Nurse charged with murdering nine patients and attempting to kill dozens of others after ‘overdosing helpless victims with huge quantities of painkillers to have a quieter nightshift’

By SABRINA PENTY

Published: 14:38 GMT, 18 March 2025 | Updated: 14:39 GMT, 18 March 2025

A male nurse in Germany has been accused of ruthlessly murdering nine helpless patients in a hospice ward so that he could have quieter shifts.

The unnamed man, 44, is said to have tried to kill a further 34 patients between December 2023 and May 2024. 

Prosecutors say the nurse injected his victims with massive overdoses of sedatives and painkillers in the palliative ward for the of the Rhein-Maas Klinikum in Wurselen in western Germany.

Several victims, say prosecutors, had suffered several attempts on their lives and others were due to leave the ward after recovering from their conditions.

Prosecutors, who are still investigating further claims, believe the case at Aachen Regional Court, which will start on 24th March, could be the biggest medical murder trial ever heard in the country.

A prosecution spokesman explained: ‘The nurse wanted to have quiet night shifts with little trouble from the patients.’

The court will be told how the nurse carried out his macabre murder spree at the clinic, with investigators expecting more cases to emerge in the coming weeks,

Hospital officials began to suspect the unexplained rapid death rate on the ward and called in police who exhumed the victims’ bodies and found unexpectedly high levels of sedatives.

A nurse in Germany is accused of murdering nine patients after injecting them with painkillers and sedatives

The unnamed hospital employee is believed to have attempted to kill a further 34 people, but investigators say the figure could be even higher

The nurse was arrested in July 2024 after suspicions grew around the unusual rise in patient deaths and incidents during his shifts, and has been in custody ever since. 

The trial has chilling similarities to the 2024 case of Berlin doctor Johannes M. accused of killing 10 patients but suspected of murdering up to 50 more for the ‘thrill of it’.

The medic, a specialist in palliative care for the terminally ill, dosed his victims with a cocktail of painkillers before setting their homes on fire.

It comes as former British nurse Lucy Letby, convicted of murdering seven infants, yesterday called for the public inquiry into her crimes to be halted. 

Letby, 35, was found guilty of murdering seven children and attempting to murder eight more between June 2015 and June 2016 while working in the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital (COCH), making her Britain’s most prolific serial child killer of modern times. 

The nurse has failed with a number of appeals, but medical experts have since publicly challenged the evidence on which she was convicted, casting doubt on whether the babies were murdered.

Her lawyer has now applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which examines potential miscarriages of justice, to have her convictions re-examined.

‘There now appears to be a real likelihood that there are alternative explanations for these deaths and unexplained collapses, namely poor clinical management and care and natural causes,’ Kate Blackwell, lawyer for the senior managers at the COCH, said in written submissions to the inquiry, set up to determine how the killings went undetected.

The nurse was arrested in July 2024 after suspicions grew around the unusual rise in patient deaths and incidents during his shifts at Rhein-Maas Klinikum in Wurselen

She asked for the inquiry to be paused until there was clarity as to Letby’s involvement.

‘If there is evidence to indicate that there are alternative explanations, then it would be wrong for the inquiry to ignore it because it is inconvenient.’

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Nurse charged with murdering nine patients and attempting to kill dozens of others after ‘overdosing helpless victims with huge quantities of painkillers to have a quieter nightshift’

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