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Ontario Nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer Charged With Murdering Eight Care-Home Residents

Police said a drug was given to elderly residents of homes in Woodstock and London between 2007 and 2014. She was remanded in custody.

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Elizabeth Wettlaufer in a green jacket, escorted by police officers past a police car outside a courthouse

For years the deaths had looked like what deaths in a nursing home usually look like. Then, on Tuesday morning, October 25, 2016, the Ontario Provincial Police stood up at a news conference in Woodstock, Ontario, and said that eight elderly residents of two long-term care homes had been murdered, and that the woman accused of killing them was one of their nurses. Elizabeth Wettlaufer, 49, a registered nurse from Woodstock, had been arrested the day before and charged with eight counts of first-degree murder. That morning she appeared in court and was remanded in custody.

Seven of the eight had died at the Caressant Care nursing home in Woodstock, a town of about 37,000 halfway between London and Hamilton. The police named them: James Silcox, 84, in August 2007; Maurice Granat, 84, that December; Gladys Millard, 87, on October 14, 2011, and Helen Matheson, 95, thirteen days later; Mary Zurawinski, 96, on November 7, 2011; Helen Young, 90, on July 14, 2013; and Maureen Pickering, 79, on March 28, 2014. The eighth, Arpad Horvath, 75, had died at the Meadow Park home in London on August 31, 2014. Woodstock's police chief, William Renton, said the police were confident that all the victims had been identified and their families told.

How they died, the police would not say. "There are obviously a number of drugs that are stored and available in long-term care facilities," said Detective Superintendent Dave Truax of the OPP. "All I'm able to say at this time was that a drug was administered." Seven of the victims, police said, had received a fatal dose. The investigation had begun in Woodstock only on September 29, then spread to London and to Oxford and Brant counties; on October 14 the OPP announced that a suspect had been identified and that the public was no longer at risk. Wettlaufer, licensed as a nurse since 1995, had resigned on September 30, the day after the investigation opened.

Caressant Care said she had left two and a half years earlier; Meadow Park said she had left two years earlier. Her neighbors knew her as Beth, a friendly, unassuming woman who lived alone in a Woodstock apartment with her small dog, Nashville. One of them said she had recently given the dog and her cats away, saying out of the blue that she could no longer care for them. "I think she knew something was coming," he said. She had posted online about her life as a nurse, and about getting sober. A friend of Helen Matheson's remembered her as private and trusting. "She'd trust anybody, obviously she did," she said. "Just a good and decent person."

Eight murder charges were the most brought against anyone in Ontario since 2006, when eight men were killed in a Bandidos motorcycle-gang dispute on a farm near London. In the legislature that afternoon a London-area member asked how killings could have gone unnoticed for ten years. Premier Kathleen Wynne called the deaths "extremely distressing."

The following June, Wettlaufer pleaded guilty to all eight murders.

What this story covers. The charges, the victims and the Woodstock and London homes, the town, Wettlaufer's licence and resignation, the employers' statements, her neighbors' description, her online posts, Donalda Osmond's words about Helen Matheson and the comparison with the 2006 Bandidos killings come from CBC News's report of October 25, 2016. The arrest the day before, the court appearance and remand, Superintendent Truax's words, the investigation's dates, Chief Renton's statement, the neighbor's account of the pets and the exchange in the legislature come from Global News's report of the same day. CBC's own report gives James Silcox's date of death as both August 12 and August 17, 2007, so only the month is given here. Sources spell her middle name both Tracy and Tracey. The guilty plea was entered in Woodstock on June 1, 2017.

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