REPORTER: Woodstock Police received information
that eight people aged 65 to 96
had been murdered at area nursing homes over a seven-year span.
They're dealing with a serial killer.
(CHILLING MUSIC)
(OMINOUS MUSIC)
(STATIC CRACKLING)
MAN: The thing inside of me, it's like...
The appetite, it's like a wolf that's...
..feeling...the hunger.
(WETTLAUFER SIGHS HEAVILY)
(FOREBODING MUSIC)
Wettlaufer believes she's the chosen one,
that God has chosen her to do important work,
that God has identified who should die next.
I think what that really is, is just good old-fashioned narcissism.
It's making herself more important than she is as a person.
We never think of health care professionals
to be the type of individuals that would consciously
kill the people they're in charge of taking care of.
So, she's got that as a, kind of interesting cover working for her.
So, this is an excerpt from notes that, um, Nurse Wettlaufer wrote.
And she says, 'James was known for inappropriately touching the staff.
That evening, I got the urge to overdose James.
I was angry that he was so inappropriate.'
It comes across as very sterile clinical.
It's as if James is a problem. James needs to die.
(CHILLING MUSIC)
It might be a revenge killing because Wettlaufer talks about
how James was inappropriate with the nursing staff.
She's ignoring the fact of his condition.
If he made a pass at her, that may have been the last straw.
But the step into psychopathy,
is deciding to kill him for that behaviour.
My guess is what she's feeling relief about
is an internal sense of loathing.
It's a sense of self-hate. It's a sense of rejection socially.
To kill Silcox,
allows her to release that sense of conflict.
Rage usually starts early.
She's, probably slowly but surely since childhood,
been an angry person.
And she finally found a place
where she could safely enlist her predatory skills.
(OMINOUS MUSIC)
This is about her second victim and it says,
'I was told by one of the nurses that Maurice had a bad habit
of grabbing the staff's breasts and asses.
One afternoon, I was working, and I felt angry.'
There's anger that is triggered by something related to sex.
It's not specific revenge on this patient,
but he now represents something that she's going to eliminate,
and so, that triggers her psychopathic behaviour.
When Wettlaufer says, 'I felt a lot of guilt', it's not over the murder.
She feels guilt because there's a conflict
between the part of her that went into nursing to help people,
and the part that took someone's life because she was angry at them.
It's also interesting that she uses the term 'ass'.
Ass is a vulgar word. There's a clue there.
She doesn't really seem like
she's socially adept or skilled, uh, with other people.
People reveal themselves through the language they use.
Hydromorphone is an opiate.
The choice to use an opiate and get high,
I think was a, a different direction
of trying to get that same stimulation or thrill-seeking
that she got from killing those two patients.
What often happens on narcotics,
your inhibitions are reduced
to the place where some of those bad thoughts can come back.
The more she does that,
the more likely it is that the rage would re-emerge.
She says, uh, 'Gladys had severe dementia and no longer talked.
She was very stubborn and horribly difficult to give pills to.'
So, her victim is a woman in this case.
We learn something new... Women are eligible to be killed.
(FOREBODING MUSIC)
(CHILLING MUSIC)
After laying off killing for about three years,
the bar seems lower for whom she's willing to kill.
She's choosing the weakest and the most vulnerable,
to act this rage out on.
These people can't fight back. They can't hurt her.
Some of them can't even talk.
She celebrates this woman decking another guy.
You can hear she laughs. She's, she's invigorated by it.
But then, um, this woman that she can identify with,
now becomes a pain in the ass,
because she's demented and giving her a problem.
This is where I think psychopathy becomes even more prominent.
It doesn't matter now whether you're a man or a woman
making sexual or non-sexual comments.
The common denominator is you're irritating.
And if you irritate her, she decides you gotta go.
(OMINOUS MUSIC)
Wettlaufer started to write poetry.
Here is one of those poems.
'She watches some life drain from the notch in his neck vein.
As it soothingly pools, it smothers her pain.
Sweet stiletto, so sharp, craves another cut.'
I really see that as,
murdering people helps her feel better.
And it makes me really wonder if there is
some sadistic piece of her
that enjoys watching them struggle.
On the surface, it makes her look like the super nurse on the unit.
But what we know is that she also knew
that she was essentially giving her, her last meal.
And she had every intention of killing her later that night.
She didn't have to give her a blueberry pie and ice cream.
So she's playing with her. She delights in killing someone.
And that's a very perverse delight.
You might wonder, why bother being kind?
I think her image of herself as a nurse
is also someone who's supposed to be nice.
In her mind, she's like, 'I'm gonna do something nice for her since she has to go.'
'I might as well give her ice cream.'
'So, what do you like to eat? What's your favourite dessert?'
'Pie and ice cream.' She goes, 'I'll go get you some.'
And forgets to add, 'After that, I'm killing you.'
Right, so I think she does oscillate in this thing.
In her mind, I think she can justify and say,
'I'm nice to her', but it doesn't have to do with her.
She's just the next one that has to go.
So, it's this impersonal view of the victim in that sense.
To actually state that she laughed out loud after killing her,
I mean, what kind of person does that?
The person didn't even annoy her.
Why is she frustrated on her job? What's unsatisfying?
Normally, you have a talk with the supervisor, right?
You talk to somebody. You go, 'I don't like my job.'
'Maybe I'll get a new one. I'll do something.'
She doesn't.
She just gets this feeling very primitively in her chest.
And if she has that feeling and she's around a particular individual
it seems like that's how it gets pegged to, Helen, at the time.
She happens to be around her,
gets the feeling and says, 'Oh! You're the one.'
Wettlaufer's showing us what it is to be a psychopath.
She enjoys the high. She enjoys the power.
This isn't about the patients at all at this point.
Wettlaufer has discovered something about herself she didn't know... She enjoys killing.
(SOMBRE MUSIC)
This is an, uh, excerpt from the confession letter
of, uh, Wettlaufer about Mary Zurawinksi.
'Mary bugged me because she was outspoken and resistive to care.
I was feeling very angry in general.
She died the next afternoon.'
She's returned to some of the old play book signals.
If the patient is annoying... the patient's gotta go.
She was fun to work with but she's also saying
that Mary essentially gave her permission to kill her.
The impulse control is very poor at this point.
Just because someone says, 'I want to die'
doesn't mean you have permission to kill them or you should kill them.
But it enables her psychopathy, in the sense that she doesn't even have to be annoyed.
It's about revenge, writ large,
revenge about whatever happened to me in the past.
I'm gonna bite the world back.
She's plotting everybody's murder
while being sweet and taking care of them,
and then ushers them right off to their death.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
(SINISTER MUSIC)
This is what she has to say about Maureen and killing her.
'Maureen had a lot of behaviours.
She would hit other residents or pull their hair.
Then I got the idea that if I could cause her some brain damage,
she wouldn't be such a handful.'
Wettlaufer is changing her motivations for killing.
Now, she's dealing with patients
where she doesn't even feel the urge necessarily to kill them.
She just wants to control the situation.
(CHILLING MUSIC)
It's terrifying to think about a nurse doing that.
Wettlaufer is making the decision
to handle these patients as if they're objects.
You really see an arrogance coming over Wettlaufer.
Now, it's just about making sure she doesn't experience stress.
She's not even saying, 'It's a sign from God, I should kill her.'
She's going, 'I just want to mutilate her brain,
so she stops being such a pain in the ass.'
Which is hostile and aggressive.
We are seeing this progression
from killing men who are sexually aggressive and abusive.
And then it progresses to general irritability.
She then picks on a victim who is defenceless.
This is psychopathy.
subtitles by Deluxe
It's important to note that she turned herself in
because she had an opportunity to work with children.
She says it's because she wanted to stop killing.
But it's not as easy to kill children without people asking questions.
Even, the pretence that this is driven by God
is, is, is off the table.
She's mastered the art of being a nice person
so she covers very skilfully how malignant she is.
She really is an angel of death and she's highly psychopathic.