by Odell, Robin
The police called Geen a self-centred narcissist who abused his position of trust. Hospital staff regarded him warily as he did not always follow instructions. He appeared elated when an emergency situation arose and remarked to a colleague, “There is always a resuscitation when I’m on duty.”
The suggestion was that Geen secretly administered drugs that had the effect of bringing patients to the brink of death. Then he would gain satisfaction from observing the emergency efforts needed to save them. The run of emergencies at Horton Hospital was a rare sequence of events and the common denominator was that Benjamin Geen was on duty at the time. He claimed to be innocent.
The jury found him guilty of two murders and of inflicting grievous bodily harm on fifteen others. On 10 May 2006 Mr Justine Crane passed down seventeen life sentences and told Geen he would spend at least thirty years in prison.
A Friend In The Woods
Josephine Burnaby lived in Providence, Rhode Island, in the US. She was the estranged wife of a wealthy clothing store owner. Her doctor, Thomas Thatcher Graves, treated her for minor ailments and when Mr Burnaby died, the doctor persuaded his widow to give him power of attorney.
The late Mr Burnaby had left his wife a small annuity, which Graves thought was somewhat miserly. He advised Mrs Burnaby to contest the will and, after due process, the will was reversed. This gave Dr Graves access to a considerable sum of money and he proceeded to milk the widow’s account.
He also wanted Mrs Burnaby out of the way so, in his capacity as her doctor, he advised her to go on long visits to California for health reasons. On returning from one of these trips at the end of 1892, Mrs Burnaby decided to break the journey by staying with a friend in Denver, Colorado.
When she arrived, her friend told her there was a parcel waiting for her which had been sent through the postal service. Opening the package, Mrs Burnaby found a bottle of whisky with a note attached. The handwritten note bore the message, “Wish you a Happy New Year. Please accept this fine old whisky from your friend in the woods.”
The two women decided to drink some of the whisky which they described as “vile stuff”. Within a few days, both were dead. Mrs Burnaby’s daughter arranged for a private autopsy to be carried out and poisoning was confirmed as the cause of death. The contents of the whisky bottle were believed to have disguised the poison.
Mrs Burnaby had voiced concerns about the way Dr Graves was managing her affairs and suspicions began to form about his true intentions. Certainly, he had attempted to profit from her wealth. The newspapers began to hint at the doctor’s involvement, although he strongly denied the allegations. In any case, there was no evidence to link him with sending the bottle of whisky. Meanwhile, his patients rallied round in support.
Despite the lack of firm evidence of guilt, Dr Graves was charged with murder and put on trial. The prosecution case was faltering until a surprise witness appeared. Joseph M. Breslyn testified that he had been approached by Dr Graves in November 1890 at Boston Railway Station who asked him a favour. Explaining that he was unable to write a note to accompany a gift, he asked the young man to write a message at his dictation. Thus was the provenance of the note sent to Mrs Burnaby established and the identity of the sender revealed.
Dr Graves was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He appealed and was granted a retrial but in April 1893 he committed suicide in his prison cell using poison that he had smuggled in.
Murder By Omission
In the US, Joan Robinson was the adopted daughter of a Texas oil tycoon and made a name for herself as a horsewoman. She married Dr John Hill, a rising star in the field of plastic surgery, and the couple lived in style at River Oaks, Houston.
By the late 1960s, the marriage began to break up and, in March 1969, Joan Hill became sick and was taken to hospital by her husband after he had treated her at home for four days. She died on 19 March and following a hurried post-mortem, the body was prepared for burial before cause of death had been properly established. The contention at the time was that she had died of a liver infection.
Joan Hill’s father, Ash Robinson, refused to accept the account given of his daughter’s death and began openly to accuse Dr Hill of allowing her to die. These allegations triggered a lawsuit for slander and when Hill remarried three months later, speculation was renewed.
In November, Joan Hill’s body was exhumed and a second post-mortem was carried out. Doctors examining the brain, preserved from the first autopsy, concluded that meningitis was a factor to be taken into account. It was pointed out, though, that there was no such indication in the brain stem, giving rise to the suggestion that the brain was not that of Mrs Hill.
Three grand juries considered the case before an indictment was brought against Dr Hill. The decision was based on a provision in Texas law whereby a case could be brought under the heading of murder by omission.
Dr Hill was tried for murder in 1971 when his second wife, whom he had divorced, gave evidence against him. She alleged that he had tried to kill her by deliberately crashing their car in which she was a passenger, against the side of a concrete bridge. The car was extensively damaged but Hill’s wife, though shocked, was uninjured. In a sensational development she said that he tried to inject her with procaine hydrochloride while she sat in the wrecked car. She fended him off but, had he succeeded, she might well have died with every appearance of being fatally traumatized by shock.
A mistrial resulted, but further accusations continued to be revealed in the press. Dr Hill was alleged to have kept bacterial culture dishes in the bathroom and to have injected his first wife with a concoction made from “every form of human excretion”, including pus taken from a boil.
Before a second trial could be held, Hill was overtaken by a dramatic turn of events when he was shot dead by a hired gunman who, in his turn, was killed by a police officer. There were suspicions that Joan Hill’s father had paid for a hired killer to eliminate his son-in-law. Allegations of various kinds continued to rumble around like distant thunder, including a suggestion that Dr Hill was alive and well, living in Mexico.
Mercy Killer
In the US, thirty-five-year-old Donald Harvey’s killing spree ended in 1987 when an alert doctor at Drake Memorial Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, smelled arsenic in the room where a patient had died and suspected Harvey of foul play. He was arrested in April and admitted killing twenty-five patients to “put them out of their misery”.
Harvey grew up in rural Kentucky where he dropped out of school. While his teachers remembered him as a pleasant, outgoing youth, psychiatrists who examined him recorded that he had been abused as a child. In an interview, Harvey denied he had killed out of pleasure or, as had been suggested, due to repressed homosexuality. Armed with notes to aid his memory, he recounted the time, place and method of many of the deaths for which he was responsible. He used cyanide and arsenic and introduced air into intravenous tubes. In two cases he used a petroleum-based cleaning product as a poison. He said that although many believed in mercy killing, few had the nerve to carry it out. He was not concerned about being discovered.
Harvey’s lawyer negotiated a plea bargain whereby he would escape the death penalty if he made a full confession of his murderous activities. A grand jury spent six weeks considering the evidence against him. This included a three-month investigation into deaths at Drake Memorial Hospital carried out by a local television station which first drew attention to the especially high number of deaths on the ward where Harvey worked.
The County Prosecutor described Harvey as a pathological killer who had “. . . a compulsion to kill like some of us have . . . a compulsion for cold beer”. A chart displayed in the court room listed the names of Harvey’s victims and detailed the manner of their deaths. This death list showed that his modus operandi ranged from poisoning with arsenic put in pies and puddings to asphyxiation using plastic bags and wet towels.
Evidence that he had attempted to kill others who were not hospital patient
s supported the idea that he was a compulsive murderer. Some of his colleagues said he was not trusted by them and there was evidence that he was fascinated by Satanism. Family members of some of his victims were not impressed by Harvey’s demeanour in court, especially when he appeared to be joking with his advisers.
The “Angel of Death” who had plea-bargained his way out of a death sentence was given four life sentences for murdering twenty-five people. Harvey will be eligible for parole when he is ninety-five years old. His admission that he had killed fifty people would make him one of America’s most prolific serial killers, overtaking the infamous Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy.
By Lethal Injection
In Germany, Stephan Letter, a twenty-seven-year-old hospital worker, was dubbed “The Nurse of Death” by the German press.
Letter’s activities came to light after staff at the hospital where he worked in Sonthofen, Bavaria, noticed that drugs had been going missing. He had started work in the internal diseases ward in 2003 and during a period of a year and a half there had been several deaths of elderly patients. It was noticed that many of the deaths of patients who were not seriously ill coincided with times when Letter was on ward duty. When he was questioned, he admitted killing the patients. A search of his apartment turned up a supply of drugs sufficient to kill several people.
This prompted an intense investigation with concerns over the deaths of seventy patients. Forty-two bodies were exhumed for post-mortem examination. Among them were six women aged between seventy and eighty-nine and four men aged between sixty and sixty-eight. They had died from lethal injections administered by Letter because he claimed he could not stand by and see them in pain.
He was tried for murder in November 2006. Letter repeated that he had killed them out of compassion but admitted he did not know how many. The prosecution said, “He killed as if it were an assembly line.” He had known some of his victims only a few hours before snuffing their lives out. His activities went unnoticed for so long because deaths among a population of elderly patients were not unexpected. His defence lawyer suggested that he had been given too much responsibility at too young an age. The judge said Letter was of above-average intelligence. He showed no emotion as he was convicted of killing twenty-eight patients with lethal injections and entered the records as Germany’s worst serial killer. The “Nurse of Death” was sentenced to life imprisonment with a ruling that he would have to serve at least fifteen years. In an ironic rider, the court ruled that he would never be allowed to work again as a nurse.
“Dr” Death
The German Odd Fellows’ Home in the Bronx, New York, provided care for up to eighty elderly people. Over a period of four months, between August 1914 and January 1915, seventeen residents died. The authorities expressed concern but no action was taken. The attrition rate might have continued but for an extraordinary confession.
Frederick Mors, an Austrian from the Tyrol, clad in lederhosen and sporting an Alpine hat complete with feather, presented himself at the Criminal Courts building in New York and asked to speak to an attorney. With the aid of a German interpreter, Mors announced that he was responsible for eight of the deaths at the old people’s home. He explained that he worked there as a nursing assistant.
Mors had arrived in the USA from Liverpool on the Aquitania on 26 June 1914. He originated from Vienna where he had worked as a forester. Once in New York he began looking for work and found a job as a porter at the German Odd Fellows’ Home. Having advanced to nursing orderly, he came under the influence of the Home’s superintendent who enlisted Mors’ help in disposing of troublesome patients.
Mors enjoyed his work but became concerned that poisoning with opium, morphine and arsenic left traces in the body. In consequence, he perfected a technique of administering death with chloroform. First he anaesthetized his victim using drops of chloroform on a pad clamped over the nose. Then he poured chloroform into the mouth producing fatal poisoning which could not be detected. When an undertaker observed burn marks around the mouth of one of the victims, he made up some plausible explanation and realized he needed to refine his method. He did this by greasing his victim’s faces with Vaseline to prevent burns.
Mors had free rein at the Odd Fellows’ Home with access to drugs and no supervision of his activities. Enquiries about his background in Vienna elicited the information that he was so fascinated by death that he had changed his name to Mors, a corruption of the Latin word for death. Following his interrogation by police, Mors was sent for psychiatric examination.
To the suggestion that he was imbalanced, if not insane, he told detectives where to find his supply of chloroform which he kept hidden. Asked why he killed the people he was supposed to be caring for, he said he brought death to them to relieve their suffering. In April 1915, Mors was declared insane by a lunacy commission and sent to Matteawan State Prison for the Criminally Insane.
Mad or not, Frederick Mors, a man obsessed with death, contrived to escape from prison in the 1920s. He was clever enough to avoid recapture and was never heard of again.
Strychnos Toxifera
Dr Carlo Nigrisoli came from a family of distinguished medical men. He lived in Bologna, Italy, with his wife Ombretta and three children where he had a successful practice. When he met Iris Azzali, he fell for her charms and began to lead a double life. His lover became pregnant and he arranged an abortion for her. But at this point, Mrs Nigrisoli realized that her husband’s attention was increasingly being diverted. She suspected another woman had entered the picture and was understandably distraught.
Family friends became aware of Ombretta Nigrisoli’s concerns and one of them, a physician, discussed the lady’s nervous condition with Nigrisoli. They agreed she should receive treatment in the form of injections given by the doctor friend. Then, for convenience, and knowing nothing about Nigrisoli’s dalliance with Iris, the doctor friend agreed that Carlo should administer the treatment to his wife.
With Nigrisoli spending more time away from home, Ombretta’s worries increased to the point where she became a burden. On 14 March 1963, late at night, Nigrisoli summoned help saying that his wife had suffered a heart attack. Ombretta died without regaining consciousness. Her husband said that he had given her a stimulant by injection but she had failed to respond. He then pressed his fellow doctors to register Ombretta’s death as caused by coronary thrombosis.
They declined to meet his wishes explaining that they were insufficiently aware of the facts leading up to his wife’s death. At this point, Nigrisoli produced a pistol, declaring that unless his wishes were met, he would kill himself.
The attending physicians calmed him down and he ended up being questioned by the police. When officers discovered that Nigrisoli had been giving his wife injections, their suspicions were immediately aroused. A post-mortem was carried out on Ombretta and the results showed that she had died from the administration of curare.
Curare, the legendary and notorious poison used by South American Indians for hunting and vanquishing their enemies is extracted from tree bark. When it enters the blood stream it causes paralysis of the motor and respiratory muscle. It has a use in modern surgical practice as a relaxant prior to surgery.
Nigrisoli was charged with murder. His trial began on 1 October 1964, although he did not appear in person. He gave his testimony from his cell that was relayed to the court room. He proclaimed his innocence. The prosecution said he had given his wife a fatal dose of curare and callously waited for it to take effect. Evidence was given describing how Ombretta had found a bottle of curare in the bathroom and feared it might be intended for her. A friend advised her to go to the police. The next day she was dead.
Dr Nigrisoli, Italy’s first convicted curare poisoner, was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Forecasting Death
Colin Norris was a staff nurse at Leeds General Infirmary in the UK who had the knack of forecasting when a patient would die. When Ethel Hall, an eighty-six-yea
r-old patient recovering from a hip operation went into a coma at 5.10 a.m. on 20 November 2002 and died shortly afterwards, Norris’ uncanny accuracy over the old lady’s demise alerted a doctor who took a blood sample. It was found that Ethel Hall had abnormally high levels of insulin in her body.
Following this incident, other deaths of elderly patients were investigated. It was discovered that Doris Ludlam, Bridget Bourke and Irene Crooker had all died within a six-month period in similar circumstances. All three were recovering from hip operations and were not terminally ill. They went into a coma and expired. The common feature was that they died when Colin Norris was on duty.
During his nursing training Norris had expressed the opinion that he did not like the idea of looking after geriatrics. Once he started work as a nurse he made clear his dislike of changing the soiled bed linen of elderly patients and other duties, which he found menial and distasteful. He was also arrogant and disrespectful.
Norris was tried for murder at Newcastle Crown Court in February 2008. He was charged with killing three patients at Leeds General Infirmary and one at St James’ Hospital. There was an additional charge of attempted murder. The deaths occurred between June and December 2002.
In the course of an investigation that lasted three years, West Yorkshire police considered seventy deaths that had occurred at Leeds General Hospital. They eventually narrowed down their list of suspicious deaths to eighteen. Some of the bodies had been cremated, thereby ruling out further consideration.
During their enquiries, detectives learned a great deal about Nurse Norris and his attitude to patients under his care. A view was expressed that had he not been found out, many patients’ lives would have been at risk. Comparisons with British mass-murderer Dr Harold Shipman (see pages 44, 45) were inevitable. Some of the most damning character assessments voiced at the trial came from hospital patients. One recalled, “he was very nasty – he didn’t like us old women.” Colleagues also testified to Norris’ attitude when on duty. On one occasion he remarked that whenever he was on night duty someone died and it was his luck to have to do all the paperwork.