When the presiding judge, Rolf Watty, finished reading the judgment in the Wuppertal assize court on September 11, 1989, a woman in the public seats shouted at him to dig the dead out of the ground and let them speak. The court had just sentenced Michaela Roeder, a thirty-one-year-old intensive care nurse, to eleven years in prison. The prosecution had asked for life, for multiple murders committed from base motives. The judge had said, in terms, that the defendant was not a murderer.
Roeder worked on the intensive care unit of St. Petrus Hospital in Wuppertal-Barmen. The prosecution charged that she had killed seventeen gravely ill patients there by injecting them with Catapresan, a clonidine preparation used to lower blood pressure, and in five cases with potassium chloride as well. She was arrested on March 14, 1986 and spent almost three years in custody before trial, eight months of it in Hamburg undergoing psychological assessment.
The trial opened before the fifth grand criminal chamber in January 1989. More than fifty journalists and at least as many photographers filled the first day; one photographer took her by the chin to turn her face toward his camera. The prosecutor, Karl-Hermann Majorowsky, complained that the two Hamburg experts, the psychologist Hubert Maisch and the psychiatrist Eberhard Schorsch, had helped the defendant work through her problems and lost the distance their role required.
The court found her responsible in eight of the seventeen cases; in the other nine, it said, her guilt had not been proved. In each of the eight, besides her own confessions and the witnesses' evidence, tests had found residues of the drugs in the bodies. She had killed a woman of seventy-seven at the woman's own request. She had killed a man of ninety-four by accident, confusing a syringe of potassium chloride with one of bicarbonate, which is used during resuscitation. In a third case she had deliberately swapped the two and injected a woman of eighty-six with potassium chloride in front of the doctors, to end resuscitation attempts she thought cruel; since it could not be shown whether the woman was already dead, that count was attempted manslaughter. The remaining five were manslaughter.
On motive the court largely followed Schorsch and Maisch. It described a unique, abnormal process in which her personal history and conditions on the ward combined, so that she wanted to free patients from a suffering she perceived through her own. The boundary between herself and her patients had blurred, the judge said, and in her delusion she had decided over life and death without measure. The prosecution had preferred the opinion of Paul H. Bresser, who described her as carefree and emotionally cold.
Much of the judgment was about the hospital. Early rejection, the judge said, had made her a person who lived for others' approval; she idealized her supervisor on the unit, made the job her whole life, and had stayed on intensive care far too long. The unit itself had a poor working climate and sloppy care and record-keeping. Her supervisor and the hospital doctors, in the court's view, should have reacted much sooner to the run of deaths in late 1985 and early 1986, and a male nurse's repeated suspicions had not been followed up. The court counted those circumstances in her favor, and the sentence it passed was below even what her three defense lawyers had asked for. The prosecution said it would appeal.
In August 1993 the taz reported that the nurse the press had called the Angel of Death of Wuppertal would soon be released. Some sources date the charged deaths from February 1984; the court's findings, as reported, concerned deaths in 1985 and 1986. German practice withholds the names of the patients, and none has been published.