ANOTHER NURSE KILLS HER PATIENTS                                                   

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Why do some nurses kill their patients? Is it the thrill in killing a human being that prompts them into taking a human life?

A nurse in the province of Ontario in Canada who preyed on elderly patients in her care told lawyers during an inquiry examining her actions, that she wouldn't have been able to murder eight people if more controls were in place on medication at long-term care homes.

Elizabeth Wettlaufer's musings on what could have prevented her crimes are contained in a transcript of a lengthy interview submitted as evidence in the public inquiry that got underway in the city of St. Thomas.

The 50-year-old injected more than a dozen patients with overdoses of insulin while working in long-term care homes and private residences in Ontario for nearly a decade. Her crimes went undetected until she confessed them to mental health workers and police in 2016.

Excess insulin in the bloodstream causes cells in your body to absorb too much glucose (sugar) from your blood. It also causes the liver to release less glucose. These two effects together create dangerously low glucose levels in your blood. This condition is called hypoglycemia. It  is possible for anyone to die if they are  injected too much insulin. What will occur is something called insulin shock. Their blood glucose will drop and they can go into a coma and  and in extreme cases,  this can be followed by death which is what happened to this woman’s victims.

There were two rooms where she could get the insulin and they were behind doors without windows.

Wettlaufer said "If the treatment room and med room were completely made of glass, there's no way I could have done what I did without somebody seeing me." If they had a buzzer going off when the door was opened, that would signal that someone was in the room where the drugs were stored.

 Even if there were windows, she explained, she could slip a few insulin pens into her pocket. And the pens themselves had no mechanism to restrict the amount of insulin since the doses can be dialled up or down very easily.

She added, "If there was, say, a stopgap measure on the pen that once you dialled up a certain amount you couldn't dial any more, or even if pens came preloaded, there wouldn't be excess insulin." 

It is interesting t note that it took a murderer such as her to come up with the solution of preventing what she did to her victims.

Wettlaufer's first murderous assaults occurred sometime between June 25 and December 31, 2007. She confessed that she injected sisters Clotilde Adriano (age 87) and Albina Demedeiros (88) with insulin. While they later died, neither of their deaths was attributed to Wettlaufer. Later, she confessed to two counts of aggravated assault in these two  incidents.

The first case in which Wettlaufer injected a patient with enough insulin to cause that person’s death was on August 11, 2007, when she murdered James Silcox (84), a World War II veteran and father of six. Through March 2014, Wettlaufer also murdered the following patients at Caressant Care:

·        Maurice Granat (84)

·        Gladys Millard (87)

·        Helen Matheson (95)

·        Mary Zurawinski (96)

·        Helen Young (90)

·        Maureen Pickering (79)

While at Caressant Care, Wettlaufer also injected Michael Priddle (63) and Wayne Hedges (57) "with intent to murder". She confessed to two counts of attempted murder in these cases. She left employment at Caressant Care in 2014, but in part-time work at other facilities and at patients' homes, she injected three more people with insulin.

She Killed Arpad Horvath (75) at Meadow Park facility in London, Ontario and she Injected Sandra Towler (77) "with intent to murder" at a retirement home in Paris, Ontario.

What amazes me is that no one considered that wherever this particular nurse was sent, death followed her close behind.

A coroner (Dr. William George) ho failed to find anything suspicious about the deaths of two people killed by an Ontario nurse told a public inquiry that he never considered the possibility that a caregiver in a long-term care facility would deliberately harm their patients.  This doctor stated that  he did not recall turning down a request to investigate the “suspicious” death of a senior who turned out to be a victim of serial killer nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer. liar, Liar, your pants are on fire.

Didn’t any doctor take samples of the victim’s blood to see if they had too much insulin in their blood?  No, they didn’t. They attributed their deaths to old age. Hey dummies. Many old people live into their nineties.

Dr. William George, who declined to investigate the death of one of Elizabeth Wettlaufer’s victims since he deemed it as  the passing of another accidental death. He said  that  the regarded long-term care homes as safe places where purposeful attacks would not occur. Where did this fool get his medical licence? Was it in a box of cornflakes?  A great many nurses have deliberately killed their patients. What did this twit have to do to get his appointment as the province’s Chief Coroner?

The Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario cut back on investigations into deaths of residents in long-term care homes in order to save the taxpayer’s money. In 2013, the coroner’s office ended the practice of automatically probing every 10^th death in a long-term care home, Chief Coroner Dr. Dirk Huyer testified at a public hearing looking into how ex-nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer went undetected as she killed eight residents.

The move to cut back its services came to a  saving of  $900,000 a year. It came in the midst of Wettlaufer’s killing spree at the long-term care homes in southwestern Ontario. The twit said, “There’s no indication such a review would have flagged Wettlaufer’s crimes, which occurred between 2007 and 2016.

Huyer said the practice of automatically investigating the “threshold deaths” had not provided good value for money. “We weren’t finding trends or patterns or specific issues,” he said.

The change in policy came at around the same time as the Ontario health ministry increased its oversight of the long-term care sector. Because of this, there was “no incremental value of routine reviews” by coroners as well, according to documents from the coroner’s office, filed as exhibits.

Less than a quarter of Elizabeth Wettlaufer’s lengthy record of incompetence was reported to the College of Nurses of Ontario when she was fired from a nursing home for putting the life of a resident at risk, a public inquiry has heard.

The college’s lawyer, Mark Sandler, noted that Wettlaufer’s employment record contained 44 instances when the registered nurse committed medication errors, or was disciplined or warned for incompetence. Yet only 10 were reported to the college, which regulates Ontario nurses, when Wettlaufer was finally fired in March 2014 from the Caressant Care home in Woodstock. If she wan’t fired, more deaths would have continued at her hands.

At the Woodstock nursing home where she murdered seven residents with massive doses of insulin, Elizabeth Wettlaufer committed dozens more public transgressions but still left with a $2,000 settlement, a glowing letter of recommendation, the backing of the nurses’ union and the belief by managers at the home that she had been flawed but good-hearted.

While Wettlaufer left behind a rap sheet that included more than a dozen warnings and suspensions for medication errors and inappropriate conduct that led to her dismissal in 2014, Caressant Care may have been reluctant to fire her because it was so difficult to recruit and retain registered nurses, the former administrator of the Woodstock home testified at a subsequent hearing.

 Brenda Van Quaethem, the former administrator of the Woodstock home  testified that she could discipline nurses but not fire them as that could only be done by Human Resources at the home office.  

The final grievance was launched by the Ontario Nurses Association after Wettlaufer gave a patient someone else’s insulin — too high a dosage — for three days. The fight over the grievance ended with the parent company paying Wettlaufer $2,000 and giving her a letter of recommendation that lauded her work there. Van Quaethem said she never saw or was even consulted about the letter.

The scales between the union and Van Quaethem seemed even more unbalanced because the administrator had nearly no training on how to investigate problematic employees; she only recalled attending a single workshop.

Her lack of training seemed evident as she described how she responded to many complaints against Wettlaufer by her colleagues. Van Quaethem said she was dismissive of any complaints that weren’t launched quickly after the alleged incidents. In other words, she didn’t do anything about the complaints until they piled p over a period of time.

Asked why she didn’t file a critical incident report to Ontario’s health ministry after Wettlaufer was accused in writing by a personal support worker of neglect, Van Quaethem said, “I can’t answer you on that question. There is no doubt in my mind that this woman should have never been appointed as a supervisor of any care home. If she had done her job properly, lives would have been saved.

What follows in her statement is evidence of her stupidity.

She’d have a smile on her face. She’d be friendly. She’d be respectful,” Van Quaethem said. “I had no reason to believe she was harming residents.

That would also apply to Ted Bundy who is also a serial killer. Many of Bundy's young female victims regarded him as handsome and charismatic, traits that he exploited to win their trust.

Wettlaufer entered an inpatient drug rehabilitation program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), a psychiatric hospital in Toronto, on September 16^th, 2016. She confessed to staff about killing and attempting to kill her patients, and CAMH staff notified the College of Nurses of Ontario and the Toronto Police Service of her confession. She then personally emailed the College of Nurses a letter of to resignation as a registered nurse because she had "deliberately harmed patients in her care.  She was then investigated by the police for her crimes.

She said at her trial that she had become “overwhelmingly angry” about the direction of her career and life and said that God was urging her to kill. I don’t know if she was pretending that she was insane but that issue wasn’t officially raised at her trial.

Elizabeth Wettlaufer pled guilty to murdering eight elderly patients at the three long-term care facilities where she worked between 2007 and 2014, and at a private house. When Justice Bruce Thomas of the Superior Court asked if she was admitting to fatally injecting her victims with insulin for no medical reason, she replied: “Yes, your honour.”

In her confession, she admitted that she "knew the difference between right and wrong" but she was visited by "surges" she could not control. She said, "God or the devil or whatever, wanted me to do it." After one murder, she felt "the surging, and then she heard her own laughter afterwards, which was really, ke a cackling from the pit of hell. She told the police that she had tried to stop killing, and she had told friends, a former partner and her pastor about the killings, but no one took her seriously.

She was obviously a mentally ill woman but she wasn’t insane since she knew that what she had done to her victims was wrong.

She was sentenced to life in prison. She was originally held at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in  Kitchener, Ontario. In March 2018, Wettlaufer was transferred from Grand Valley to an unspecified secure facility in Montreal  to receive medical treatment.

I hope that she is never released from prison. Further, I hope the home care facilities smarten up and keep a watchful eye on the staff they hire.