Edson Isidoro Guimaraes was born in 1957 and worked as a nursing assistant in the intensive care unit of the Salgado Filho municipal hospital, in the Meier district of Rio de Janeiro. Staff and press later called him the nurse of death.
Between January and May 1999 he killed patients on the unit by injecting potassium chloride into their drips and by removing the oxygen masks of those on ventilators. He was frank about the choice of victims, saying he took patients in irreversible comas, often in the last stages of AIDS, whose families were suffering.
He also had a financial arrangement. He was paid roughly sixty dollars each time he was first to notify one of Rio's competing funeral homes of a death, so that the firm could reach the family before its rivals. Rio's secretary for public security, Josias Quintal, put the two motives together: "He may have begun doing it to earn money and then just lost control."
The hospital had spent two years trying to explain the death rate in its emergency intensive care unit. It had bought equipment and retrained staff and the figure would not fall. What ended it was a single sighting: a hospital porter watched Guimaraes fill a syringe with potassium chloride and inject a comatose patient, who died at once. He was arrested on May 4, 1999, and confessed to five killings.
He was convicted on February 21, 2000, after a trial that ran close to twelve hours, of four murders, and sentenced to seventy-six years. Brazilian law caps the term actually served at thirty. Before the trial he told a television reporter that he did not regret it.
The larger figure attached to his name, up to a hundred and thirty-one patients between January 1 and May 4 1999, is an estimate and has never been established in court. What is documented is narrower and more suggestive: once he was taken off the ward, deaths on it halved. The case forced scrutiny of Rio's municipal hospitals and of the trade between hospital staff and funeral directors.