The nurses on the thirty-eight-bed geriatric ward in Wetteren, a market town of twenty-five thousand in East Flanders, had been keeping a secret diary. In it they recorded deaths they could not explain and things they had seen, including patients whose catheters had been torn out. The woman in charge of the ward was their Mother Superior, a nun of the Apostolic Congregation of St. Joseph known as Sister Godfrida, and on February 10, 1978, she was arrested, at first on charges of forgery and theft; she was accused of taking more than $30,000 from her elderly patients to support a morphine habit. In custody she confessed, placidly, to killing three of them with overdoses of insulin, because, she said, they had been too difficult at night. She had done it sweetly, she insisted, and none of them had suffered.
Belgian reporting later named the three as De Backer, Matthys and Maria Vanderginst, who was eighty-seven. A Canadian columnist writing years afterward gave two different names, Pieter Diggmann, eighty-two, and Leon Maihofer, seventy-eight, which do not appear in the Belgian accounts. Insulin given to someone who does not need it drives blood sugar down until the brain fails and leaves little trace. Police charged her with three murders, and a judge ordered the bodies of the three exhumed, together with those of seven other possible victims; the autopsies supported insulin poisoning. Jean-Paul De Corte, a member of the board that ran the home, said it could just as well be thirty people as three, and roughly thirty deaths on the ward were examined. None beyond the three was ever established against her.
She had been born Marie-Godfrieda Cecilia Bombeke in 1933, the name usually printed as Cécile Bombeek, into a devout farming family near Wetteren; accounts give her birthplace as Overmere or Wichelen. She entered the congregation as a young woman, some accounts say at fifteen and others at twenty-five, trained in nursing, and rose to be Mother Superior and head of the geriatric ward. Colleagues dated the change in her to 1975, when she had surgery to remove a brain tumor and afterward became addicted to morphine and painkillers. She was forty-four when she was arrested and was held in jail in Ghent.
There was never a trial. Psychiatrists found her unfit to stand trial, and she was committed to psychiatric care rather than prosecuted, so no court ever ruled on the killings. The case caused a sensation abroad, and the international press descended on Wetteren, while the mainly Catholic Belgian papers largely ignored it. In 2023 the investigative journalist Tom De Smet published a book on her, Soeur Mourir, which argued from new material that she may have killed as many as twenty people and described a hidden life of expensive dinners, peepshows and relationships with women, financed with her patients' money.
Late in life she moved, like the patients she had once looked after, into a home for the elderly, the Sint-Jozef home in Wetteren, where she lived in a state of dementia. She died there in 2019, at eighty-six, so quietly that even her family was not told.