For years before the police were told, a group of nurses at the Orkdal nursing and old people's home in Sør-Trøndelag suspected their own manager of killing patients. He was Arnfinn Nesset, a trained nurse, a churchgoing father of two and a respected man in the town, who had been hired in 1977 to run the home. In the summer and autumn of 1981 a series of suspicious deaths there finally came to light, and the investigation that followed became, in the words of a journalist who covered it, perhaps the largest murder case in Norway's peacetime history, measured by the number of murder charges.
Nesset was born on October 25, 1936, in Trøndelag, outside marriage, and was raised by his mother, living with her in her childhood home; his father never had contact with him. The weapon in the case was Curacit, a drug that paralyzes the muscles, including those used for breathing. Over some 967 hours of police interviews he confessed to killing patients with injections of it; the figure is given as twenty-seven in some accounts and thirty in others, and at one point he was investigated for around sixty deaths. He was charged with twenty-five murders. Shortly before the trial he withdrew every confession, and in court he denied everything.
On March 18, 1983, the Frostating court of appeal convicted him of twenty-two murders, as well as attempted murder, forgery and embezzlement, and sentenced him to twenty-one years, the heaviest sentence Norwegian law allowed, and ten years of preventive detention. The confessions were the decisive evidence. The lead prosecutor, Olaf Jakhelln, later said he had never had reason to doubt the verdict and that it was common to hear that Nesset had been convicted without proof.
He served twelve years in prison with a spotless record, and in 1993 he was moved to supervised release; he was released in 2004. He changed his name and settled elsewhere in Norway. He never stopped denying the killings, and in 2024, at eighty-seven and living in a care center in eastern Norway, he sought to have the case reopened. A book by the author Simen Sætre published in 2025 cast doubt on his guilt, and a journalist who covered the trial said several pieces of the evidence were weak. The conviction has not been overturned. Nesset died peacefully in a nursing home on December 2, 2025, aged eighty-nine.