The Serial Killers by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman
Authors: Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman
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couldn’t do a thing.’
In 1989 nursing sister Michaela Roeder was charged at Wuppertal, West Germany, with the murder of seventeen patients by injection with Catapresan, a drug which affects high blood pressure. Public prosecutor Karl-Hermann Majorowsky accused her of playing ‘mistress of life or death’ over patients in the intensive care unit of St Peter’s Hospital in Wuppertal-Barmen, by her random selection of who should live or die. Twenty-eight bodies were exhumed after a nurse claimed to have seen Sister Roeder injecting a cancer patient with Catapresan. Seventeen of the corpses were found to contain traces of the drug. Newspaper reports said that even before suspicion was first aroused, Sister Roeder – who denied the murder charges – had been nicknamed ‘The Angel of Death’ by her colleagues, because of the high death rate in the ward. She was alleged by police to have admitted involvement in six deaths ‘because she could not bear to see patients suffer unnecessarily’.
On 10 April 1989 Dr Alois Stacher – head of Vienna’s hospital system – told a press conference that four women nurses working at the Lainz Hospital had been charged with the multiple murder of patients aged between seventy-three and eighty-two, and a warrant issued for the arrest of a fifth nurse. He said the ‘bloody murders’, allegedly committed at intervals since 1983, totalled at least forty-nine – probably the largest number of ‘series murders’ in European history. When first interrogated, said Dr Stacher, the nurses claimed the deaths were ‘mercy killings’. He disagreed: ‘These nurses enjoyed killing, because it gave them an extraordinary power over life and death. They killed patients who had become a nuisance to them, who had angered them or who posed a special problem.’
The killing rate rose from one patient every three months to one a month and continued virtually unnoticed – until a chance remark by an off-duty nurse to a ward doctor was reported to Dr Stacher, who immediately called in the police. The nurses were alleged to have changed their modus operandi from time to time, to avoid rousing suspicion. The method most frequently used was to drown patients by forcing water down their throats whilst holding their nostrils closed. ‘This is a painful death which leaves virtually no trace,’ said Dr Stacher. ‘Water in the lungs of an elderly person is considered quite normal.’ The nurse named as leader of the death group was said to have confessed personally to murdering twenty-two patients in this way. Other methods allegedly included injection of insulin, glucose and sleeping drugs. None of the accused had been brought to trial when this book went to press.
One twentieth-century poisoner who appeared to be a straight throwback to the Anna Zwanziger type of serial killer (she regarded arsenic as her ‘truest friend’) was Englishman Graham Young. Young, who was born in 1947, yearned obsessively for publicity. His mother died when he was only a few months old, and the solitary, intelligent child grew into an adolescent odd-man-out who disliked society generally and, perversely, transferred his admiration to Hitler and the Nazis. Another of his early heroes was Dr William Palmer, the English multiple murderer who poisoned his creditors and probably his wife, his mother-in-law, and four of his children before he was hanged in the 1850s.
Graham Young began experimenting with poison in 1961 – when he was fourteen – by administering small doses of antimony tartrate to his family. His elder sister Winifred suffered considerably from what she thought to be a permanently upset stomach. In April 1962 Graham Young’s stepmother died. When his father, who was also ill and growing steadily weaker, was taken to hospital the doctors diagnosed arsenic poisoning. Fifteen-year-old Graham Young was outraged. His comment ‘How ridiculous not to be able to tell the difference between arsenic and
In 1989 nursing sister Michaela Roeder was charged at Wuppertal, West Germany, with the murder of seventeen patients by injection with Catapresan, a drug which affects high blood pressure. Public prosecutor Karl-Hermann Majorowsky accused her of playing ‘mistress of life or death’ over patients in the intensive care unit of St Peter’s Hospital in Wuppertal-Barmen, by her random selection of who should live or die. Twenty-eight bodies were exhumed after a nurse claimed to have seen Sister Roeder injecting a cancer patient with Catapresan. Seventeen of the corpses were found to contain traces of the drug. Newspaper reports said that even before suspicion was first aroused, Sister Roeder – who denied the murder charges – had been nicknamed ‘The Angel of Death’ by her colleagues, because of the high death rate in the ward. She was alleged by police to have admitted involvement in six deaths ‘because she could not bear to see patients suffer unnecessarily’.
On 10 April 1989 Dr Alois Stacher – head of Vienna’s hospital system – told a press conference that four women nurses working at the Lainz Hospital had been charged with the multiple murder of patients aged between seventy-three and eighty-two, and a warrant issued for the arrest of a fifth nurse. He said the ‘bloody murders’, allegedly committed at intervals since 1983, totalled at least forty-nine – probably the largest number of ‘series murders’ in European history. When first interrogated, said Dr Stacher, the nurses claimed the deaths were ‘mercy killings’. He disagreed: ‘These nurses enjoyed killing, because it gave them an extraordinary power over life and death. They killed patients who had become a nuisance to them, who had angered them or who posed a special problem.’
The killing rate rose from one patient every three months to one a month and continued virtually unnoticed – until a chance remark by an off-duty nurse to a ward doctor was reported to Dr Stacher, who immediately called in the police. The nurses were alleged to have changed their modus operandi from time to time, to avoid rousing suspicion. The method most frequently used was to drown patients by forcing water down their throats whilst holding their nostrils closed. ‘This is a painful death which leaves virtually no trace,’ said Dr Stacher. ‘Water in the lungs of an elderly person is considered quite normal.’ The nurse named as leader of the death group was said to have confessed personally to murdering twenty-two patients in this way. Other methods allegedly included injection of insulin, glucose and sleeping drugs. None of the accused had been brought to trial when this book went to press.
One twentieth-century poisoner who appeared to be a straight throwback to the Anna Zwanziger type of serial killer (she regarded arsenic as her ‘truest friend’) was Englishman Graham Young. Young, who was born in 1947, yearned obsessively for publicity. His mother died when he was only a few months old, and the solitary, intelligent child grew into an adolescent odd-man-out who disliked society generally and, perversely, transferred his admiration to Hitler and the Nazis. Another of his early heroes was Dr William Palmer, the English multiple murderer who poisoned his creditors and probably his wife, his mother-in-law, and four of his children before he was hanged in the 1850s.
Graham Young began experimenting with poison in 1961 – when he was fourteen – by administering small doses of antimony tartrate to his family. His elder sister Winifred suffered considerably from what she thought to be a permanently upset stomach. In April 1962 Graham Young’s stepmother died. When his father, who was also ill and growing steadily weaker, was taken to hospital the doctors diagnosed arsenic poisoning. Fifteen-year-old Graham Young was outraged. His comment ‘How ridiculous not to be able to tell the difference between arsenic and
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