Michaela Roeder

Case details

Michaela Roeder, known as the “Angel of Death,” was a nurse who was charged in Wuppertal, West Germany, with the murder of seventeen patients by injection with Catapresan, a drug that affected high blood pressure.

The offence

Michaela Roeder was accused of playing “mistress of life or death” over patients in the intensive care unit of St Peter’s Hospital in Wuppertal-Barmen through random selection of who should live or die.

Public prosecutor Karl-Hermann Majorewsky accused her of asserting and satisfying her own feeling of superiority, describing her as “master over life and death.”

At trial, Roeder admitted giving lethal doses to some patients and said she did it to spare them pain, while the prosecution alleged she did it as a demonstration of power.

Investigation

Fourteen bodies of Roeder’s alleged victims were over 70, and the other three were over 53. The allegations concerned 17 patients in total.

A newspaper report said that even before suspicion was first aroused, Sister Roeder had been nicknamed “The Angel of Death” by her colleagues because of the high death rate in the ward.

Twenty-eight bodies were exhumed after a nurse claimed to have seen Sister Roeder injecting a cancer patient with Catapresan. Seventeen of the corpses were found to contain traces of the drug.

Investigators also alleged that Roeder admitted involvement in six deaths because she “could not bear to see patients suffer unnecessarily.”

Arrest

Roeder was arrested in March 1986.

Trial

Michaela Roeder was charged with killing 17 patients in a two-year period, and she faced a possible life sentence if convicted.

During trial proceedings, the prosecution demanded a life sentence. The court’s decision that compassion was Roeder’s motive angered some members of the public in the courtroom.

At the trial’s opening, State Prosecutor Karl-Hermann Majorewsky said Roeder had killed “to assert and satisfy her own feeling of superiority” as “master over life and death.”

The prosecution alleged that Roeder had killed to demonstrate power. Der Spiegel magazine quoted Majorowsky as saying:

“The accused posed as a mistress over life and death. We are dealing here with cold-blooded murder out of base motives,” a Jan. 9 issue of Der Spiegel magazine quoted Majorowsky as saying.

Roeder denied the murder charges and, in court, admitted giving the fatal doses to six of the patients, saying she did it to spare them pain.

Roeder told a senior magistrate’s court in the western German town of Wuppertal that she gave eight elderly patients lethal injections to put them out of their misery and accidentally killed a ninth. She acknowledged only one patient actually asked to be killed. She also said that in one case she accidentally killed a patient with the wrong injection.

Roeder was found guilty of six counts of manslaughter and one each of attempted manslaughter and mercy killing.

Majorowsky said in court papers there were “no clues that these patients would have died.”

More than 40 witnesses and medical experts were expected to testify.

Sentencing

Michaela Roeder, 31, was sentenced to 11 years in prison on September 11, 1989.

Appeals

No appeals were described.

Outcome

The court imposed an 11-year prison sentence.