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Nurse Heather Pressdee Is Charged With Killing Two Nursing Home Patients With Insulin

Pennsylvania's Attorney General said the 40-year-old nurse gave insulin to three men at a Butler County nursing home in 2022. Two died. Investigators said she admitted the injections.

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Heather Pressdee, in orange jail clothes and glasses, escorted by officers past reporters

Investigators came to Heather Pressdee's home in Natrona Heights, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday, May 24, 2023, to ask her about three men who had collapsed at a nursing home where she worked. The same day the 40-year-old registered nurse was placed in Butler County Prison without bail, charged by the state Attorney General's office with two counts of criminal homicide and one of criminal attempted homicide. The charges, which also included aggravated assault, three felony counts of neglect of a care-dependent person and three misdemeanor counts of reckless endangerment, were announced the next day.

All three men had been patients at Quality Life Services, a skilled nursing facility in Donegal Township near Chicora, in Butler County. Pressdee worked there from May 23 to November 28, 2022, as assistant director of nursing and then interim director, a job that put her in charge of the nursing staff and of investigating abuse. Prosecutors said that while there she gave the three men insulin they did not need. Two of the three were not diabetic.

"The allegations in this case outline the callous abuse of incredibly vulnerable patients by a professional nurse," Attorney General Michelle Henry said. "As the charges indicate, these were deliberate and intentional acts perpetrated by a caregiver who was trusted to care for these victims."

What the affidavit said

The first case went back to August 31, 2022, when a 73-year-old man with no history of seizures was found seizing in his bed. He was not diabetic, but at the hospital, according to the affidavit, doctors found he had been given insulin. Pressdee had been his nurse, and records showed she had given him medication 10 minutes before the seizure began. He survived.

In the early hours of November 20, two men who shared a suite, connected by a bathroom, were sent to Butler Memorial Hospital about 10 minutes apart with dangerously low blood sugar. One was 55 and not diabetic; he had already been hospitalized with hypoglycemia that October. The other, 83, was in hospice care and had diabetes that did not call for insulin. Neither could have injected himself, investigators said. Pressdee was the night nurse on duty and in charge of the medication cart. A nurse practitioner told investigators she had never seen anything like it in a 30-year career, and that before the younger man's episode Pressdee had said he would be "better off dead."

The 55-year-old never recovered. On December 4, 2022, his family ended life-sustaining care, and hypoglycemia was listed among his causes of death. The 83-year-old died on December 25.

When investigators questioned her at home, the affidavit said, Pressdee admitted giving all three men insulin. She described injecting the 55-year-old in the shoulder with 60 units of short-acting insulin at midnight on November 20 and the 83-year-old in the stomach with 60 units at 12:30 a.m., and giving the 73-year-old 100 units while he was in COVID-19 isolation; she said he had asked her to kill him. She told investigators she felt bad for the men's quality of life and hoped they would "just slip into a coma and pass away."

Investigators also traced a pattern in her work history. Since 2018 she had held short jobs at 11 care facilities in Allegheny, Armstrong and Butler counties, and at each, they said, she had been disciplined for abusive behavior toward patients or staff and had resigned or been fired. Before nursing she had spent 14 years as a veterinary technician.

The Attorney General's Medicaid Fraud Control Section and Bureau of Narcotics Investigation brought the case, and the office said the investigation was still open. It asked anyone with concerns about care a relative had received from Pressdee to call its tip line.

In May 2023 the charges covered three patients at one facility, and the men were identified only by age. The investigation the Attorney General's office called still open in May went on to produce new charges months later, after prosecutors said Pressdee confessed to trying to kill 19 more patients at other facilities where she had worked. In May 2024 she pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and attempted murder and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Prosecutors put the total at 22 patients at five facilities between 2020 and 2023, 17 of whom died.

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