Cecile Bombeek

Case record: Cecile Bombeek (Sister Godfrida)

Cecile Bombeek was known as Sister Godfrida and as Sœur Godfrida. She was a nun of the Apostolic Congregation of St. Joseph and managed a geriatric ward in a public hospital in Wetteren, Belgium.

She became a morphine addict after she underwent brain surgery in 1976. Other sources stated that she was already a morphine fiend before the surgery, and that the operation was done to “cure” her of the addiction.

In the 38-bed geriatric ward, the death rate increased dramatically in recent months, and nurses began comparing notes on curious events. Other cases revealed signs of sadistic mistreatment, including catheters ripped from the bladders of elderly patients by “persons unknown.”

Police suspicion focused on the 44-year-old Sister Godfrida, a Josephite nun assigned to the geriatric ward.

The offence

Cecile Bombeek was officially accused of killing three patients at a public assistance hospital. Police sources said she had confessed to killing three patients by injecting them with overdoses of insulin.

She was accused of murdering patients aged between 75 and 80 by administering overdoses of insulin in July and August last year.

The investigation also raised suspicion that she murdered more than 30 patients between 1976 and 1978. In addition to the killings, police and other accounts described suspected acts of torture, including ripping catheters from patients.

In custody, her confession to three homicides was sufficient to bring an indictment. The case description also stated that police contended she began to loot the savings and personal property of her aged patients and embezzled more than $30,000 in a year’s time. The material further stated she killed at least three patients with insulin overdoses when they became “too difficult at night,” and that it was impossible to estimate the lethal sister’s body-count, with an attribution to Dr. Jean-Paul De Corte that it “could just as well be thirty people as three.”

Investigation and arrest

Nurses in the geriatric ward kept a diary of mysterious deaths and other irregularities, and they contributed to focusing suspicion on Sister Godfrida.

Police sources said that the investigation into how she obtained the amounts of morphine she needed soon aroused suspicion about her treatment of patients in the old people’s ward.

Sister Godfrida was arrested on Saturday on charges of forging medical prescriptions and drug abuse.

She was sent to a private clinic for addiction treatment in Ghent on August 28 last year.

The material said she became a morphine addict after her brain surgery in 1976, and it also included the statement that other sources claimed she was already addicted before the surgery and that the operation was done to “cure” her of the addiction.

Trial and fitness for trial

In March 1978, she was committed for psychiatric observation to determine her fitness for trial.

Her current legal status was that she was found not fit to stand trial and, subsequently, interred in a psychiatric facility.

Other details

Dr. Jean-Paul De Corte, spokesman for the hospital’s governing board, was quoted:

"It could just as well be thirty people as three."

She was identified as “religieuse ‘Adhérente à l’ordre apostolitique de Saint Joseph’” (Sœur Godfrida ex-Cecile Bombeek).

A syndicated item included the following bibliographic text: “Drug Addict Nun Charged With 3 Murders,” syndicated (UPI), St. Petersberg Press (Fl.), Feb. 17, 1978, p. 14 A.