Elizabeth Wettlaufer

Elizabeth Wettlaufer was born and raised in Zorra Township, a rural community near Woodstock, Ontario.[1] Growing up in a staunchly Baptist household,[5] she went on to earn a bachelor's degree in religious education counseling from London Baptist Bible College after graduating from Huron Park Secondary School in the mid-1980s. Wettlaufer then studied nursing at Conestoga College.[6]

In 2007, Wettlaufer was hired onto the staff at Caressant Care, a long-term care home in Woodstock. She was initially regarded by co-workers as caring and professional. However, throughout her tenure, Wettlaufer struggled with substance abuse and alcoholism. She faced accusations of showing up to work drunk, and at one point was found passed out in the facility's basement during the night shift. Wettlaufer was suspended four times for "medication-related errors", then was finally fired in March 2014 over a "serious" incident in which she gave the wrong medication to a patient.[7]

After leaving Caressant Care, Wettlaufer had difficulty holding down a job. She was hired by the Meadow Park Care Center in London, but lost this job after checking herself into a drug rehab facility in Niagara. She took various temp jobs at other care homes. Wettlaufer admitted to a neighbour that she was fired from one of these jobs for stealing medication, and was fired from another job for making a medication error while high that nearly resulted in the death of a patient.[7] She also wrote poetry about her desire to kill.[8]

While she was a nurse at Caressant Care, Wettlaufer began injecting some of the patients she cared for with insulin. In some cases, the amount was not enough to kill the patient; she was charged with, and confessed to, aggravated assault or attempted murder for those cases. Wettlaufer's first assaults occurred sometime between June 25 and December 31, 2007. She confessed that she injected sisters Clotilde Adriano (age 87) and Albina Demedeiros (88) with insulin. While they later died, their deaths were not attributed to Wettlaufer. She confessed to two counts of aggravated assault.[9]

The first case in which Wettlaufer injected a patient with enough insulin to directly cause death was on August 11, 2007, when she murdered James Silcox (84), a World War II veteran and father of six. Through March 2014, Wettlaufer also murdered the following patients at Caressant Care:

• Maurice "Moe" Granat (84)
• Gladys Millard (87)
• Helen Matheson (95)
• Mary Zurawinski (96)
• Helen Young (90)
• Maureen Pickering (79)

While at Caressant Care, Wettlaufer also injected Michael Priddle (63) and Wayne Hedges (57) "with intent to murder". She confessed to two counts of attempted murder in these cases. She left employment at Caressant Care in 2014, but in part-time work at other facilities and at patients' homes, she injected three more people with insulin:

• Killed Arpad Horvath (75) at Meadow Park facility in London, Ontario
• Injected Sandra Towler (77) "with intent to murder" at a retirement home in Paris, Ontario
• Injected Beverly Bertram (68) "with intent to murder" at a private residence in Ingersoll, Ontario

Wettlaufer entered an inpatient drug rehabilitation program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), a psychiatric hospital in Toronto, on September 16, 2016.[5] There, she confessed to CAMH staff about killing or attempting to kill her patients, leading to CAMH notifying the College of Nurses of Ontario (CNO) and the Toronto Police Service.[6] She then emailed CNO to resign as a registered nurse because she had "deliberately harmed patients in [her] care and [was] now being investigated by the police for same", personally called an investigator from CNO, and had CAMH staff fax a four-page handwritten confession.[5] Wettlaufer had confessed to killing patients several times prior to her confession at CAMH, including to a lawyer who advised her to keep it a secret, and was not reported to police.[10] After providing police with a two-hour-long confession, she was formally charged with the eight murders on October 25. After further investigation, she was also charged with four counts of attempted murder and two counts of aggravated assault on January 13, 2017. Wettlaufer waived her right to a preliminary hearing and confessed to all charges in court on June 1. On June 26, she was sentenced to eight concurrent life terms in prison, with no possibility of parole for 25 years.

In her confession, Wettlaufer admitted that she "knew the difference between right and wrong" but she was visited by "surges" she could not control. She said, "God or the devil or whatever, wanted me to do it." After one murder, she felt "the surging ... And then [heard her own] laughter afterwards, which was really, it was like a cackling from the pit of hell." Wettlaufer told police she had tried to stop killing and she had told friends, a former partner and her pastor what she had done, but no one took her seriously.[11] During the police interview she described the "laughter" not as audible laughter, but as a feeling within her chest (visually using her hands), while the feeling prompting her to overdose and subsequently kill as coming from her stomach region. Wettlaufer never claimed to derive pleasure from the killings, stating that she felt horrible after murdering each victim.

Wettlaufer was held at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario.[12] In March 2018, she was transferred from Grand Valley to an unspecified secure facility in Montreal to receive medical treatment.[13]

• List of serial killers by country
• Harold Shipman – British general practitioner convicted in 2000 of 15 murders but suspected of as many as 250
• Lucy Letby

• Wettlaufer's handwritten confession, published by the National Post
• Public Inquiry into the Safety and Security of Residents in the Long-Term Care Homes System official website