In March 1983 a jury in Trondheim convicted Arnfinn Nesset, the former manager of a nursing and old people's home in Orkdal, of murdering 22 of its elderly residents and of trying to kill another. He was 46, a trained nurse with a quiet manner, and before the case came to light he had been a respected family man in the district. The prosecution said he had killed them with Curacit, a muscle relaxant used in surgery that he had ordered for the home in large amounts. United Press International called it Scandinavia's biggest peacetime mass murder case.
The verdict rested mainly on his own words. During the investigation he confessed to killing many more patients than he was convicted of killing, over hundreds of hours of police questioning. Shortly before the trial he withdrew every confession, and in court he denied that he had killed anyone. He received 21 years in prison, the heaviest sentence Norwegian law then allowed, and 10 years of preventive detention. He was moved to supervised release in 1993, freed in 2004, and lived the rest of his life under another name.
He never stopped saying he was innocent. In 2024, at 87, he gave his first press interview and said he wanted the case examined again. In autumn 2025 the journalist Simen Sætre published a book arguing that several of the confessions were probably false. Nesset died in a nursing home in December 2025, aged 89, before any court looked at the case again.
Nesset trained as a nurse and worked for several years at hospitals in Trondheim and Orkanger, according to a 2002 retrospective in Adresseavisen, the Trondheim daily. At the central hospital in Trondheim, the paper wrote, he came to know Curacit well, because the drug was used during operations.
NRK described him as small and slightly built and deeply religious. In 2024 he told NRK that his strong belief in God had held him up through the years after his conviction, and that he had always taken everything to God.
In 1976 he was hired as manager of Orkdal sjuke- og aldersheim, a combined nursing home and old people's home in Orkdal, a community in Sør-Trøndelag near Trondheim.
In 1977 Nesset obtained Curacit for the home. A drug of that kind, Adresseavisen wrote in 2002, had no place in a nursing home. The same year, staff began to talk among themselves about a run of sudden and unexpected deaths and whether their manager might be behind them. The paper said there were few clear signs, and that the suspicion hung over the home for about three more years. Staff saw him carrying a laboratory basket in and out of patients' rooms. No one in authority looked into the rumors.
UPI later reported that the deaths for which he was tried took place between May 1977 and November 1980, and that the victims ranged in age from 67 to 95. Their names did not appear in the news reports of the verdict. They were residents of the home in the last years of their lives, in the care of the staff he led.
In late autumn 1980 it emerged that Nesset had altered a pharmacy prescription and had ordered Curacit in large quantities several times. When he was confronted, according to Adresseavisen, he said the drug was meant for putting down a dog, an explanation the paper said was hard to believe. The county physician and the police were told. UPI's account of the verdict credited a local journalist with finding that large quantities of Curacit had been sent to the home, the discovery it said set off the investigation. At trial, UPI reported, Nesset said the Curacit had been used as rat poison.
Nesset was arrested in January 1981, UPI reported. The questioning that followed was long and hard. NRK put the total at nearly 1,000 hours of questioning, often 10 to 12 hours at a time; an NTB report on his death gave the figure as 967 hours.
During those months he confessed to the police, and in the interrogation court, to killing patients at the home with Curacit. The number of killings he admitted is given differently in different reports. NRK has given it as 27. UPI in 1983 and NTB in 2025 gave it as 30. The title of Simen Sætre's 2025 book, as reported by NTB, Altinget and Journalisten, refers to 31 confessions. UPI wrote that he had described giving the poison by injection and by mixing it into food.
The police considered opening graves in Orkdal to test the dead for Curacit, NRK reported, but did not, because he had confessed. UPI, writing at the time of the verdict, said that all the bodies had been cremated before the trial, so no tests were possible.
Nesset's defense lawyer from the start was Morten Gunnes. In 2024 Gunnes told the lawyers' magazine Advokatbladet that the police never called him in and that he was never present at any interrogation. He said he had letters from Nesset saying that Nesset had repeatedly asked the police to contact him, or to let him telephone, and that it never happened. Gunnes told NRK that he first saw the documents at custody hearings, and that Nesset, in their prison meetings, never told him he had confessed to killing anyone. He described his client as easily led and very loyal to authority. Alf Nordhus, who joined the defense later, was also not present during the interrogations, Gunnes said.
The trial began at Frostating lagmannsrett, the court of appeal for the region, sitting in Trondheim, on October 18, 1982, according to a photo caption in Advokatbladet. Gunnes and Alf Nordhus, whom NTB later called a legendary defense lawyer, defended him. Olaf Jakhelln was the public prosecutor.
The trial lasted five months. The court heard 128 witnesses, among them Nesset himself, his family and friends, his colleagues, the investigators and psychiatrists, Adresseavisen reported. Four psychiatrists examined him and found him sane, according to UPI.
There was no technical evidence. NRK reported that the prosecution case rested on what witnesses had seen and experienced and on the record of the police interrogations. UPI listed the three pillars of the case as his confession, the existence of the poison, and the testimony of witnesses.
Nesset sat almost motionless through the hearings, half turned away from the public, pale and hunched, writing in a notebook, the Adresseavisen reporter Finn Åldstedt wrote. He wore a gray suit he had sewn himself in prison at Tunga. Åldstedt wrote that his few displays of emotion were mostly self-pity.
UPI reported that Nesset retracted his confessions at the start of the trial; NRK and Advokatbladet put the retraction shortly before it. He told the court he had confessed only to get away from hard police questioning, UPI reported. He pleaded not guilty to every count.
Jakhelln asked the jury to convict. UPI quoted him calling Nesset a "bestial killer" with aggressive instincts that had to come out somehow, and saying that Nesset had bought the poison and arranged the deaths so they looked tidy on the surface, with every chance to act at the home.
The jury of six women and four men deliberated for three days. On a Friday in March 1983, UPI reported from Trondheim on March 11, it found Nesset guilty in the deaths of 22 patients and found that he had stolen about $1,800 from patients. Adresseavisen reported that he was convicted of 22 murders and one attempted murder, and acquitted of two further murders.
He was sentenced to 21 years in prison, the maximum under Norwegian law, and 10 years of preventive detention, known in Norway as sikring. Norway had no death penalty. NRK reported that the court found no remorse and no mitigating circumstances. The question of motive was not settled. NRK reported that the court weighed mercy as a possible motive, and that the presiding judge said Nesset had wanted to help the patients "over the last hill"; UPI wrote that no clear motive emerged, and Adresseavisen wrote in 2002 that the trial did not establish one. "After 128 witnesses," Åldstedt wrote, "Arnfinn Nesset was as incomprehensible as the killings he was convicted of."
No appeal against the verdict is on record.
Nesset served his sentence at Ila landsfengsel og sikringsanstalt, where he was prisoner number 284, NRK reported. He called his cell a "lugar", the word for a ship's cabin, rather than a cell. It measured about 10 square meters, and he kept an embroidered tablecloth, flowers and a guitar in it.
On May 4, 1984, the NRK journalist Ingebjørg Sæbu interviewed him. His lawyer had set conditions: no questions about the charges or the killings. Sæbu later recalled that shaking his hand felt like holding a bunch of parsley, and she described a stooped man in a homemade cardigan. In the interview Nesset said his confession to the police had been wrong. He said he had been so worn down mentally that he confessed just to get out of the situation. Of the patients he said, "They loved me. And I loved them." Asked whether death had been a relief for some of them, he said the staff had agreed among themselves that it would have been better if certain patients had been allowed to go.
The interview was not broadcast. Several NRK editors listened to it, and the editor Gunnar Gran decided against airing it because the lawyer kept interrupting. The tape was kept, and it surfaced for a TV 2 documentary about the case. Sæbu said she understood the decision, given that he had been convicted of killing 22 people, had earlier confessed to more, and had been questioned for nearly a thousand hours.
The VG journalist Olav Steimler also interviewed Nesset, after about a year of weekly calls to his lawyer and to Ila prison. He was given one hour. Steimler recalled a mild, polite man who made the coffee himself and served homemade buns, and said he had no sense of sitting across from a mass murderer.
Before, during and after the trial Nesset kept diaries. He told NRK in 2024 that he had burned them, along with old school exam papers and other private papers, so that his memories would be erased.
After 12 years, with a spotless record in custody, Nesset was released in 1993 to fri sikring, a supervised form of release, NTB reported. He settled in another part of Norway. Advokatbladet reported that he spent several years at Ila before moving to open custody and was released in 2004. He changed his name and lived at an address kept secret, and by 2024 he had served his sentence in full.
In 2024 Nesset spoke to the press for the first time, in a long interview for an NRK podcast series about the case. He was 87 and living in a care home in eastern Norway. He said he was innocent and wanted the case reopened so that it could be fully cleared up.
He described the interrogations as many, long and harsh. He said he had been alone for most of them, with a lawyer present only a couple of times. He said he had been worn down until he confessed, and that a person who sat through such questioning day after day might do things just to get out, and might even come to believe he had done them. He said the police had threatened to exhume the dead in Orkdal before the trial to test them for Curacit, and that he had found the idea so terrible that he decided it was better to take the blame himself. "I remember well that I confessed," he said. The police and prosecutors denied pressuring him, NRK reported, and said he had often offered details on his own initiative.
He rejected the idea that the deaths were mercy killings and said he had no motive at all; others, he said, had put forward those motives. Asked how he had lived with the conviction, he said he had no choice but to live with it, or he would have had to end his life.
Nesset pointed to the case of Birgitte Tengs, killed in 1995, whose cousin was convicted, later acquitted, and then cleared in 2023 of a civil damages ruling. The interrogation methods in that case were heavily criticized and led to major changes in Norwegian police interviewing. Gunnes, his old lawyer, told NRK and Advokatbladet that the methods used on Nesset were the same, and that Nesset had been treated more harshly. He said the case should be looked at again. He said he would not take part himself, because he was too old and about to turn 80, and he doubted any lawyer would take on the case, given the cost and the lack of payment at the start. No formal request to reopen the case was ever filed, so far as is known.
Jakhelln, the prosecutor at the trial, told NRK that he had never been in doubt about Nesset's guilt during the trial. He told NRK and Advokatbladet that there was no basis for reopening the case and that the verdict should stand.
In autumn 2025 Simen Sætre, a journalist and author, published Den usannsynlige seriemorderen: Arnfinn Nesset og hans 31 tilståelser (roughly, The Improbable Serial Killer: Arnfinn Nesset and His 31 Confessions). Sætre told the trade magazine Journalisten that he started the project assuming Nesset was guilty, and that he spent five years going through all the investigation documents and found several false confessions. In an NRK interview he said the case should be reopened and could be the largest miscarriage of justice in Norwegian history, Journalisten reported.
The book re-examines whether the evidence supported each of the convictions and criticizes the investigation, the trial and the press, NTB reported. Sætre argues that several of the confessions were probably false and that the doubt was too great for a conviction. In a longer essay for the weekly Morgenbladet, as Journalisten summarized it, he criticized Norwegian newspapers for publishing grave allegations about Nesset without evidence, corrections or apologies, and for treating him as convicted long before the trial. Adresseavisen and NTB recalled that Alf Nordhus had made a similar charge in a book for his 70th birthday in 1989. Public opinion against Nesset was created, Nordhus wrote; the village had found its mass murderer.
In August 2026 Juristforbundet, the Norwegian Association of Jurists, announced that Sætre would receive its Rettssikkerhetsprisen, a rule of law prize, for his work on the case. The prize jury praised his source criticism and his willingness to ask uncomfortable questions of both the justice system and his own profession. "A state under the rule of law is never better than its ability to tolerate critical questions," said the association's president, Sverre Bromander. NTB reported at the time that it was uncertain whether the case would be brought back to court.
On December 3, 2025, the lawyer Per-Arne Skog told VG that Nesset had died that Tuesday peacefully in a nursing home. He was 89. NTB noted that he had said the case deserved a fresh look, 41 years after the verdict, and that he died before that happened.
The case left a long mark on the community. When the TV 2 documentary about Nesset was released, the mayor of Orkdal, Oddbjørn Bang, told NRK that many people had been affected, among them relatives of the dead and staff at the home, and that the case had been traumatic for the community. The municipality published the number of its mental health helpline and had received a couple of calls, he said. The documentary's director, Fredrik Horn Akselsen, told NRK that Nesset still related to the case much as he had in 1984, and called him an enigma.
The number of confessions. The police record of how many killings Nesset admitted is reported as 27 (NRK), 30 (UPI in 1983 and NTB in 2025) and 31 (the title of Sætre's book). All of them were retracted before the trial. Only the 22 deaths of which the jury convicted him are legally his; he was acquitted of two other murders, and the remaining confessions were never the basis of a conviction.
The evidence. No technical or forensic evidence linked him to any death, according to NRK, and the dead were not exhumed. The conviction rested on the confessions, his purchases of Curacit and witness testimony. Sætre argues that several confessions were probably false and that the doubt in each case was too great for a conviction. Jakhelln held to the verdict.
The interrogations. Nesset said he confessed under pressure and because of a threat to exhume the dead. The police and prosecutors denied pressuring him and said he often volunteered details. His first lawyer said he was kept out of the interrogations.
The graves. NRK reported that the police considered opening graves and did not because of the confessions; UPI reported in 1983 that the bodies had all been cremated before the trial.
The Curacit. Confronted in 1980, he said the drug was for putting down a dog, according to Adresseavisen; at the trial, UPI reported, he said it had been used as rat poison.
Motive. The court weighed mercy as a motive, NRK reported, and the prosecutor spoke of aggression; no motive was established. Nesset himself denied any motive and rejected the idea of mercy killings.
The start of his job. Adresseavisen reported in 2002 that he was hired as manager in 1976; he obtained Curacit for the home in 1977.
1976: Arnfinn Nesset, a trained nurse, is hired as manager of the Orkdal nursing and old people's home.
1977: He obtains Curacit for the home; staff begin to talk about sudden deaths.
May 1977 to November 1980: the period of the deaths for which he is later tried (UPI).
Late autumn 1980: it emerges that he altered a prescription and ordered large quantities of Curacit; the county physician and the police are told.
January 1981: arrested (UPI); questioned for close to 1,000 hours and confesses to many killings.
Shortly before the trial: retracts all his confessions.
October 18, 1982: trial begins at Frostating lagmannsrett in Trondheim.
March 1983: after three days of deliberation, the jury convicts him of 22 murders and one attempted murder and acquits him of two murders; sentence of 21 years plus 10 years of preventive detention.
May 4, 1984: interviewed by NRK; the interview is not broadcast.
1989: his defense lawyer Alf Nordhus writes that public opinion against him was created.
1993: released to supervised release (fri sikring) after 12 years.
2004: released.
June 2024: at 87, tells NRK he is innocent and wants the case reopened; the trial prosecutor says the verdict should stand.
September 2025: Simen Sætre's book on the case is published.
December 2025: dies in a nursing home, aged 89; his lawyer confirms the death on December 3.
August 2026: Juristforbundet announces its rule of law prize for Sætre's work on the case.