Late in September 2016, a registered nurse named Elizabeth Wettlaufer sat down and wrote out, in a numbered list running across four pages, the patients she had injected with insulin in the hope of killing them. Nobody had suspected her. The deaths had been recorded as natural, most of them at Caressant Care, the long-term care home in Woodstock, Ontario, where she had worked from 2007. The police learned of them from her.
Eight of the people on these pages died: James Silcox, Maurice Granat, Gladys Millard, Helen Matheson, Mary Zurawinski, Helen Young, Maureen Pickering and Arpad Horvath. Others she names were given insulin and lived. In 2017 she pleaded guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder, four of attempted murder and two of aggravated assault, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The confession went into the court record as Appendix A to the agreed statement of facts on which she pleaded.
Ontario then set up a public inquiry under Commissioner Eileen E. Gillese to find out how a nurse could kill inside the province's long-term care system for close to a decade without anyone noticing. Its report, published in 2019, printed the agreed statement of facts in full, and the four handwritten pages with it. That printed copy is the only one the public can see, and the text below was read from it.
Nobody questions her on these pages, so this is not an interview and should not be read as one. It is a statement she chose to write, in her own hand, and signed at the foot of the last page. The structure is hers too: a number for each patient, the home, the dose and whether the person died, set down in roughly the order the killings happened, with the attempts on people who survived worked in among them. The page headings are ours, added so a reader can tell where each of the four sheets begins.
The pages are a public record of the Ontario inquiry and appear in its report, Volume 2, the volume given over to her crimes, as part of Appendix C, printed pages 815 to 819. The report itself is published by the Government of Ontario under Crown copyright. The words are Wettlaufer's own, and we reproduce them as a primary record with this note attached, in the same way we treat a court transcript. Anyone who wants to see the handwriting should go to that volume, where the sheets are printed as images.
There is no typed text of these pages anywhere in the report. Each sheet exists only as a small picture, roughly 60 dots to the inch, and a scanner reads nothing useful at that size, so every word below was read by eye from enlarged copies of those pictures. A word we could not make out with confidence carries a [?]. Her spelling and grammar are left exactly as she wrote them, so "inapropriatly" and "eatting" stand. Passages the inquiry blacked out before publication are marked where they fall, and the inquiry's page numbering and ruled margins have been left off.
This is her account, written from memory in September 2016, and the doses, dates and places are her recollection of them. Police investigated what she described, and the agreed statement of facts that accompanied her plea is the version the court accepted. We have not compared her figures against that statement line by line, and where a date or a dose here matters, the statement and the inquiry's findings are the records to check.
[Top right margin, written sideways and overlapping the page number:] Written Sept 24[?] — Elizabeth Wettlaufer [signature]
Sept 2007 Not a diabetic, had dementia Caressant Care
(1) James Silcox - I was working a double shift. 3pm - 7am. James was known for inapropriatly touching the staff. [REDACTED BY THE INQUIRY] [ENTIRE LINE REDACTED BY THE INQUIRY] [REDACTED BY THE INQUIRY] . James was not diabetic.
That evening I got the urge to overdose James. I was angry that he was so inapropriate. At approximately 7.30pm I decided to overdose him with insulin, hoping he would die. I felt it was his time to go becouse of the way he acted. I remember feeling angry at him.
I went into the med room & used a spare insulin needle to prepare a dose of 50 units of short acting insulin. I gave it to him at app. 10:30 pm.
Throughout the night, after I overdosed him, James called out "I'm sorry" and "I love you". At app. 3:00 a.m, the PSW's found James vital signs absent. I called the attending physician and the James family to inform them of James' death. The physician ruled his cause of death to be a post surgery embolism.
Sept or Oct 2007 Caressant Care 2) Maurice Granat: Not a diabetic, cancer patient 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. I gave Maurice app. 40 units of short acting
Maurice Granat (cont'd) Pg 2 of 4 insulin at around 8pm. By the next morning he was in a coma. He died some time that afternoon.
October 2011 Helen Matheson Not a diabetic. Caressant Care, Dementia Helen was very quiet & reserved. One afternoon I gave her app. 50 units of [struck: overdose of insulin] short acting insulin. I am not sure why I chose her. I was feeling angry an frustrated about my job. [struck: shift] After the overdose she stopped talking and eatting. The Doctor declared her to be palliative. She died 2 days later.
[struck: Oc] November 2011
Mary Zurawinski[?] - Not a diabetic, Caressant Care, dementia
Mary was spunky, thin and outspoken. One afternoon, around 4pm, I gave her 50 units of short acting insulin and 30 units of long acting insulin. She bugged me becouse she was outspoken & resistive to care. I was feeling very angry in general. She died the next afternoon.
November 2011
Gladys Millard - type 2 diabetic, Caressant Care, dementia Gladys had severe dementia & no longer talked. She was very stubborn & horribly difficult to give pills to. I was working [struck, illegible] 11pm - 7am. At around 5am I gave her 40 units of long acting insulin and 60 units of short acting insulin. At app. 7am she became unresponsive and diaphoretic. She died that evening.
Elizabeth Wettlaufer [signature]
October 2013 Pg 3 of 4 Helen Young - Caressant Care - type 2 diabetic. - dementia Helen was feisty and outspoken. She was constantly saying "help me nurse". She frequently yelled out "I want to die". One afternoon I felt like something snapped inside me. She kept yelling out she wanted to die. I thought angrily "fine I'll help you die". I gave her 60 units [struck, illegible] of short acting insulin just before supper. After supper I gave her 60 units of long acting insulin. At app 8pm the PSWs called me to her room. Helen was having a seizure. She was not epileptic. I took all her vital signs and pretended to take her blood sugar. She died 2 days later.
March 2014 [struck, illegible] March 2014
Maureen Pickering - Caressant Care - dementia, not diabetic Maureen had a lot of behaviours. She would hit other residents or pull their hair. She was on one to one care. We didn't always have the needed staff for this. Sometimes I had to be with her 1on1 as well as give pills to 32 people, do paperwork and do treatments. One afternoon shift we did not have her 1 to 1 staff. I was angry, frustrated and irritated. She kept yelling out random things. [interlineated line, illegible at this resolution] I gave her a Haldol shot to calm her down. Then I got the idea that if I could couse her some brain damage she wouldn't be such a handful.
At app. 8pm I gave her 60 units of long acting insulin. That night she [struck, illegible] had a stroke.
Elizabeth Wettlaufer [signature]
March 2014 [struck, illegible] March 2014 Pg 4 of 4 Maureen Pickering (cont'd) She was sent to hospital where she became comatose. She died app. 5 days later.
August 2014 Meadow Park Nursing Home Arpad "Art" Horvath Dementia, Not diabetic Art was physically abusive to the staff. He would pinch & hit. One evening I decided enough was enough. I felt angry, frustrated, vindictive, & energized. I gave Art 40u of short acting insulin & 60u of long acting insulin at app 8pm. During the night he had a stroke and died 4-5 days later.
People who didn't die
Clotilde Adriano - dementia - diabetic - Caressant Care September 2007
Albina Demedeiros - diabetic - Caressant Care October 2007
Wayne - dementia diabetic - Caressant Care October 200[?]
Mike - Huntington's disease 2009
Sandra Towler Gave her 40u long acting insulin, 60u short acting. Telfer Place Winter 2016 Survived. Paris
Beverly B[?] (?) diabetic August 2016 Saint Elizabeth, Ingersoll, homecare Gave 180u long acting insulin via Picc line Survived
Elizabeth Wettlaufer [signature]