Elizabeth Tracey Mae Wettlaufer was born in Woodstock, Ontario, on June 10, 1967, into a devout Baptist family, and qualified as a registered nurse in 1995. She was dismissed from her first nursing job in 1995 for stealing medication, and worked afterwards at long-term care homes in Woodstock and London, Ontario.
Between August 2007 and August 2016 she gave overdoses of insulin to fourteen elderly residents in her care. Eight died: James Silcox, Maurice Granat, Gladys Millard, Helen Matheson, Mary Zurawinski, Helen Young, Maureen Pickering and Arpad Horvath. Six survived. She said afterwards that a feeling would come over her, that she called it a red surge, and that she believed at the time she was carrying out God's will, though she later said that was not a real belief so much as something she told herself.
None of it was detected. Insulin overdose in an elderly nursing home resident produces a death that looks entirely ordinary, and no post-mortem was performed on any of them. She was dismissed from one home in 2014 for a medication error unrelated to the killings, and was hired elsewhere.
On September 29, 2016, she checked herself into the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and told her doctors what she had done. They reported it. She then repeated it to the College of Nurses and to the police in detail.
She pleaded guilty in June 2017 to eight counts of first degree murder, four of attempted murder and two of aggravated assault, and was given eight concurrent life sentences with no parole for twenty-five years. The Gillese Inquiry, which reported in 2019, examined how she had gone undetected for nine years, and its central finding was that the long-term care system had no mechanism that would have found her; she was caught because she chose to say so.