German serial killer nurse linked to deaths of 102 patients

Niels Hogel has admitted using drugs to induce heart attacks so he could play the hero by trying to resuscitate patients.

Niels Hoegel hides his face during a court hearing in 2015. Picture: AFP

A nurse serving a life sentence for a double murder is suspected of being responsible for 102 deaths at two hospitals, a number that would make him Germany’s most prolific postwar serial killer.

Niels Hogel, 41, was convicted in 2015 of two murders and three attempted murders by giving intensive-care patients overdoses of powerful drugs.

After his conviction investigators exhumed 134 bodies from 67 cemeteries to test them for drugs that Hogel admitted using to induce heart attacks so he could play the hero by trying to resuscitate the patients.

He said at his trial that he acted out of “boredom”, feeling euphoric when he brought a patient back to life and devastated when he failed.

Police said they expected to bring charges against Hogel next year. Germany does not have consecutive sentencing but more convictions will affect his chances of probation. In German law, it is not possible to be sentenced for more than life imprisonment and people who get a life term are usually eligible for probation after 15 years.

The death toll was “unique in the history of the German republic”, said Arne Schmidt, the chief police investigator. Hogel killed “without a discernible pattern” and preyed especially upon those in critical condition. He worked at a hospital in Oldenburg from 1999 to 2002 and at another in Delmenhorst, near Bremen, from 2003 to 2005.

He was arrested in 2005 after a colleague saw him injecting a patient who survived and was sentenced to seven and a half years in jail in 2008 for attempted murder. After publicity surrounding his trial a woman contacted police fearing that her late mother was killed by him. Investigators exhumed several bodies and detected traces of the heart drug in five of them, declaring it either the definitive or possible contributing cause.

After the latest toxicology reports on the bodies of most of the patients who died at the hospitals while he worked there, investigators believe that he was responsible for 38 deaths at Oldenburg and 64 in Delmenhorst.

The toll could rise. Toxicology studies are continuing for five other cases and the exhumations of three former patients are planned in Turkey. Some victims may have been cremated.

Police have said that if health officials had not hesitated in alerting the authorities then Hogel might have been stopped earlier. Former staff at the two hospitals are facing criminal investigations for negligence.

The previous worst German serial killer was also a male nurse who was convicted 10 years ago of killing 28 elderly patients in Bavaria by lethal injection because he felt sorry for them. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Europe’s most prolific postwar killer was Harold Shipman, a doctor with 218 identified victims and who is believed to have killed as many as 250 people, most of them elderly and middle-aged women who were his patients. Shipman was sentenced to 15 life terms in 2000 and hanged himself in prison in 2004. He was 57.

The Times