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This is an updated edition of Angels of Death, first published in 2015. Sadly, in the four short years since then, there have been many more cases around the world of healthcare workers killing their patients. Two of those cases – a Canadian nurse who’s one of that country’s most prolific serial killers, and an Australian nurse who killed two of her patients because they had made complaints about her – are featured in this edition.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone in the healthcare industry could have murder on their mind. But even as I was putting the final touches on this new edition, ex-nurse Niels Högel was convicted of 85 murders in Germany. Högel was already in jail for murder, and attempted murder, but his latest trial, which ended in June 2019, was an attempt to find out just how many people he’d murdered and to bring some answers to families of the suspected victims.

Högel stalked the rooms of the hospitals he worked, injecting his patients with drugs meant for heart conditions, just so he could revive them and be a hero. He was known as ‘Resuscitation Rambo’.

It’s feared that between 2000 and 2005, Högel murdered hundreds of people, aged from 34 to 96. He is now the most prolific serial killer in post-war Germany.

While writing Angels of Death, I noticed that the pattern of offending with medical serial killers is often alarmingly uniform. Many of these evil angels worked nightshifts where they were unsupervised, they had personal problems and mental health issues, and there were always red flags that meant they could have been stopped. These flags were typically disciplinary issues that were not shared as they moved from job to job; things like drug addiction, criminal convictions, or clouds over their professional practice.

In many of the cases in this book, the murders could have been prevented had there been more rigorous checks and balances in place at every level, from the hospital right up to state legislation.

Before researching this book, I had not realised just how many healthcare professionals had been found guilty of murder.

Frankly, it is disturbing and only partly because these are only the ones we know about. It could be argued that healthcare serial killing is the easiest type of murder to commit and get away with – for years or, possibly forever.

Serial killer nurses and doctors do not have to go looking for their victims, they literally have wards of captive and trusting victims from which to choose.

Serial murder by healthcare professionals is particularly heinous because, by the very nature of their jobs, they are automatically given an enormous amount of trust. But instead of using their skills and training to save lives and comfort people, they use their positions to violate the vulnerabilities of their victims.

It is an unforgivable betrayal of trust.

Emily Webb

Melbourne, Australia 2019