‘Killer nurse’ pleads guilty
One after another, family members aimed their grief and anguish at Heather Pressdee, who sat quietly on the other side of the Butler County, Pa., courtroom.
Some called her the devil. One woman told her to burn in hell. They told she was not God, that she was no longer in control.
“I hope you live to 100,” Jack Rogers’ niece told her. Dubbed the “killer nurse” for her hand in the deaths of 17 nursing home patients at five facilities, Pressdee pleaded guilty Thursday to three counts of first-degree murder and 19 counts of attempted murder. In return for her plea, the 41-year-old will avoid the possibility of the death penalty. She will instead receive three con- secutive life sentences plus hundreds more years for the attempted murder charges.
Why are you pleading guilty? attorney James De- Pasquale asked her.
“Because I am guilty,” Pressdee replied.
She’d faced more than three dozen charges in con- nection with the deaths caused by insulin injections, which happened between 2020 and her arrest in May 2023, including four murder charges.
As family members of Pressdee’s victims gave their victim-impact statements, they spoke lovingly about who their loved ones were before Pressdee, in the words of some, tried to play God.
Nick Cymbol loved Jeeps, the Steelers and monkeys, and he was the social butterfly of Sunnyview Health and Rehabilitation. Gerald Shrum was a veteran and lifelong patriot. His daughter said she has nightmares imagining her father’s last moments. Betty McQuee- ney was a faithful Jehovah’s Witness. Some were elder- ly or ill, their families said, but none were ready to die.
Pressdee worked at six different nursing facilities across the region in less than three years, and she was at her seventh last year when she was initially charged with two counts of murder.
Six months later, after more families brought their suspicions to the Attorney General’s Office, investiga- tors filed dozens more charges, including two more counts of murder.
The two criminal complaints spanned more than 40 pages and detailed Pressdee’s confessions to each in- sulin overdose.
One woman “looked at her like an animal would,” she told investigators. One man “had no quality of life,” she said, and she “felt bad” for another. One “needed to die.”