Nurse suspected in more deaths
Police in Germany believe the convicted killer took the lives of dozens of patients.
BERLIN — A German nurse convicted in 2015 of killing two people with heart medication overdoses is now suspected in the deaths of dozens more during a grisly spree more than a decade ago, police said Monday.
Niels Hoegel, who is serving a life sentence, is now believed by police to have killed 84 patients and possibly many more who died under mysterious circumstances during his shifts at two hospitals in the northwestern towns of Oldenburg and Delmenhorst. He worked there between 1999 and 2005.
If convicted of the additional deaths, Hoegel, 40, would be Germany’s worst mass murderer in postwar history — a claim that he reportedly boasted about in prison.
“There’s no end in sight to the horror,” said Oldenburg police chief Johann Kuehme at a news confer- ence, adding that the threeyear investigation into additional suspicious deaths would continue. “The evidence that we’ve collected so far is shocking enough, indeed it is beyond imagination. The killings we’ve been able to confirm are only the tip of the iceberg.”
Kuehme said the corpses of about 100 patients found dead on Hoegel’s watch at the two hospitals near Bremen were exhumed from different cemeteries and traces of the medications were found — leading to 84 additional suspected cases.
Hoegel was finally stopped in 2005 when another nurse caught him injecting a patient with an overdose of a drug that can cause heart failure or circulatory collapse. The patient survived.
He was arrested and first convicted in 2008 of attempted murder in that case — and sentenced to 7 1⁄2 years. Media coverage of that trial prompted a woman to tell police she suspected her mother may have also fallen victim to Hoegel. Police exhumed several corpses and found traces of the drug in five of them, including the woman’s mother.
Hoegel said during his second trial in 2015 that he had injected the overdoses into about 90 patients at the Delmenhorst hospital because he enjoyed the “euphoric” feeling of sometimes being able to resuscitate them and being seen as a hero at his intensive care station.
In 2015 he was convicted of two murders, two attempted murders and bodily harm. He told the court then that he thought he was responsible for 30 deaths. Prosecutors in 2016 estimated the total to be at least 33.
Fellow inmates told authorities that Hoegel had told them that he started killing patients to relieve them of their suffering and, later, out of boredom.
One inmate said Hoegel had said he stopped counting after the list reached 50. State prosecutor Daniela Schiereck-Bohlemann said Hoegel had admitted to 30 cases.
“I’m the greatest mass murderer in postwar history,” Hoegel once reportedly told a fellow inmate, according to German media reports.
A total of 411 patients died at the two hospitals during the years that Hoegel worked there, including 321 who were found dead during his shifts or right after. Many were elderly; some were in their 40s and 50s.
He is expected to go on trial for the additional killings, but Germany has no provision for consecutive sentences.