Episode 15: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I’m your host Julie Mattson. Today we’re continuing our series on Medical Murderers & Serial Killers, focusing on nurses that have killed their patients. These nurses are often referred to as angels of mercy or angels of death. They are typically criminal offenders, often times serial killers, who are usually employed as a caregivers and intentionally harm or kill the people under their care.

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SHOWNOTES:

•  We’re back on the subject today of nurses or healthcare workers who have killed patients. And some of them are actually serial killers. So they’ve killed multiple patients. Nurses who kill are actually called angels of mercy or angels of death and that’s a type of criminal offender who can be a serial killer, who is employed as a caregiver and will intentionally harm someone or kill someone who is under their care. The sad part about it is these people actually use their knowledge to kill their victims. So, if they’re a nurse or an orderly or a tech at a hospital, or even a doctor, they’re going to know what it takes, maybe even how much of a medication to use to actually kill one of their patients. And eventually, they’re going to probably kill someone who is close to death or someone who is maybe on hospice or that kind of a patient. But as time goes on, it’s going to escalate to encompass healthy people and people who aren’t in the hospital close to death’s door. Now, the typical medical professional who murders, kills about two patients a month. (00:31)

•   She was actually putting this in people’s IVs who were in the hospital. And then as their IV dripped in, they just continuously got higher and higher doses of potassium. So they say she may have murdered up to three people in a single day. And like we said earlier, a lot of health care workers who murder average about probably two each month. So she was sentenced to life in prison back in 2016 and then she was cleared on appeal and then freed in 2017. She spent just a little time in jail. In 2019, she was retried and acquitted and then later in late 2020, she was re-arrested and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Now, she was retried again that year in 2020 and acquitted again. This could be challenged again. So apparently, Italy is very well known for a slow justice system. Their cases seem to drag out for years due to appeals. There could be another challenge or appeal to her acquittal. But as far as I could see, she’s actually out at this time. And surprisingly, I was reading that she wants to go back into the nursing field. So there’s that. I can’t imagine, I mean, I would not want someone taking care of me who had murdered over 90 people. It’s hard for me to believe that she wouldn’t do it again. And it’s really strange that she had been a health care worker for 17 years with no real history of doing anything like this, and then all of a sudden, she just decides she’s going to put potassium in IVs and start taking selfies with deceased people. (07:31)

•   So his lover slash roommate was a gentleman named Carl Hullweller, and he actually suspected infidelity and he poisoned his food with arsenic. And his reason for that was he wanted him to become so ill that he was unable to leave the house and unable to go see anyone, much less the person that he was sleeping with. But that also resulted in him killing Hullweller’s father with arsenic. He poisoned his neighbor. He had a neighbor by the name of Diane Alexander. He put a serum that was infected with hepatitis in her drink, and that made her very ill. He killed another neighbor by the name of Helen Metzger by putting arsenic in her pie. So his lover was his roommate, and then he injured the one neighbor, killed his roommate’s dad, and then also killed Helen by putting this arsenic in her pie. He was caught in March of 1987, and this was after an autopsy was done on one of his patients by the name of John Powell. Now, Powell had been at the hospital on life support following a motorcycle accident. So whenever they did an autopsy on Powell, and probably one reason they did that is because they suspected he had done something because they knew that he had been a patient of this guy. So they did the autopsy and there were large amounts of cyanide in his system. And this is when they really realized this guy was up to no good. Of course, he was forced to resign. He was actually, when he worked as an autopsy tech, caught stealing body parts for occult rituals. He later confessed to the poisoning. He never pretended that he didn’t do it. But he did stay under the radar pretty much because he worked in an area where patients were not expected to survive. (14:32)

•   There’s another nurse and this was really interesting to me because this actually did result in 35 states actually enacting laws for ensuring the safety of patients that are in the hospital, which I found interesting. But Charles Cullen was also a nurse. Now this guy when he was younger, and we also see, as I noticed, a lot of these people were not treated right. They had a really bad background. They may have been molested by a family member or a neighbor, but it seems like it all starts at a very, very young age. Now when he was nine years old, he attempted suicide and he had, you know, those chemistry sets that you can get for your kids. He actually chugged some of the chemicals that were in there. Now I don’t know exactly what it was. I can’t imagine those chemicals being put in the chemistry sets that we can buy for our kids now and I hope to God they’re not. But he tried to kill himself at a very young age by doing that. Now his background also included his father dying when he was only seven months old. And then in 1977, his mother was killed in a car accident. So it sounds like things did not start out well for him. He attempted suicide in 84. He joined the army and was actually discharged from the army. Now in 2000, he attempted suicide by lighting a charcoal grill and then sitting in the bathtub. So he was basically waiting to be poisoned by the carbon monoxide, but it didn’t work. So he worked at St. Barnabas Medical Center and that’s in Livingston. He murdered several patients while he was there. He gave an insulin overdose to a patient with AIDS. Contaminated IVs were also found at the facility. They weren’t really sure if he did it or not. There wasn’t really enough evidence to try him for that, but they believe there was a very good chance that he did have something to do with it. But after he resigned from St. Barnabas, he went to Warren Hospital and there he murdered three elderly women by overdosing them with Dijoxin. So this guy was a nurse and he actually had access to the medications. Now some of you may know, some may not, but Dijoxin is actually an anti-arrhythmic and it’s actually used for blood pressure as well. So it can be used for several different things. It’s given commonly for patients that are in heart failure, who have a high heart rate or situations where their heart beats irregularly, either too fast or too slow. So it’s a medication that can affect the heart muscle and he murdered three elderly women by actually giving them overdoses of the Dijoxin. (20:21)

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