French care worker charged over pensioner poisonings
Chambéry (France) (AFP) - A French care worker was charged Thursday with the fatal poisoning of six pensioners in a case that has chilling echoes of British medical serial killer Harold Shipman.
The 30-year-old woman has also been charged with attempting to poison three other elderly residents of the Cesalet retirement home on the outskirts of Chambery in the French Alps.
Chambery's deputy prosecutor, Dietlind Baudoin, said all nine residents had been given a "cocktail of psychotropic drugs" without any medical justification and with the result that six of them died.
Baudoin said the victims, all in their 80s, had been suffering from "frailties linked to their age" but were otherwise in good health, and not nearing the end of their lives.
The suspect, who had only worked in the home since the summer of 2012, has told police that she wanted to "relieve the suffering" of the victims and did not intend to kill them, a police source told AFP. All the deaths occurred since the beginning of October.
The care worker was arrested on Tuesday, initially only in connection with the death of an 84-year-old woman who fell into a coma on November 27 for no apparent reason and died two days later in the Chambery Hospital Centre.
The centre said the retirement home's doctor had reported a resident falling into a coma for which the cause could not be established following her transfer to the emergency unit.
"The following day, toxicology analyses revealed the presence of psychotropic drugs at levels which indicated they had been administered in a higher dose than normal for therapeutic purposes," it said in a statement.
"None of the pharmaceutical products identified had been prescribed for this resident."
Suspect had recently lost mother
The charged woman's alleged method of killing the patients resembled the modus operandi of Shipman, who was convicted in 2000 of murdering 15 of his patients and is believed to have killed more than 200 others whilst working as a general practitioner near Manchester in the north of England.
Most of Shipman's victims were killed as a result of lethal injections of the powerful painkiller diamorphine, although not all of them were elderly and frail: his youngest was only 41. Sentenced to life in prison, Shipman committed suicide by hanging in prison in 2004.
According to Baudoin, the woman charged on Thursday had recently lost her own mother after spending a lot of time nursing her through the final stages of her life.
"She kept talking about 'relieving', she wanted to give them relief and we don't exactly know what she meant by this term," Baudoin added.
"She was quite serene. She speaks in a coherent way, calm and composed.
"But she was also very isolated from a social point of view.
"Since the death of her mother, a fragility had been detected."
France has had a number of cases in recent years of medical staff apparently taking it upon themselves to euthanise elderly, infirm patients.
Nicolas Bonnemaison, an emergency room doctor, was in October sent for trial on charges of poisoning seven patients who were close to death, acts he has defended on the grounds that they were suffering terribly.
Ten years ago Christine Malevre, a nurse in a hospital near Paris, was given 12 years in prison for having prematurely ended the lives of six people.
President Francois Holland has promised to draft legislation which will give doctors the right to assist the ending of the lives of patients deemed to be suffering unbearable pain with no prospect of recovery.
The issue is currently subject to a process of public consultation after an ethics body recommended the landmark reform in July.
