A 40-year-old male nurse, Niels Hoegel, who was jailed for life two years ago for killing two hospital patients with lethal drug overdoses, has murdered at least 90 patients in total.
The police said it’s possible he has killed over 180 patients and described the situation as post-war Germany’s worst killing spree.
Hoegel, a nurse at Delmenhorst hospital, Bremen, Germany, was jailed in February 2015 for two murders and four counts of attempted murder or causing bodily harm on intensive-care patients.
Police said Monday that forensics experts had since exhumed and analyzed more than 130 additional bodies and had found evidence of a vastly higher death toll at two hospitals where Hoegel had worked between 1999 and 2005.
A police chief in the city, Johann Kuehme, said, “The insights we were able to gain are terrifying, they surpass what we could have imagined.”
Also, chief police investigator, Arne Schmidt, said, “The death toll is unique in the history of the German republics,” adding that Hoegel killed “without a discernible pattern and preyed especially on those in critical condition.”
Schmidt told a press conference that “there was evidence for at least 90 murders, and at least as many (suspected) cases again that can no longer be proven,” declaring himself “speechless” at the outcome.
However, the suspect has admitted to injecting patients with drugs that can cause heart failure or circulatory collapse so he could then try to revive them and, when successful, shine as a savior before his medical peers. He earlier testified that at times he acted out of “boredom,” that he felt euphoric when he managed to bring a patient back to life, and devastated when he failed.
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