Roeder was born in 1958 and worked as a nurse in a hospital in Wuppertal, in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Between February 1984 and February 1986 elderly and seriously ill patients on her wards died after being given Catapresan, a clonidine preparation used to lower blood pressure, which in the doses administered caused collapse. The deaths were not initially treated as suspicious, the patients being old and ill.
She was charged in connection with seventeen deaths. The court did not accept them all, and on September 11, 1989 she was convicted and sentenced to eleven years.
Eleven years is the striking fact in this entry, and it is the reason to keep the convicted and the alleged figures apart. Whatever the court found, it was not a finding of seventeen murders, and the sentence indicates a much narrower one; German reporting of the case describes the difficulty of establishing that a particular injection caused a particular death in a patient who was dying anyway.
That difficulty is the recurring feature of the medical cases in this archive. Where the victims are old, sick and expected to die, the evidence is a pattern of shifts and a drug level, and a prosecution that begins with seventeen deaths routinely ends with a fraction of them.