Nurse wrongly convicted of killing 7 patients dies at age 63
Lucia de Berk, the former nurse wrongfully convicted of multiple murders in The Hague, has died at 63 following a short illness, her former lawyer Stijn Franken confirmed, according to AD.
De Berk, widely known as Lucia de B., was sentenced in 2004 to life in prison for the alleged murder of several patients at the hospital where she worked, along with several attempted murders. She spent six years behind bars before being fully acquitted in 2010. Her case became an example of a judicial error for which the Dutch authorities later apologized.
The suspicions against De Berk began in 2001 after the death of a six-month-old baby. Prosecutors alleged she had killed the infant and other patients using the heart medication digoxin, claims she consistently denied. The legal battle extended to the Supreme Court.
At the time, the hospital maintained that De Berk had “assisted” in the deaths, citing the unusually high number of patient deaths during her shifts as evidence.
Colleagues described her as an outsider, and the hospital director publicly singled her out at a press conference even before the criminal investigation began. A statistician calculated that the probability of witnessing so many deaths and resuscitations by chance was one in 342 million, further fueling suspicion. Despite the lack of concrete evidence, she earned the nickname “Angel of Death.”
In 2004, De Berk was convicted by the court for seven murders and three attempted murders, a sentence upheld by both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court in 2006.
Doubts about the conviction emerged through the efforts of nursing physician Metta de Noo and her brother, science philosopher Ton Derksen, who identified multiple errors in the prosecution’s case.
Their persistence led to a reopening of the case and, on April 14, 2010, De Berk was fully acquitted. Authorities concluded that all the deaths were due to natural causes. “There is nothing to blame De Berk for,” the final ruling stated.
