We are supposed to be able to trust our doctor, who is supposed to strive to save as many lives as possible. While the vast majority of doctors are very helpful, caring, and attentive people, some dark people are drawn to the medical profession. Indeed, working in a hospital is a preferred career choice for serial killers, who can be in contact with drugs, poisons and other undetectable ways of murdering patients, already in poor health and who can die without further suspicion against them. A perfect cover for their murderous impulses!
How did they use their profession to kill? Discover the portraits of these “angels of death”!
Marcel Petiot
©Wikimedia Commons
Nicknamed “Doctor Satan”, Doctor Petiot was a doctor who practiced in the 1920s, in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. Taking care of the most needy, Petiot very quickly became a renowned doctor, eventually becoming the mayor of this small town in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté.
During the Occupation, he fitted out a mansion in Paris. He brings in persecuted Jews, but also resistance fighters, whom he makes believe that he will help them to go to Argentina. But when the families arrive at his place to hide, Doctor Petiot kills them with gas and throws their bodies in quicklime. Not seen not taken, Petiot perpetrates his assassinations for a few months, recovering the jewels and the money of the deceased, which no one is looking for since they are supposed to have gone very far or deported.
A few suspicions are beginning to arise. Petiot was then arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, but confessed nothing of his practices. Worse: he pretends to be a resistant, a few months before the liberation.
Except that in 1944, the pestilential smell that emanates from the chimneys begins to really alert the neighbors. The police then arrive at the doctor’s and discover the corpses of two people, about to be burned. The doctor is immediately arrested and sentenced to execution for the murder of 24 patients, for lack of testimony or substantial evidence. However, the authorities are convinced of it: he would have committed in reality about sixty.
John Bodkin Adams
©Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy / Abaca
Irish doctor practicing in Sussex, John Bodkin Adams is said to have drugged up to 160 patients during the post-war period, between 1946 and 1956. How did he get caught? The police, who saw his patients die one after another, found it strange that they bequeathed large sums of money to John in their wills just before they died.
Upon his arrest in 1957, Adams was acquitted of all charges against him. Although the trial did not find Adams guilty, all of England knows this story, considering John Bodkin Adams to be one of the serial killers the most famous in the UK.
Mechthild Bach
©Dpa picture alliance archive / Alamy / Abaca
Mechthild Bach was an oncologist from Hanover, who killed her patients by injecting them with high-dose morphine and diazepam. According to suspicions, she would have murdered 76 patients, even if the oncologist was only tried for 13 murders. The trial could not be held to the end because Mechthild Bach committed suicide in 2011, before the announcement of the final verdict. Finding her accusations totally unfounded, she claimed to have wanted to help and relieve her patients when she administered morphine to them. A trial which notably revived the debates around assisted suicide in Germany.
Jane Toppan
©FLHC NV5 / Alamy / Abaca
In 1901, American nurse Jane Toppan confessed to poisoning 31 of her patients. The reason ? After killing them by overdose, she would lie next to them, kiss their faces, and sometimes sleep with their corpses. In fact, when she fell in love with patients, she administered lethal doses of morphine or atropine to them so that they remained with her as long as possible, in a state of semi-consciousness, until death. dead.
Found not guilty by reason of insanity, she was committed to a mental institution in Taunton, until her death on October 29, 1938.
Joseph Michael Swango
©Youtube screenshot
A doctor in the United States and in Africa, Joseph Michael Swango is said to have murdered more than 60 patients between 1981 and 1997. In order not to be discovered by the medical profession, Joseph reserved the same fate as his patients for some of his colleagues: he slipped from arsenic in the food or in the drinks of the people he wanted to murder, often very close to discovering the truth. During his trial, Joseph Michael Swango admitted to the murders of 4 people. Today, he is sentenced to life in prison and is serving his sentence in Colorado.
Harold Frederick Shipman
©Ray Bradbury / Alamy / Abaca
British doctor from Leeds, Harold Frederick Shipman is said to have killed nearly 250 patients, even though he was convicted of 15 murders. His victims were mostly middle-aged women who were murdered by injecting lethal amounts of diamorphine. In 2000, he received the maximum sentence and committed suicide in his cell at Wakefield prison in 2004, without ever confessing or explaining his crimes.
Joseph Mengele
©Keystone Press / Alamy / Abaca
During World War II, Joseph Mengele was a doctor at Auschwitz concentration camp. In order to conduct scientific experiments on the human body, this doctor used the bodies of prisoners, dead or alive. Viruses, ablations, dialyses, mutilations… The horrors committed by Joseph Mengele are numerous and will never be condemned. Sure enough, at the end of the war, Joseph Mengele fled to Brazil, never to be brought to justice for these inhuman experiences.
LR