Cecile Bombeek

Victims

NO CONVICTION AND NO TRIAL. She confessed to THREE killings by insulin overdose and was found unfit to plead, so no court ever ruled on any of it. A hospital board member said at the time that it "could just as well be 30 people as three", and roughly thirty deaths on her ward were examined; NONE OF THOSE WAS ESTABLISHED AGAINST HER by any court. She was also accused of stealing more than thirty thousand dollars from patients

Years active

1976 - 1977

Location

Wetteren, East Flanders, Belgium

Method

Poisoning (overdoses of insulin)

Status

A nun of the Apostolic Congregation of St Joseph, known as SISTER GODFRIDA, who rose to Mother Superior and managed the geriatric ward of the public hospital at Wetteren. Colleagues dated a change in her behaviour to a 1975 operation to remove a brain tumour, after which she became addicted to morphine and stole from her patients. FELLOW NURSES ON THE 38-BED WARD KEPT A SECRET DIARY of unexplained deaths and irregularities, and that diary, together with a young doctor who took the matter public, brought the case out. She was arrested in February 1978, initially over forgery and drug theft, and then CONFESSED to killing three patients with overdoses of insulin because they had been "too difficult at night", saying she had done it "sweetly". Exhumations and autopsies confirmed insulin poisoning. PSYCHIATRISTS FOUND HER UNFIT TO STAND TRIAL AND SHE WAS COMMITTED RATHER THAN PROSECUTED, so THERE WAS NEVER A TRIAL AND THERE IS NO CONVICTION. SHE WAS RELEASED FROM THE INSTITUTION IN THE LATE 1990s, dementia having been judged to leave her no longer a danger, and lived in anonymity at the Sint-Jozef nursing home in Wetteren, where SHE DIED IN 2019 AGED EIGHTY-SIX. She was buried without public notice.

Bombeek was born in 1933 and was a member of the Apostolic Congregation of St Joseph. She managed the geriatric floor of the public hospital at Wetteren in East Flanders, where she was known as Sister Godfrida.

In 1976 and 1977 she killed patients aged between seventy-five and eighty by injecting overdoses of insulin, which in a non-diabetic drives blood sugar to fatal levels and leaves little trace. Her stated reason, as recorded, was that the patients were too difficult at night. Three deaths are established and more were suspected.

Nurses at the hospital raised the alarm early in 1977 and an investigation followed. It also emerged that she had been diverting hospital funds and morphine, and had been conducting a relationship with a priest.

She was found unfit to stand trial and was committed to a psychiatric facility. There was no conviction and no judgment.

The case caused a scandal in Belgium disproportionate even to the deaths, because of what she was: a nun in charge of a Catholic-run geriatric ward. The accessible sourcing is Belgian press reporting of 1977 and encyclopaedia summaries, and the count of three or more has never been tested in any court.