The story of nurse Lucia de Berk, nicknamed the "Angel of Death"
Miscarriages of justice are not uncommon. For those watching from the outside, it is simply a story of justice, whether it has been done or not. But for the person who has been the victim of incompetence or slander, it is a tragedy, and years spent hoping for acquittal. This is what happened to the Dutch nurse Lucia de Berk, who was wrongly accused of 13 murders.
On the morning of September 4, 2001, a seven-month-old girl named Amber died in a clinic in The Hague. It happened while 39-year-old nurse Lucia de Berk was on duty. The child was in serious condition - the girl had congenital anomalies of the heart, lungs, intestines and brain. Amber lived only thanks to complex medical equipment.
As is customary in such cases, the hospital conducted an investigation to rule out medical error and other factors. During the investigation, it suddenly became clear that this was the 13th sudden death of a patient that had occurred while this nurse was on duty. Journalists quickly found out about this, and articles about the nurse-killer, who was nicknamed the "Angel of Death", immediately appeared in the media.
On December 13, 2001, Lucia de Berk was arrested and found guilty of thirteen premeditated murders. She was shocked by what was happening and categorically denied any involvement in the deaths of her patients. However, the prosecution stood its ground. A few months after her arrest, the trial began, which attracted enormous attention not only in the Netherlands but also beyond its borders.
The fact that all 13 unexplained deaths occurred during the two years she worked as a nurse at the clinic was evidence against Lucia de Berk. Before her arrival, the deaths had clear causes and did not arouse suspicion.
The main version of the child's death was poisoning. Experts conducted a blood test on Amber. The material for analysis was squeezed out of the napkins that were used during the autopsy. The investigators' guess was confirmed - a high concentration of a drug called digoxin was found in the blood.
The drug had been used to treat the child, but was stopped two months before Amber's death. Doctors were certain that the drug could not have survived in the child's blood. Lucia de Berk was found with a key to a medicine cabinet that contained, among other things, ampoules of digoxin.
There was another suspicious moment. Electronics recorded that before the child's death, the device monitoring her body parameters was turned off for 20 minutes. That's how long it takes for the medicine to start working. On November 27, 1997, a strange entry was made in Lucia's diary, found during a search: "Today my obsession took over."
At the time, de Berk was working at another hospital. On November 27, 1997, an elderly patient, Frau Zonneveld, who was being treated for cancer, died there. It was de Berk's shift as a nurse. The deceased patient's doctor was puzzled by her sudden death, since the treatment had been successful and the patient was expected to live for a long time.
During interrogation, Lucia was asked about the notes, and she explained that she had been telling a friend's fortune that day using tarot cards. It was her hobby, which her colleagues at work knew nothing about - such hobbies are not welcomed among doctors. Lucia admitted that she had tried to quit fortune-telling, but she kept breaking down because of her friends' requests to tell her fortune.
The nurse also tried to explain why little Amber's machine was turned off. According to her, it was necessary for the doctor to examine the child. However, her version was not confirmed. The prosecutor believed that de Berk was prevaricating, and during the trial she openly called her a liar. She had reasons for this.
The police carefully studied Lucia's biography and found many interesting things. It turned out that she did not have a secondary education. She did not finish school, and forged a certificate in order to enroll in nursing courses. In addition, it became known that before going into medicine, de Berk earned her living as a prostitute.
A renowned expert in law and psychology, Henk Elffers, was called to the court. He studied the death statistics and calculated that the probability that Lucia had accidentally ended up where patients were dying was only 1 in 342 million. The specialist insisted that this could not be a simple coincidence.
Everything was against Lucia, but she insisted on her innocence. Several episodes were removed from the case, but the nurse was still accused of 4 murders and 3 attempted murders. In her final statement, the woman said:
On March 24, 2003, the court handed down a sentence of life imprisonment. Lucia immediately filed an appeal. In 2004, the Hague Court of Appeal reviewed the case. A prisoner was supposed to testify as a witness, who allegedly heard De Berk say in the exercise yard: "I saved these 13 people from suffering." But in the courtroom, the man refused to confirm his words.
Despite this, the appeal was rejected, and Lucia continued to serve her sentence. Moreover, she was also sentenced to six months of forced psychiatric treatment. In 2006, she appealed again and lost again. After that, she had a stroke and almost died. The woman was partially paralyzed, and her recovery took a long time.
In 2006, Metta de Noo, a relative of one of the directors of the institution, decided to conduct her own investigation into the deaths at the clinic. She found that the investigation was carried out negligently, and many facts did not correspond to reality. She managed to find out that the condition of some patients whose deaths were linked to Lucia worsened over several days. This meant that their deaths were neither unusual nor unexpected.
But no one took into account the materials collected by de Noo. She had to turn to her cousin, philosophy professor Ton Darcsen. He studied issues of judicial errors and was considered an authoritative expert. The scientist carefully studied the de Berk case and admitted that it contained many errors and much evidence was far-fetched.
But the main thing was that patients were dying before Lucia arrived at the clinic. There was an error in the death statistics, because the year de Berk was hired, the hospital changed its name, and all its events began to be written "from scratch." That is why it turned out that the deaths began in the year the new nurse arrived.
Darcsen devoted an entire book to the de Berk case, which attracted widespread public attention. Thanks to this, another specialist, Richard Gill, a professor of statistics at Leiden University, joined Lucia's defense. He was extremely outraged by the calculations of Henk Elffers, who had nothing to do with statistical science. Thanks to the efforts of Darcsen and Gill, it was possible to move the sluggish mechanism of justice from a dead stop.
In April 2008, the case was retried and De Berk was released pending trial. A new investigation was launched, during which examinations established that Amber had died of natural causes. The nurse had indeed turned off the machine out of necessity. As for the drug in the blood, its appearance was due to the death of heart tissue.
On December 9, 2009, the court declared the death of Amber and another child to be natural. The judges also acknowledged that Lucia was directly guilty only in these two cases. In March 2010, all charges were dropped against the nurse, and the blame was shifted to the management of the clinic, which made mistakes in treatment. On April 14, 2010, Lucy de Berk was finally acquitted.
After justice was served, the woman sued the accusers and demanded compensation. Her claim was satisfied, but the amount of the payment was not disclosed. The sensational case of the "Angel of Death" from The Hague was the subject of a film in 2014 called "Lucia de Berk".
13 hospital deaths were linked to one man, but years later he was found innocent. What can we conclude from this story?