November 13, 2025 • 13 mins
A German palliative care nurse administered lethal doses of morphine and midazolam to elderly patients simply to reduce his workload during night shifts.
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READ or SHARE: https://weirddarkness.com/nurse-killed-patients-easier-shifts
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2025, Weird Darkness.
#WeirdDarkness #TrueCrime #SerialKiller #GermanCrime #HealthcareHorror #NurseMurderer #MedicalCrime #PalliativeCare #TrueCrimeStory #CriminalNurse
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
There are places we trust without question. Hospitals rank near
the top of that list. We trust that the people
caring for our most vulnerable are guided by compassion, training
and an oath to do no harm. The reality at
one German hospital proved that trust can be dangerously misplaced.
(00:32):
I'm Darren Marler and this is weird dark news. Between
December twenty twenty three and May twenty twenty four, the
forty four year old palgative care and nurse at Rein
Moss clinicem Hospital in Worslin was administering lethal injections to
patients under his care. Not once or twice. This went
on for over five months. He used morphine and madazolam
(00:56):
medazlam being a muscle relaxant that is sometimes used for
execution in the United States. These are drugs that exist
in hospitals for legitimate medical purposes, drugs that are supposed
to ease suffering. He turned them into murder weapons. Each night.
During his rounds, he targeted patients who required more attention
and care. The people who needed him most became his victims.
(01:20):
The forty four year old nurse had been employed at
the hospital in Worselin since twenty twenty. He completed his
nursing training in two thousand and seven. So we're talking
about somebody with nearly two decades in healthcare, somebody who'd
been at this particular hospital for years. This wasn't a
brand new nurse who panicked under pressure. It was somebody
who had been working night shifts in paliative care long
(01:42):
enough to know exactly what he was doing. Paliative care
is where patients arrive at their most vulnerable, often in
the final stages of terminal illness. They are there because
they need specialized attention, careful pain management, compassionate monitoring, They
need someone who understands their fragility. Instead, in this case,
(02:03):
they got someone who saw them as inconveniences. The nurse
arbitrarily administered sedating medication to seriously ill patients, sometimes in
combination with painkillers. The word arbitrarily matters here. There was
no medical reasoning, no careful assessment, no consideration of individual
patient needs. He just decided on his own who would
(02:25):
get injected, and when prosecutors said, he injected the mostly
elderly patients with large doses of sedatives or painkillers with
the simple aim of reducing his workload during night shifts.
His motive wasn't complicated. It wasn't some twisted mercy killing ideology.
It was a revenge against the medical system. It wasn't
(02:45):
even financial gain. He killed people because caring for them
properly would have been too much work for him. The
patients who needed the most attention irritated him, so he
eliminated the problem. Ten people died because a nurse didn't
feel like doing his job. The pattern came to light
in July twenty twenty four when hospital administrators noticed a
(03:08):
sudden drop in patient deaths while the nurse was on vacation.
Someone goes on vacation and suddenly fewer patients are dying.
That's the kind of statistical anomaly that makes you go
back and check your numbers, because it shouldn't work that way.
Death rates in a palliative care unit don't typically fluctuate
based on which nurses on shift. The anomaly prompted them
(03:29):
to conduct an internal audit, which revealed alarming irregularities and
medication logs. Hospital staff and doctors noticed an unusual rise
in sudden patient deteriorations during this nurse's shifts. Once they
started looking closely at the records, the pattern became impossible
to ignore. Patients would be stable one moment, then suddenly
(03:50):
crash during his night shift. The medication logs didn't match
proper protocols. Things that should have been documented weren't. Drugs
were being administered in quantities and combinations that raised red flags.
The hospital alerted law enforcement, leading to his arrest later
that summer. Subsequent toxicology tests confirmed the presence of morphine
(04:12):
and medasolam in several deceased patients, triggering a full scale investigation.
The bodies told the story their records had started to
reveal these were not natural deaths, even by the standards
of a palgative care unit where death is expected. These
people had been poisoned executed. The trial began in March
(04:32):
twenty twenty five at the aucun District Court courtroom. Observers
noted his demeanor throughout the proceedings. He appeared in casual clothing,
a sloppy jogging suit, according to one reporter, seeming indifferent
to the gravity of the charges against him. His appearance
suggested he couldn't be bothered to take the proceedings seriously.
His defense demanded an acquittal, arguing that he had done
(04:54):
nothing wrong. The nurse testified that he had simply tried
to put his patients to sleep because sleep is the
best medicine. That was his actual explanation. He claimed he
had no idea the drugs he used would prove lethal.
His defense argued that the overdoses were unintended side effects
of misjudged sedation. According to this version of events, he
(05:17):
was just a well meaning caregiver who accidentally kept giving
his patients fatal doses of medication over and over again
for several months. Prosecutors weren't buying it, they told the
court he showed irritation and a lack of empathy to
patients who required a higher level of care. Prosecutor Marius
(05:37):
Salmon described the defendant as suffering from a personality disorder
and narcissistic traits, saying he worked in a profession he
never wanted to work in and could not bear the
suffering of palliative care patients. So here was somebody working
an end of life care who apparently couldn't stand being
around end of life people. The very thing his job
(05:58):
required him to deal with was that's the thing he
found unbearable. Rather than changing careers, he decided to speed
up the process of them being end of life. The
court heard disturbing details about how he operated. Palliative care
units typically provide patients with a button that they can
press when experiencing severe pain, which releases additional pain medication.
(06:19):
It's a system designed to give patients a little control
over their own comfort to ensure they're not suffering while
waiting for a nurse to respond. Prosecutors presented evidence that
the nurse pressed these buttons himself multiple times during the night,
without patient consent or medical justification. He was essentially dosing
patients remotely, stacking medication on top of the injections he'd
(06:43):
already given them. When asked by prosecutors why he had
done this, he answered, just for fun, Yeah, just for fun.
That response captures something essential about this case. There was
a casualness to his a thoughtlessness that made it somehow worse.
(07:03):
He wasn't even pretending these were difficult decisions made under
extreme circumstances. He was bored during his night shift, so
he pressed buttons and watched what would happen. Prosecutors accused
him of playing master of life and death over those
in his care. That phrase kept coming up during the trial,
and it fits. He'd been given professional authority over vulnerable people,
(07:26):
and he had twisted that authority into something unrecognizable. On
November fifth, twenty twenty five, earlier this month, the court
convicted this nurse of murdering ten patients and attempting to
murder twenty seven others. Twenty seven other patients survived what
he did to them. They survived despite his best efforts
to sedate them into oblivion. He was sentenced to life
(07:48):
in prison. The court determined that the offenses carried a
particular severity of guilt, which bars him from early release
after fifteen years, normally an option in such cases. That
designation particular severity of guilt is significant in the German
legal system. It means even if he theoretically becomes eligible
for parole, the court has essentially said, no, this was
(08:11):
so egregious that the standard rules don't apply to him.
This is somebody who should never walk free again. The
court originally charged him with nine murders and thirty four attempts,
but ultimately considered a further act to be a completed murder,
as the evidence came together during trial, what had initially
been classified as attempted murder turned out to have killed someone.
(08:32):
After all. The body count kept climbing even during the
legal proceedings. Survivors who attended the trial had to sit
through his testimony. Former patients of the nurse appeared at
the courthouse to confront the man who had harmed them.
These were people who survived what he inflicted, who escaped
the paligative care unit and lived to testify. Many of
them were already dealing with serious illnesses, already living through
(08:56):
some of the hardest days of their lives. Then they
discovered that their nurse, the person supposed to be helping them,
have been actively trying to kill them. The trial forced
them to relive their ordeal to hear him explain that
he had done it because they were too much work
for him, that he pressed their medication buttons just for fun.
The investigation isn't over. Prosecutors told AFP that exhummations have
(09:20):
taken place to identify further victims. They are literally digging
up bodies now, checking to see how far back this goes.
Investigators continue to examine other suspicious cases during his career,
he was a nurse for seventeen years before being caught
seventeen years. The investigation extends beyond Wurselin to Colonna, another
location where he worked. Every facility he ever set foot
(09:43):
in now has to go back through their records looking
for unexplained deaths, unusual medication patterns, anything that might indicate
he was doing this elsewhere. How many other families are
going to get devastating phone calls. How many people who
thought their loved ones died naturally are going to discover
the truth was much darker. This isn't Germany's first experience
(10:05):
with a healthcare serial worker. The case echoes that of
Neil's Horgel, who was hated a life sentence in twenty
nineteen for murdering eighty five patients and who's believed to
be modern Germany's most prolific serial killer eighty five confirmed murders.
Horgel killed patients with lethal injections between two thousand and
two thousand and five before he was caught. Psychiatrists said
(10:28):
that he suffered from a severe narcissistic disorder. His motive
was different. He would induce cardiac arrest in patients so
then he could try to revive them and look like
a hero. But the mechanism was the same. A nurse
lethal injections vulnerable patients who trusted him, and it is
still happening. In July twenty twenty four, a forty year
(10:48):
old palliative care specialist named by media as Johannes M
went on trial in Berlin, accused of killing fifteen patients
with lethal injections between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty four,
while was happening. At the same time, the Wurslin nurse
was being investigated in at least five cases. Johannes M
is suspected of setting fire to his victims' homes in
(11:09):
an attempt to cover up his crimes. He didn't just
kill patients, he tried to burn down their houses afterward,
presumably hoping to destroy evidence or make the deaths look accidental.
Three separate German nurses, all using lethal injections, all targeting
vulnerable patients, all within the span of roughly two decades.
The pattern emerging from these cases reveals a very troubling
(11:32):
vulnerability in healthcare systems. Colliative care patients represent some of
the most defenseless people in any medical setting. Many can't
speak for themselves. They're often heavily medicated, already confused, weak,
unable to advocate for their own care. They depend entirely
on the competence and compassion of their caregivers. Three separate
(11:54):
German nurses exploited that trust and dependence, turning it into
a hunting ground. Separate German nurses that we know of,
Who knows how many more are out there. The cases
prompted renewed calls for stricter monitoring systems and taliative and
geriatric wards across Germany. People are asking reasonable questions, how
(12:14):
does somebody kill ten people over five months without anyone
noticing until he goes on vacation. What safeguards were supposed
to prevent this? Why did it take a statistical anomaly
during his absence to trigger an investigation. The answers to
those questions are going to require systematic changes, better oversight,
more transparency and medication administration, and probably technologies that don't
(12:38):
yet exist in most hospitals. The court proceedings revealed just
how easy it had been for him. He had access
to powerful medications, he had authority over patients who couldn't
question him. He worked night shifts when supervision was minimal.
He had plenty of plausible deniability. These were already dying
patients in a palliative care unit where death is expected.
(13:00):
One of those factors combined to create an environment where
he could kill repeatedly without immediate detection. The system wasn't
designed to catch someone like him. It depended on the
assumption that nurses would not murder their patients, that the
oath to do no harm actually meant something. For most
healthcare workers, that assumption does hold. For these three men,
(13:22):
it didn't. If you'd like to read the story for
yourself or share the article with a friend, you can
read it on the Weird Darkness website. I've placed a
link to it in the episode description, and you can
find more stories of the paranormal, true crime, strange, and more,
including numerous stories that never make it to the podcast
in my Weird Darknews blog at Weird Darkness dot com
slash news
There are places we trust without question. Hospitals rank near
the top of that list. We trust that the people
caring for our most vulnerable are guided by compassion, training
and an oath to do no harm. The reality at
one German hospital proved that trust can be dangerously misplaced.
(00:32):
I'm Darren Marler and this is weird dark news. Between
December twenty twenty three and May twenty twenty four, the
forty four year old palgative care and nurse at Rein
Moss clinicem Hospital in Worslin was administering lethal injections to
patients under his care. Not once or twice. This went
on for over five months. He used morphine and madazolam
(00:56):
medazlam being a muscle relaxant that is sometimes used for
execution in the United States. These are drugs that exist
in hospitals for legitimate medical purposes, drugs that are supposed
to ease suffering. He turned them into murder weapons. Each night.
During his rounds, he targeted patients who required more attention
and care. The people who needed him most became his victims.
(01:20):
The forty four year old nurse had been employed at
the hospital in Worselin since twenty twenty. He completed his
nursing training in two thousand and seven. So we're talking
about somebody with nearly two decades in healthcare, somebody who'd
been at this particular hospital for years. This wasn't a
brand new nurse who panicked under pressure. It was somebody
who had been working night shifts in paliative care long
(01:42):
enough to know exactly what he was doing. Paliative care
is where patients arrive at their most vulnerable, often in
the final stages of terminal illness. They are there because
they need specialized attention, careful pain management, compassionate monitoring, They
need someone who understands their fragility. Instead, in this case,
(02:03):
they got someone who saw them as inconveniences. The nurse
arbitrarily administered sedating medication to seriously ill patients, sometimes in
combination with painkillers. The word arbitrarily matters here. There was
no medical reasoning, no careful assessment, no consideration of individual
patient needs. He just decided on his own who would
(02:25):
get injected, and when prosecutors said, he injected the mostly
elderly patients with large doses of sedatives or painkillers with
the simple aim of reducing his workload during night shifts.
His motive wasn't complicated. It wasn't some twisted mercy killing ideology.
It was a revenge against the medical system. It wasn't
(02:45):
even financial gain. He killed people because caring for them
properly would have been too much work for him. The
patients who needed the most attention irritated him, so he
eliminated the problem. Ten people died because a nurse didn't
feel like doing his job. The pattern came to light
in July twenty twenty four when hospital administrators noticed a
(03:08):
sudden drop in patient deaths while the nurse was on vacation.
Someone goes on vacation and suddenly fewer patients are dying.
That's the kind of statistical anomaly that makes you go
back and check your numbers, because it shouldn't work that way.
Death rates in a palliative care unit don't typically fluctuate
based on which nurses on shift. The anomaly prompted them
(03:29):
to conduct an internal audit, which revealed alarming irregularities and
medication logs. Hospital staff and doctors noticed an unusual rise
in sudden patient deteriorations during this nurse's shifts. Once they
started looking closely at the records, the pattern became impossible
to ignore. Patients would be stable one moment, then suddenly
(03:50):
crash during his night shift. The medication logs didn't match
proper protocols. Things that should have been documented weren't. Drugs
were being administered in quantities and combinations that raised red flags.
The hospital alerted law enforcement, leading to his arrest later
that summer. Subsequent toxicology tests confirmed the presence of morphine
(04:12):
and medasolam in several deceased patients, triggering a full scale investigation.
The bodies told the story their records had started to
reveal these were not natural deaths, even by the standards
of a palgative care unit where death is expected. These
people had been poisoned executed. The trial began in March
(04:32):
twenty twenty five at the aucun District Court courtroom. Observers
noted his demeanor throughout the proceedings. He appeared in casual clothing,
a sloppy jogging suit, according to one reporter, seeming indifferent
to the gravity of the charges against him. His appearance
suggested he couldn't be bothered to take the proceedings seriously.
His defense demanded an acquittal, arguing that he had done
(04:54):
nothing wrong. The nurse testified that he had simply tried
to put his patients to sleep because sleep is the
best medicine. That was his actual explanation. He claimed he
had no idea the drugs he used would prove lethal.
His defense argued that the overdoses were unintended side effects
of misjudged sedation. According to this version of events, he
(05:17):
was just a well meaning caregiver who accidentally kept giving
his patients fatal doses of medication over and over again
for several months. Prosecutors weren't buying it, they told the
court he showed irritation and a lack of empathy to
patients who required a higher level of care. Prosecutor Marius
(05:37):
Salmon described the defendant as suffering from a personality disorder
and narcissistic traits, saying he worked in a profession he
never wanted to work in and could not bear the
suffering of palliative care patients. So here was somebody working
an end of life care who apparently couldn't stand being
around end of life people. The very thing his job
(05:58):
required him to deal with was that's the thing he
found unbearable. Rather than changing careers, he decided to speed
up the process of them being end of life. The
court heard disturbing details about how he operated. Palliative care
units typically provide patients with a button that they can
press when experiencing severe pain, which releases additional pain medication.
(06:19):
It's a system designed to give patients a little control
over their own comfort to ensure they're not suffering while
waiting for a nurse to respond. Prosecutors presented evidence that
the nurse pressed these buttons himself multiple times during the night,
without patient consent or medical justification. He was essentially dosing
patients remotely, stacking medication on top of the injections he'd
(06:43):
already given them. When asked by prosecutors why he had
done this, he answered, just for fun, Yeah, just for fun.
That response captures something essential about this case. There was
a casualness to his a thoughtlessness that made it somehow worse.
(07:03):
He wasn't even pretending these were difficult decisions made under
extreme circumstances. He was bored during his night shift, so
he pressed buttons and watched what would happen. Prosecutors accused
him of playing master of life and death over those
in his care. That phrase kept coming up during the trial,
and it fits. He'd been given professional authority over vulnerable people,
(07:26):
and he had twisted that authority into something unrecognizable. On
November fifth, twenty twenty five, earlier this month, the court
convicted this nurse of murdering ten patients and attempting to
murder twenty seven others. Twenty seven other patients survived what
he did to them. They survived despite his best efforts
to sedate them into oblivion. He was sentenced to life
(07:48):
in prison. The court determined that the offenses carried a
particular severity of guilt, which bars him from early release
after fifteen years, normally an option in such cases. That
designation particular severity of guilt is significant in the German
legal system. It means even if he theoretically becomes eligible
for parole, the court has essentially said, no, this was
(08:11):
so egregious that the standard rules don't apply to him.
This is somebody who should never walk free again. The
court originally charged him with nine murders and thirty four attempts,
but ultimately considered a further act to be a completed murder,
as the evidence came together during trial, what had initially
been classified as attempted murder turned out to have killed someone.
(08:32):
After all. The body count kept climbing even during the
legal proceedings. Survivors who attended the trial had to sit
through his testimony. Former patients of the nurse appeared at
the courthouse to confront the man who had harmed them.
These were people who survived what he inflicted, who escaped
the paligative care unit and lived to testify. Many of
them were already dealing with serious illnesses, already living through
(08:56):
some of the hardest days of their lives. Then they
discovered that their nurse, the person supposed to be helping them,
have been actively trying to kill them. The trial forced
them to relive their ordeal to hear him explain that
he had done it because they were too much work
for him, that he pressed their medication buttons just for fun.
The investigation isn't over. Prosecutors told AFP that exhummations have
(09:20):
taken place to identify further victims. They are literally digging
up bodies now, checking to see how far back this goes.
Investigators continue to examine other suspicious cases during his career,
he was a nurse for seventeen years before being caught
seventeen years. The investigation extends beyond Wurselin to Colonna, another
location where he worked. Every facility he ever set foot
(09:43):
in now has to go back through their records looking
for unexplained deaths, unusual medication patterns, anything that might indicate
he was doing this elsewhere. How many other families are
going to get devastating phone calls. How many people who
thought their loved ones died naturally are going to discover
the truth was much darker. This isn't Germany's first experience
(10:05):
with a healthcare serial worker. The case echoes that of
Neil's Horgel, who was hated a life sentence in twenty
nineteen for murdering eighty five patients and who's believed to
be modern Germany's most prolific serial killer eighty five confirmed murders.
Horgel killed patients with lethal injections between two thousand and
two thousand and five before he was caught. Psychiatrists said
(10:28):
that he suffered from a severe narcissistic disorder. His motive
was different. He would induce cardiac arrest in patients so
then he could try to revive them and look like
a hero. But the mechanism was the same. A nurse
lethal injections vulnerable patients who trusted him, and it is
still happening. In July twenty twenty four, a forty year
(10:48):
old palliative care specialist named by media as Johannes M
went on trial in Berlin, accused of killing fifteen patients
with lethal injections between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty four,
while was happening. At the same time, the Wurslin nurse
was being investigated in at least five cases. Johannes M
is suspected of setting fire to his victims' homes in
(11:09):
an attempt to cover up his crimes. He didn't just
kill patients, he tried to burn down their houses afterward,
presumably hoping to destroy evidence or make the deaths look accidental.
Three separate German nurses, all using lethal injections, all targeting
vulnerable patients, all within the span of roughly two decades.
The pattern emerging from these cases reveals a very troubling
(11:32):
vulnerability in healthcare systems. Colliative care patients represent some of
the most defenseless people in any medical setting. Many can't
speak for themselves. They're often heavily medicated, already confused, weak,
unable to advocate for their own care. They depend entirely
on the competence and compassion of their caregivers. Three separate
(11:54):
German nurses exploited that trust and dependence, turning it into
a hunting ground. Separate German nurses that we know of,
Who knows how many more are out there. The cases
prompted renewed calls for stricter monitoring systems and taliative and
geriatric wards across Germany. People are asking reasonable questions, how
(12:14):
does somebody kill ten people over five months without anyone
noticing until he goes on vacation. What safeguards were supposed
to prevent this? Why did it take a statistical anomaly
during his absence to trigger an investigation. The answers to
those questions are going to require systematic changes, better oversight,
more transparency and medication administration, and probably technologies that don't
(12:38):
yet exist in most hospitals. The court proceedings revealed just
how easy it had been for him. He had access
to powerful medications, he had authority over patients who couldn't
question him. He worked night shifts when supervision was minimal.
He had plenty of plausible deniability. These were already dying
patients in a palliative care unit where death is expected.
(13:00):
One of those factors combined to create an environment where
he could kill repeatedly without immediate detection. The system wasn't
designed to catch someone like him. It depended on the
assumption that nurses would not murder their patients, that the
oath to do no harm actually meant something. For most
healthcare workers, that assumption does hold. For these three men,
(13:22):
it didn't. If you'd like to read the story for
yourself or share the article with a friend, you can
read it on the Weird Darkness website. I've placed a
link to it in the episode description, and you can
find more stories of the paranormal, true crime, strange, and more,
including numerous stories that never make it to the podcast
in my Weird Darknews blog at Weird Darkness dot com
slash news
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