By Christopher F. Schuetze
Hanover, Germany: Authorities in Germany have charged a Berlin palliative care doctor with killing 15 patients over the course of three years. The public prosecutor said that a further 75 patient deaths were being investigated as suspicious.
If convicted in the 15 deaths, the doctor would be the most prolific serial killer in Europe since a German nurse killed at least 85 patients two decades ago.
The middle building of Moabit Prison in Berlin.Credit: dpa via Getty Images
The doctor charged on Wednesday, a 40-year-old man whose name was not released, in keeping with Germany’s strict privacy laws, is accused of having killed the patients between 2021 and 2024 by giving them a powerful narcotic and then a muscle relaxant – essentially sedating them before stopping their breathing. He has not admitted to the charges, prosecutors said.
In some cases, he is accused of setting fire to the patients’ apartments to hide the evidence. In at least one instance, he is accused of calling an ambulance to mislead investigators.
Under German law, the maximum sentence for murder is life in prison with the possibility of parole after 15 years. But the crimes in this case are so unusual that the public prosecutor has requested a special security custody, meaning that if the doctor were convicted, he would be kept in prison after the conclusion of the sentence for the safety of the wider population.
The doctor is being held at Moabit Prison in Berlin. He has been in jail since August, when the district attorney ordered his arrest on suspicion that he had killed four of his patients. Since then, a team of investigators has found more patients they suspect to have been victims.
During their investigation, authorities exhumed 12 bodies, five of which led to the charges against the doctor. Even with the announcement of the criminal charges, Berlin’s public prosecutor said that the investigation was ongoing.
The case is not the first in which medical workers have been linked to the intentional death of patients.
In 2019, Niels Högel, a nurse in Oldenburg, Germany, was convicted of the murder of 85 patients from 2000 to 2005, and investigators suspect the true number of his victims to be far higher. Högel was found to have administered drug overdoses that caused cardiac arrest so that he could revive the patients and be celebrated as a hero.
A British family doctor, Harold Shipman, was convicted in 2000 of murdering 15 of his patients. A later inquiry found that he had killed at least 215, over a period of 23 years.
Also in Britain, Lucy Letby, a neonatal nurse, was convicted in 2023 and 2024 of killing seven babies and trying to kill seven others. She was accused of using hard-to-trace methods like overfeeding the babies and injecting them with air or insulin, although medical experts have since called into question the evidence used to convict her and cited new evidence suggesting that the babies were not intentionally harmed.
The patients whom the Berlin doctor is accused of killing were ages 25 to 94, with most of them on the upper end of that range. All of them were receiving palliative care, and an at-home medical provider employed this doctor in the care of all of them. Investigators said the doctor’s employer had assisted in their inquiry.
In one instance, he is accused of sedating and poisoning an 87-year-old woman last June and then setting fire to her apartment in the Neukölln area of southern Berlin. Although emergency workers were able to resuscitate her, she subsequently died in hospital.
A month later, prosecutors say, the doctor first killed a 75-year-old man in the nearby Kreuzberg district and then drove to Neukölln, where he killed a 76-year-old woman and set fire to her apartment. But when he saw that the fire had gone out, prosecutors say, he called the woman’s relatives and claimed that he had been ringing her doorbell, but that no one had answered.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.