Ex-German nurse gets life for murdering 85 patients
He ranks among worst serial killers
OLDENBURG, Germany — The former nurse’s crimes were “incomprehensible,” a German judge told the court on Thursday, reaching his arms across the breadth of the bench as if to capture in one gesture what he sensed his words had failed to define — the enormity of murdering 85 patients who had been placed in the care of the nurse but instead had found death.
“Your guilt is so large that one can’t explain it,” the presiding judge, Sebastian Bührmann, told the nurse, Niels Hoegell, in a courtroom packed with the relatives of the 100 patients whose deaths he was charged with orchestrating. “It is so large, you can’t show it.”
Hoegell is believed to be the most prolific serial killer in peacetime Germany, and perhaps the world. His trial on the 85 murders sought to provide a measure of comfort and answers to some of the victims’ families, more than a decade after they died. His conviction on Thursday was the third for the nurse.
Officials suspect Hoegell may have killed as many as 300 patients while working at two clinics in northern Germany between 2000 and 2005. He was accused of administering drug overdoses that caused cardiac arrest so that he could try to revive patients heroically. His colleagues called him “Resuscitation Rambo.”
In its sentencing, the court barred Hoegell from working as a nurse, emergency medical responder or any other job providing care. “We want to be sure that you never, ever again are able to work in such a job,” the judge said.
From the trial’s opening in October, Judge Bührmann stressed that the purpose went beyond trying to determine guilt: It was to try to find answers to how and why the patients had died. But he acknowledged that in 15 cases, the court had failed to find enough evidence to support murder convictions.
“Despite all of our attempts, we could only lift part of the fog that hangs over this trial,” he said. “That fills us with a certain sadness.”
Throughout the more than 90 minutes that the judge read out the sentencing, he repeatedly and directly addressed Hoegell. The former nurse, dressed in a black T-shirt and wearing a thick chain necklace, sat with his head resting in the palm of his right hand, listening passively.
“The human ability to understand capitulates when faced with the sheer number of deaths, week for week, month for month, year for year,” Judge Bührmann said. Going through the names of each patient, their medical records and the details of how and when they had died left him feeling “like a bookkeeper of death,” he said.
Hoegell had confessed to killing 43 his patients, and spent the early days of the trial going over the medical files of each of the 100 patients with the judge.