A German palliative care doctor was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday in Berlin for the murders of 15 patients during home visits, with the judge suspecting this “serial killer” of other deadly interventions.
Found guilty of killing 12 women and 3 men, between September 2021 and July 2024, using cocktails of lethal sedatives, this 41-year-old doctor is suspected of a much higher number of murders in investigations still ongoing.
The practitioner, identified under the name Johannes M., was sentenced to the maximum sentence: life imprisonment, accompanied by recognition of the particular seriousness of the crimes, and subsequent placement in secure detention, two measures aimed at preventing early release.
He is also prohibited from practicing the profession of doctor for life. The judges, on all these points, followed the prosecution’s requisitions.
Murderer “for a long time”
Judge Sylvia Busch called the man a “serial killer” at the center of an “inconceivable” and “out of the ordinary” case.
The practitioner administered to his victims a sedative followed by a muscle relaxant which, combined, lead to paralysis of the respiratory muscles, respiratory arrest and death within a few minutes.
The victims, who were all under his medical responsibility at the time of the events, were between 25 and 94 years old.
On at least five occasions, he allegedly set fire to the victims’ apartments to cover up the homicides.
The suspect was accused of killing two elderly people on the same day, in two neighboring districts of Berlin.
It was at the end of July 2024 that its leader sounded the alarm with the police, according to the weekly Die Zeit. In this Berlin home care service, she found it strange that so many of Johannes M.’s patients died so suddenly and that so many apartments burned down at the time of their deaths.
The doctor was arrested at the beginning of August upon his return from vacation, initially for the murder of four patients. But the list of his alleged victims is growing: it increases to eight in November, ten in February, then fifteen in April.
Alongside the trial, investigations are still underway into dozens of other deaths for which he may be responsible.
He himself mentioned, in a conversation with his wife, around 70 interventions with sedatives in lethal doses, affirming that he had killed “always, for a long time”, added the magistrate.
« Sentiments d’omnipotence »
“The actions of the accused have nothing to do with palliative medicine or euthanasia,” Judge Busch said on Wednesday, emphasizing that most of the patients killed wanted to live, and that some could still hope to live a long time.
Only two people were so seriously ill that they were bedridden the day they died, and all of them wanted to decide the end of their lives themselves, she insisted.
Like this 25-year-old patient suffering from a thyroid tumor, still independent at the time of her death in September 2021.
His mother had not been warned, unlike on previous occasions, of the visit of the doctor, who was accompanied by his three-year-old son during the administration of the fatal mixture.
In the patient’s medical file, he had previously made false statements, reporting serious symptoms and claiming that she had refused hospitalization.
In the case of a 70-year-old man suffering from gallbladder and liver cancer, he told his son, who was present at the home, to give the patient medication for nausea.
“The accused did not kill out of compassion, nor to spare his patients suffering, (…) nor by error in the interpretation of euthanasia”, which is in any case illegal in its active form in Germany, the judge underlined.
He deliberately chose the field of palliative care so that he could kill without being worried and enjoy “feelings of omnipotence,” Sylvia Busch said.
According to several German media, Johannes M. scientifically studied homicides as part of his doctoral thesis in medicine, completed in February 2013 when he was 28 years old.
This case echoes the case of a serial killer caregiver who raged in the early 2000s: Niels Högel, a former nurse suffering from “a severe narcissistic disorder”, according to psychiatrists, was sentenced in June 2019 to life imprisonment for the murder of at least 85 patients in two hospitals in Lower Saxony, in the north-west of Germany.
