Jacques Gutton died on May 3, 1998, on the neuro-pneumology ward of the François Quesnay hospital in Mantes-la-Jolie, west of Paris. He was one of the patients whose deaths the hospital's managers were already looking at, because too many people were dying on that unit, and too many of them on the shifts of one nurse. Christine Malèvre was twenty-eight. She had wanted to be a nurse all her life, and she had been on the ward since February 1997, caring for people in the late stages of lung disease.
When the managers questioned her, she tried to kill herself. On July 25, 1998, after that attempt, she told investigators that she had helped about thirty patients to die, and that each of them had asked her to. She was arrested that month. Out of police custody, she took the confession back, saying she had made it under duress, and her account shrank: to four patients, and later in court to two she said had asked for her help, with two more she described as accidents. The patients in the file were between seventy-two and eighty-eight and had been given lethal doses of morphine, potassium or other drugs. At least two of them, the investigation found, had not been in palliative care at all.
She was first charged with manslaughter. The charge became murder after two reports. The psychiatric and psychological assessments described a young woman whose morbid fascination with illness had led her to believe she had a secret mission to deliver patients from it. A statistical study found that patients on the ward were three to four times as likely to die when she was on duty. Olivier Morice, who represented five of the families, put the change bluntly: the judge had realized, he said, "we are dealing with a serial killer more than with a Madonna of euthanasia."
Madonna of euthanasia was what her supporters called her. France did not recognize a right to die, and for campaigners who wanted it to follow the Netherlands she became a symbol. She received some five thousand letters of support, published a book giving her side, and had public figures speaking for her. On the ward, her colleagues had called her the Black Widow.
The families turned the argument. Several said their relatives had never told anyone they wanted to die, and that Malèvre was the only person who claimed to have heard it. Some said the patient had been recovering, or about to go home. Four families joined the prosecution as civil parties, those of Jacques Baudet, Hubert Bruyelle, Denise Le Maout and Jacques Gutton, and so did the hospital itself. The euthanasia organizations withdrew their support as the trial went on, and most of the commentators who had defended her took it back.
She went on trial before the assize court at Versailles on January 20, 2003, charged with seven murders and facing life. "I want to live," she told the court, "to live my life as a woman, to start a family." After two weeks the court convicted her of six murders and acquitted her of the seventh; accounts date the verdict to January 30 or 31. She was sentenced to ten years, ordered to pay damages of nearly ninety-three thousand euros, and barred from nursing for life. She appealed, and it went against her: on October 15, 2003, the Paris appeal court raised the sentence to twelve years.
She married while in prison and studied accounting, since she could no longer work in medicine, and she was released in 2007 after about four years. The figure of thirty that follows her name is her own first confession, made after a suicide attempt and withdrawn as soon as she was out of custody. The number proved in court is six.