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French Nurse Christine Malèvre Convicted of Murdering Six Patients at Mantes-la-Jolie

She had presented herself as a compassionate nurse who helped the dying. A Versailles jury rejected that picture, jailed her for ten years and banned her from nursing for life.

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Illustration of two lawyers in black robes walking down an arched stone courthouse corridor with a checkered floor, camera bags on a bench. Not an actual scene from the case.

Christine Malèvre had become the face of France's euthanasia debate. On January 31, 2003, a jury at Versailles declined to see her that way and convicted her of murdering six of her patients.

The Yvelines assize court, where her trial had opened on January 20, found the former nurse guilty of six of the seven murders she was charged with and sentenced her to ten years of criminal imprisonment. It also banned her for life from working as a nurse. She was acquitted of the murder of Denise Le Maout.

Malèvre had worked for nearly three years on the neuro-pneumology ward of the hospital at Mantes-la-Jolie, west of Paris, where she was assigned in August 1995. On May 6, 1998, hospital managers suspended her and alerted the Versailles prosecutor to an unusual number of deaths on her ward. She attempted suicide that night. In a televised interview later that year, and in a 1999 book, "Mes aveux" ("My Confessions"), she described herself as a nurse so moved by her patients' suffering that she wanted to shorten it.

That image did not survive the investigation. Psychiatric experts described a "morbid fascination with illness" and premeditated killing, though they found she took no pleasure in it. At trial, the prosecution urged the jury not to treat the case as one about euthanasia, and she showed no visible emotion or remorse toward the victims' families.

Malèvre appealed. On October 15, 2003, the appeal assize court in Paris again convicted her of six murders, again acquitted her in Le Maout's death, and raised her sentence to 12 years.

The jury found her guilty of six murders, while Malèvre maintained that she had helped only two patients to die, at their request, and denied intending to kill the others.

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