On June 6, 2001, Olaf Däter called on Lisbeth N., eighty-seven, at her home in Bremerhaven on a pretext, smothered her with a towel and took 350 marks. A few days earlier the home-care service that looked after her had fired him without notice for embezzling money. Over the following days he did the same to four more of the service's elderly clients, all of them women over eighty who knew him as their nurse and let him in. He attacked them from behind and knelt on them with his full weight, causing severe internal injuries. For four of the five, the doctors called to the bodies certified natural deaths.
The sixth woman lived because he mistook her fainting for death. While he was still in her house her son telephoned; Däter picked up the receiver and hung up. The son, suspicious, found his mother unconscious soon afterward, and when she came to she named her attacker to the police. It turned out that he had already killed another elderly woman that same day. With the stolen money he took his girlfriend and her child on a private flight over the East Frisian Islands and Heligoland, and when he came back the police were waiting for him outside his parents' home. The four earlier deaths came to light only through his confession. In all, his takings came to less than 5,000 marks, and he took only cash, leaving jewelry and other valuables. Several times he left without robbing anyone because nurses were nearby.
Däter was born illegitimate in Bremerhaven on September 25, 1969, was adopted by his stepfather a year later and grew up an only child. He stayed close to his parents, who repeatedly bailed him out, and at the time of the murders he lived in their immediate neighborhood. After leaving school with the Mittlere Reife he spent eight years in the Bundeswehr, in a medical unit, rising to Oberfeldwebel; soldiers under him found him bossy and pedantic. The army then helped him train as a nurse in Cuxhaven. He married, and was divorced a year later. His job in Cuxhaven had also ended over embezzlement, but that had been kept from his later employers. He was in debt from a taste for luxury cars and was trying to impress a prostitute he had befriended with an expensive lifestyle.
The overlooked injuries set off a public debate in Germany about undetected killings, and authorities in and around Bremerhaven reexamined deaths of elderly people. He confessed and gave money as his motive; his debts ran to five figures. He told police he would have gone on killing had he not been caught. On November 22, 2001, the Landgericht Bremen sentenced him to life imprisonment and found that his guilt was particularly grave, which rules out release after fifteen years.