Marianne Nolle

Victims

7 MURDER CONVICTIONS and 2 attempts, all by verdict rather than plea, from killings between 1984 and 1992. Police attributed SEVENTEEN deaths and EIGHTEEN attempts to her and could prove neither; the older cases had insufficient evidence and several bodies had been cremated. ONE GERMAN ACCOUNT GIVES SIX CONVICTIONS RATHER THAN SEVEN; the seven figure is carried by Wikipedia, serienkillers.de and the German encyclopedia entries and is followed here. She denied everything to the end

Years active

1984 - 1992

Location

Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Method

Poisoning (Truxal)

Status

An outpatient care nurse in Cologne who gave elderly patients in their own homes fatal overdoses of the antipsychotic Truxal, in some cases mixed with diazepam. THE INVESTIGATION BEGAN WITH A THEFT COMPLAINT BY A RELATIVE, not with any suspicion of killing. Convicted in 1993 of seven murders committed between 1984 and 1992 and sentenced to life imprisonment; THE VERDICT BECAME FINAL IN 1994 after the Federal Court of Justice rejected her appeal. SHE DENIED THE KILLINGS TO THE END AND NEVER CONFESSED. Police believed she had killed seventeen people and attempted eighteen more, but those cases could not be proved: the evidence in the older ones was insufficient and several bodies had been cremated. She died on July 28, 2022, aged eighty-four.

Nolle was born in 1938 and worked as a carer for elderly people in Cologne, in private households and in a residential home, without formal nursing qualifications.

Between 1984 and 1992 she killed patients in her care by giving them large doses of Truxal, a chlorprothixene sedative, which in the elderly produces a decline that looks like the ordinary end of a long illness. Seventeen deaths were investigated; she was convicted of seven murders and two attempts, and further cases were not pursued because the bodies had been cremated.

She was tried at Cologne and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1993, the court finding particular gravity of guilt, which in German law bars the usual review at fifteen years. She has consistently denied the killings.

The case is one of a series of German prosecutions of carers and nurses from the 1980s onwards, and the mechanism is the same in each: deaths among the very old in institutional care are not examined unless someone insists, and the count in every one of these cases is limited by how many bodies survived cremation. Seventeen investigated, seven proved, and the higher figure is an accurate way of putting it.