Christine Malevre was born on January 10, 1970, and worked as a nurse in the pneumology unit at the Francois Quesnay hospital in Mantes-la-Jolie, west of Paris, from February 1997 to May 1998, caring for patients in the last stages of incurable lung disease.
The case began inside the hospital rather than with the police. Managers looked into an abnormal number of deaths on the unit and questioned her. On July 25, 1998, after attempting to take her own life, she confessed to having helped about thirty patients to die. She was arrested that month.
She then recanted, saying the confession had been made under duress, and reduced her account first to four patients and later, in court, to two she said she had helped at their request, with two more she described as accidents. The victims in the file were aged between seventy-two and eighty-eight and had been given lethal doses of morphine, potassium or other drugs.
The charge was originally manslaughter. It was upgraded to murder after two reports: a psychiatric assessment describing a morbid fascination with death and disease, and a statistical finding that patients were three to four times more likely to die during her shifts. Olivier Morice, acting for five of the families, put the shift plainly, saying the judge had realised "we are dealing with a serial killer more than with a Madonna of euthanasia."
Those were the two ways the case was read in France at the time. To one side she was the Madonna of Euthanasia, a symbol for a movement that wanted France to legalise assisted dying as the Netherlands had; she received some five thousand letters of support, published a book giving her account, and had public figures speaking for her. Her colleagues on the ward had called her the Black Widow.
What turned opinion was the evidence of the families. Several said their relatives had never spoken to anyone of wanting to die and that Malevre was the only person who claimed to have been told. Some said the patient had been about to go home or was recovering. Pro-euthanasia organisations withdrew their support during the trial, and most of the commentators who had defended her retracted.
She went on trial at Versailles on January 20, 2003, charged with seven murders and facing life. On January 30 the court convicted her of six, acquitted her of the seventh, sentenced her to ten years and ordered damages of nearly ninety-three thousand euros, and barred her from nursing for life.
She appealed, and the appeal went against her: on October 15, 2003, the Paris appeal court raised the sentence to twelve years. She was released in 2007 having served about four.
The figure of thirty in this roster is her own first confession, made after a suicide attempt and afterwards withdrawn. The number established in court is six.