Nurse Killed Patients Because It Made Her 'Feel Good'

[bloodrayne]

"Killing Patients Made Me Feel Good", Says Nurse

A nurse has admitted killing patients at a Milan hospital to make herself feel powerful and important, keeping a diary noting the details of their deaths.

Sonia Caleffi, 34, was arrested on Thursday in connection with the deaths of five patients in one month, but police said the list of her alleged victims was "almost certainly much longer".

Prosecutors said Ms Caleffi, from the Lake Como area of northern Italy, had admitted using a syringe to inject air into the veins of three women and two men at the 900-bed hospital at Lecco, north of Milan, causing their deaths by embolism and respiratory failure. She then recorded the details in a notebook she kept at home. "I felt so sorry for those people," she wrote.

Anna Maria Delitala, the prosecutor at Lecco, said four more deaths at the hospital were suspicious.

Staff said that in each case Ms Caleffi had cleared the hospital room of family members and other nursing staff, remaining alone with her victim. She would then leave the room "in an extremely agitated state" several minutes later, calling for assistance to help the dying patient.

Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera said the nurse had a history of depression.

She married at 23, divorced at 27, and had worked at a series of hospitals and nursing homes.

She was undergoing psychoanalysis when hired at Lecco in September, police said, but hospital authorities had noticed nothing strange about her behaviour.

Police said Ms Caleffi had admitted she had killed patients in her care.

Her defence lawyer, Claudio Rea, said he had asked for a psychiatric assessment of his client. He claimed she injected the air not to kill but to make her patients ill so she could heroically save them. Instead, they had all died. Suspicions first arose last month when relatives of a 99-year-old woman admitted for "routine treatment" complained after the woman died suddenly.

Hospital director Pietro Caltagirone said: "Death rates on the ward had inexplicably doubled in an isolated series of cases, so we called the police."

The incriminating notebook was found during a search of Ms Caleffi's home.

Police also discovered at the nurse's house "a small library" of books dealing with euthanasia.

Health Minister Girolamo Sirchia said the Lecco deaths showed there might be a case for periodic psychological tests for employees in high-stress medical occupations, as was already the case with airline pilots.

But Gennaro Rocco, head of the Rome Nurses Institute, said Italian nurses already had to provide a medical certificate of their "physical and psychological suitability" before they began training.

Ms Caleffi's father Nicola, 59, a postal worker, said his daughter had wanted to be a nurse since she was 12.

"I don't believe it," he said when told she had confessed. "I don't understand who this person is they call the 'killer nurse' - it's not my daughter."

[Gren the cake]

inujecting air into the veins? ugh. that sounds disgusting

anyway. crazy lady. sucks :(. one o the places where u really trust people, its thier job that and its not like ud understand what theyre doing anyway so its not like u can be scrutinizing their every move

[horror_master]

Reminds me of a guy in the states who did the same thing, but he wanted to see them die.