German nurse Niels Hoegel world’s most prolific serial killer after murder of over 100 patients

A German nurse who admitted killing more than 100 of his patients “out of boredom’’ over five years has become one of the world’s most prolific known serial killers.

A German nurse who admitted killing more than 100 of his patients “out of boredom’’ has become one of the world’s most prolific known serial killers.

Niels Hoegel, now 41, was able to literally get away with murder during a killing spree at two German hospitals which lasted more than five years.

Appalled authorities are struggling to work out how Hoegel was able to continue to work for so long as the number of deaths grew.

They have exhumed 134 bodies from 67 cemeteries but fear they may never know the full extent of his crimes, as other patients who died on Hoegel’s watch were cremated, and no forensic evidence remains.

Up to 200 people may have died at his hands.

Former nurse Niels Hoegel, accused of killing more than 100 patients in his care, wears a bullet proof vest as he is lead out of the court compound. Picture: Hauke-Christian Dittrich/ DPA/AFP

Hoegel is on trial in a court in the German city of Oldenburg, one of the cities where he carried out his monstrous crimes, and where he admits killing 35 people at a local hospital.

He also killed 62 people at a clinic in the city of Delmenhorst.

Oldenburg police chief Johann Kühme said the scale of Hoegel’s crimes “leaves us speechless”.

“And as if all that were not enough, we must realise that the real dimension of the killings by Hoegel is likely many times worse,” he said.

Prosecutors say Hoegel injected patients with drug overdoses that caused them to go into cardiac arrest.

They said the motivation for the crimes was “vanity’’ because Hoegel then liked to show off his skill at resuscitating them — although many did not survive.

His victims were aged 34 years to 96 years of age.

Prosecutors also said Hoegel appeared to enjoyed the “thrill’’ of his actions, with one psychologist testifying to the court that killing the patients was never his aim.

Rather, when he was able to revive them, he was “sated’’, but only for several days.

“For him, it was like a drug,” the unnamed psychologist said.

Hoegel hides his face behind a folder as he waits next to his lawyer Ulrike Baumann. Picture: Carmen Jaspersen/DPA/AFP

Prosecutors said Hoegel should have been aware the drugs he was injecting into his patents would cause them to suffer a range of medical ailments including cardiac failure.

“From the prosecutorial point of view, the accused Niels H accepted, at least tacitly, in all cases the death of the patients due to the effects of the drugs,’’ prosecutors said in a statement.

The fat, bearded nurse was only stopped when he caught injecting a patient at the Delmenhorst clinic with an unprescribed medication.

He was sentenced to seven years’ jail for attempted murder.

Determined family members of his victims pushed for a second trial, and in 2015 he was found guilty of two further murders and three attempted murders.

A confession he made to his psychiatrist about 30 other patients prompted the investigations which led to his latest trial.

As his latest trial kicked off in October, he admitted killing 97 more people at the two hospitals, and apologised to the relatives who were there in the courtroom, according to the German national news agency DPA.

“If I knew a way that would help you, then I would take it, believe me,’’ he told the court.

“I am fully convinced now that I owe every relative an explanation. I am honestly sorry.”

Judge Sebastian Buehrmann said the aim of the court proceeding was to establish the scope of Hoegel’s murderous spree, which ran over the two hospitals from 2000-2005.

“We will do our utmost to learn the truth,” the judge said. “It is like a house with dark rooms — we want to bring light into the darkness.”

Hoegel admitted. to murdering more than 100 patients.

Hoegel told the court that the charges against him were accurate.

“What I have admitted took place,” he said.

The grandson of one of the victims, and a co-plaintiff in the trial, Christian Marbach, told the Guardian it was a “scandal’’ that Hoegel had been able to get away with his murder spree for so long without the hospital authorities or law enforcement catching him.

“They had everything they needed (to stop him) — you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes,” Mr Marbach said.

In recent decades, the world has been confronted with the actions of some truly prolific and horrific serial killers — all men, and often in positions of trust or authority.

Their victims were often vulnerable people such as those with substance abuse problems, or sex workers.

Last month, Russian ex-policeman Mikhail Popkov was found guilty of 56 murders. He had earlier been jailed for killing another 22 people.

American man Samuel Little, 78, last month confessed to murdering 90 people, mainly drug addicts and prostitutes. Police have confirmed 34 of those deaths so far.

The so-called Chessboard Killer, Alexander Pichushkin, murdered 48 people, mainly alcoholic old men, in Moscow and was sentenced to life in prison in 2007. He was aiming for one victim for every square on a chessboard.

Another Russian, the Butcher of Rostov, former teacher Andrei Chikatilo, 56, got the death sentence for the sexually-motivated murders of 52 women, children and young people between 1978 and 1990.

The Green River killer, truck painter Gary Ridgeway, confessed in 2003 to killing 48 prostitutes and runaways in America in the early 1980s. He is suspected of killing around 90 people.

Englishman Harold Shipman became known as Doctor Death after the family GP was convicted in 2000 of killing 15 elderly patients with lethal doses of morphine.

Inquiries found he had murdered around 250 of his patients, making him the UK’s most prolific serial killer.

In Colombia, South America, the travelling salesman and rapist known as the Monster of Genova, Luis Alfredo Garavito, was jailed in 2000 for murdering 189 boys over a five-year span until 1996.

The Monster of the Andes, another Colombian called Pedro Lopez Monsalve, confessed in Ecuador to killing 310 poverty-stricken children in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

Other high-profile serial killers include the Americans Ted Bundy, convicted of killing 36 women but suspected of murdering up to 100 women and girls; the sexual pervert and killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who murdered 17 young men and boys, and John Wayne Gacy, who raped and murdered 33 young men and boys in the 1970s.

In Pakistan, Javed Iqbal was sentenced to death in 2000 for the murder and mutilation of 100 children, while Anatoly Onoprienko in Ukraine admitted killing 52 people in a bid to attain the world record in murders. He was sentenced to death in 1999.