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Ex-Nurse Charged With Killing 8 Nursing Home Residents in Ontario Ex-Nurse Charged With Killing 8 Nursing Home Residents in Ontario
(about 7 hours later)
OTTAWA — A former nurse in Ontario was charged on Tuesday with murdering eight nursing home residents by injecting them with lethal drug doses. OTTAWA — There were few common threads in the lives of the eight nursing home patients, who ranged in age from 75 to 96. One owned a tool and die shop; another was a factory worker. Some were pillars of churches; many were parents.
The Ontario Provincial Police told reporters at a news conference in Woodstock, Ontario, that the victims ranged in age from 79 to 96. The death notices for some of them suggested that they might have had Alzheimer’s disease or other chronic medical conditions. Most of the notices described the deaths as peaceful.
The former nurse, Elizabeth Tracey Mae Wettlaufer, 49, was charged with eight counts of first-degree, or intentional, murder, committed between August 2007 and August 2014. On Tuesday, however, the Ontario Provincial Police said that, peaceful or not, the deaths were not natural. Elizabeth Tracey Mae Wettlaufer, a former nurse, was charged with eight counts of first-degree, or premeditated, murder over a seven-year period, from 2007 to 2014. She was arrested on Monday night.
The police offered no motive for the killings, seven of which occurred at a nursing home owned by Caressant Care Nursing and Retirement Homes in Woodstock, which is about 80 miles southwest of Toronto. The eighth victim died in another of the company’s nursing homes in London, Ontario, about 20 miles away. The motive for the killings remains, for now, a mystery. Seven of the patients died at a nursing home in Woodstock, a city of about 37,000 people that has a large Toyota plant and sits in the middle of farm country, some 80 miles southwest of Toronto. The eighth and final killing, according to the police, took place farther along Highway 401 West, at a nursing home in London, Ontario, that briefly employed Ms. Wettlaufer.
Caressant Care said in a statement that Ms. Wettlaufer had left its employment about two and a half years ago. She resigned from the College of Nurses of Ontario, the profession’s licensing board, at the end of last month; the police said that was around the time they started their investigation. The licensing board said it was also conducting its own investigation. A tip to the Woodstock police on Sept. 29 started the investigation, although the authorities declined to identify the person who provided it. The next day, by coincidence or not, Ms. Wettlaufer gave up her nursing license.
The police did not identify the drug or drugs used in the killings. When it became apparent that the deaths involved more than one location, the provincial police were called in.
During a news conference in Woodstock, the police said that the investigation was continuing and that more charges were possible. They added that a single method had been used to kill all of the known victims.
“The victims were administered a drug,” said Detective Superintendent Dave Truax of the Ontario Provincial Police. “We’re not in a position at this time to comment further on the specifics of the drug, as it forms part of the evidence that is now before the courts.”
The glimpses of Ms. Wettlaufer’s life provided through social media posts, police statements, nursing records and court documents suggest many disappointments and struggles, particularly when it came to finding steady employment.
In a Facebook post about a year after the police said the final murder took place, Ms. Wettlaufer suggested that she had experienced problems with alcohol.
She studied nursing at Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario, and religious counseling at London Baptist Bible College. She began working as a nurse in 1995. Christian Horizons, a charity that provides services for people with developmental disabilities, said in a statement that Ms. Wettlaufer had been one of its employees until June 2007. The group did not indicate, however, where she had worked.
Ms. Wettlaufer separated from her husband not long before she began working at the Woodstock nursing home, owned by Caressant Care. The company said in a statement that she had left about two and a half years ago but, citing the murder investigation, declined to give a reason for her departure.
Julia King, the chief operating officer of the Meadow Park London Long Term Care nursing home, where the last victim died, said in an email that Ms. Wettlaufer had left her job there about two years ago.
Charlene Puffer, who lived in the same Woodstock apartment building as Ms. Wettlaufer, told the Canadian Press news agency that the police had made several visits to the building recently. On one occasion, she said, the officers wore hazardous materials suits.
As it emerged on Tuesday that the eight people had been killed rather than succumbing to disease or old age, relatives of some of the victims said they had harbored suspicions.
Susan Horvath, the daughter of Arpad Horvath, who died at 75 in the London nursing home, told a radio station there that something had seemed wrong with her father’s care.
“I just had a feeling, and I told Mom,” Ms. Horvath said. “Then when he passed on — and how he passed on — that’s when I knew, ‘This is not right.’”
But other family members, some of whom learned of the case through news reports on Tuesday, told reporters that they had never suspected anything. Several of the death notices thanked the nursing staff at the Woodstock home for their care.
This is not the first time a nurse in Ontario has been accused of multiple murders. In 1981, Susan Nelles was arrested and charged with killing four infants at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children by injecting them with a powerful heart medication. She was acquitted when evidence showed, among other things, that she had not been working during some of the shifts when the babies died.
The police identified the other nursing home victims as James Silcox, 84; Maurice Granat, 84; Gladys Millard, 87; Helen Matheson, 95; Mary Zurawinski, 96; Helen Young, 90; and Maureen Pickering, 79. Death notices show that many of them came from farm towns surrounding Woodstock, including Tillsonburg, which was the center of Ontario’s now-defunct tobacco industry.
Coincidentally, an 8-year-old girl was abducted across the street from the Woodstock nursing home in 2009, and was later found murdered. While there was no connection between the two cases, Chief William Renton of the Woodstock police said on Tuesday, “It’s very difficult for a community to have to endure these types of tragic incidents.”