Nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer carried out her killing spree at Caressant Care in Woodstock, Ontario
‘She was far from an angel of mercy,’ said Superior Court Justice Bruce Thomas when he sentenced Elizabeth Wettlaufer to a life behind bars. ‘Instead, she was a shadow of death that passed over [her victims].’
Elizabeth Wettlaufer remains one of the worst serial killers in Canadian history. Armed with an insulin pen, the nurse secretly targeted frail hospital patients between 2007 and 2016 and left them for dead.
Wettlaufer hinted to friends about being responsible for the deaths but they never believed her, thinking she couldn’t be capable of causing such terror.
It was only when the killer confessed to authorities herself that her double life, as a deranged murderer, came to light.
Who was Elizabeth Wettlaufer?
The nurse grew up in a staunchly Baptist household in Canada (Picture: Canadian Press/Shutterstock)
Wettlaufer was born into a ‘very controlling ‘ religious family on June 10, 1967 in Zorra Township, a rural community near Woodstock in Ontario. She studied religious education counseling at London Baptist Bible College before she went on to earn a nursing degree at Conestoga College.In 1997, she married truck driver Donnie Wettlaufer after the pair met at a Baptist church.
On paper, Wettlaufer was a ‘caring’ individual when she was first hired at Caressant Care in 2007, a long-term care home in Woodstock.
But the mental health of the nurse – who was earning $60,000 (£45,000) a year – soon spiralled as she struggled with alcoholism and drug abuse. Wettlaufer routinely turned up for work drunk, or missed shifts entirely. She struck up a relationship with a woman she’d met online and when her husband Donnie found out about the affair, he left her.
In 2014, Wettlaufer was fired after she gave the wrong medication to a patient. Little did anyone know at that point, just how dangerous she truly was.
After leaving her care home job, Wettlaufer had stints in rehab and several temp jobs; one of which she was fired from after stealing medication. During this time, Wettlaufer started to write strange poetry.
The confession
In 2007, Wettlaufer was hired onto the staff at Caressant Care where she targeted her victims (Picture: Toronto Star via Getty Images)
In September 2016, Wettlaufer gave her Jack Russell dog, Nashville, to a friend and entered an inpatient drug rehabilitation program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto.
Here, she confessed to staff that she had killed or attempted to kill several of her patients. She hand wrote a list with several names and dates. Soon, a horrific story started to unravel.
Police discovered that several deaths of patients at Carressant Care, thought to have been natural, were actually caused by the nurse meant to protect them.
Wettlaufer had snuck into the facility’s medicine stores and inserted insulin into what’s known as an ‘insulin pen,’ typically used to treat people with diabetes. But the killer nurse would load up the pen with huge doses and jam it into the bodies of elderly patients which caused …read more
Source:: Metro
