Petr Zelenka was a nurse on the anesthesiology and resuscitation ward, the intensive care unit known in Czech as ARO, at the hospital in Havlíčkův Brod, a town in the Vysočina Region of the Czech Republic. Between May and September 2006 he gave patients on the ward a medicine that no doctor had prescribed for them. Seven of them died. Ten others survived. Months passed before anyone at the hospital connected the run of sudden, unexplained bleeding on the ward to one member of staff, and more weeks passed before the police acted on a complaint the hospital had filed. He was arrested on December 1, 2006, at a hospital in Jihlava, where he had found new work.
In February 2008 the Regional Court in Hradec Králové convicted him of seven murders and ten attempted murders and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Radio Prague described him then as the worst serial killer in the Czech Republic's post-communist history. The presiding judge said that had the death penalty not been abolished in 1990, he would have imposed it. The High Court in Prague confirmed the conviction and the sentence in June 2008, and the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court later turned down his last challenges. He may first apply for conditional release in 2038.
The case also put the hospital, the regional government, the police and the Ministry of Health under scrutiny. The hospital's director was dismissed, prosecuted and finally acquitted. A ministry commission examined the ward's records, police looked into further deaths, and relatives of the patients spent more than a decade in the civil courts trying, without success, to hold the hospital liable.
Little is known of Zelenka's early life. Radio Prague gave his age as 30 when the case broke in December 2006 and 31 when he was sentenced in February 2008. He had a secondary medical school diploma, which he completed while already working as a nurse, TN.cz reported in a later look back at the case.
He had worked at the Havlíčkův Brod hospital for about seven years by the time of his arrest, Právo reported in December 2006. He told the High Court in June 2008 that he had spent seven and a half years on the ARO ward and had done his job well until the end. His defense lawyer later described him as well regarded by patients, superiors and colleagues. The killings took place after he had been promoted to head nurse and placed in charge of the intensive care unit, Radio Prague reported. At the trial, the ward's head physician, Pavel Longin, testified that Zelenka had behaved in an exemplary way and that doctors had never complained about him, and former colleagues described him as hardworking and polite.
The ČT24 news service of Czech Television later summed up the view of those who had known him at work: before his arrest he had been a quiet and exemplary hospital employee. He told investigators, according to his first lawyer, that he had no history of psychological problems and that none ran in his family.
According to the court record as reported by Czech media, Zelenka began giving the medicine to patients on the ward in May 2006 and continued until September. The patients were seriously ill, most of them elderly, and many were recovering from major surgery. He had no authority to give any medication without a doctor's instruction, and none had been given for these patients. The first attempt, in May 2006, was on a bedridden man who survived, Seznam Zprávy reported in a 2020 summary of the case.
The indictment named the patients who died and gave the dates of their deaths, as Novinky reported at the time of the appeal hearing. František Škvařil, 67, died on June 11, 2006. Marie Henslová, 58, died on June 18. Pavel Tláskal, 82, died on June 22. Ivo Řípa, 77, died on July 9. Jaroslav Kohlmayer, 59, died on August 14. Václav Nový, 60, died in August; his widow told reporters after the verdict that knowing his death had been unnecessary made it harder to bear. Marie Šimůnková, 65, died on August 25. The indictment listed ten further names in the attempted murder counts. Those patients survived; their names were not reported in the coverage of the verdicts.
At the time the deaths were not treated as suspicious. Deaths on an intensive care ward were not unusual, Radio Prague noted, and it was only later that the hospital saw how many patients had died of internal bleeding. Radio Prague and Aktuálně.cz both reported that about seven months passed before the unusually high number of such deaths was noticed.
The pattern was uncovered by Pavel Longin, the head physician of the ARO ward. He compared the ward's duty roster with the records of patients' bleeding, ČT24 reported. He found about 40 cases of unexplained bleeding. In 23 of them the medicine had been involved, and Zelenka had been on duty for every one of those 23. Právo reported in January 2008 that Longin had established in August 2006 that patients had been given the medicine, and that this was the cause of their bleeding.
On September 25, 2006, the hospital ended Zelenka's employment by mutual agreement. Longin suspected him and wanted the suspicious deaths examined. Radio Prague reported that a death in September prompted the hospital to negotiate his departure rather than dismiss him outright, a choice critics later said had let him find work at another hospital in nearby Jihlava. The health minister, Tomáš Julínek, said that a dismissal would probably have prevented that new job. Zelenka worked at the Jihlava hospital for about a month before his arrest, TN.cz reported, and Radio Prague reported that he had no opportunity to harm anyone there.
The hospital's director, J. P., learned of Longin's suspicion on September 25, 2006, according to the account Právo published when J. P. was later charged. He contacted a lawyer two days later and met her on October 6. A criminal complaint was drawn up about a week after that. The prosecutor's office received it on October 17, and the police received it by post a few days later; the reports give both October 20 and October 23.
The complaint was filed against an unknown perpetrator. According to the health minister, it spoke of an unknown harmful substance and said nothing about the medicine or about Zelenka, and it did not clearly state that a patient had died. The investigator who received it judged it not urgent and then fell ill for three weeks. When the investigator returned on November 27, the police took up the case in earnest. On November 28 they asked the hospital's lawyer for more information. On November 29 Longin contacted the police himself, and the next day he gave a statement naming Zelenka as his suspect. Testimony from hospital staff and the involvement of a forensic expert then moved the case forward quickly.
A police inspection in Hradec Králové found in December 2006 that officers in Havlíčkův Brod had made an error and that poor organization of their work had cost three weeks. The police president, Vladislav Husák, admitted delays and ordered a review of police conduct between October 13 and November 28, at the request of the interior minister, Ivan Langer.
Police arrested Zelenka on December 1, 2006, in a corridor of the hospital in Jihlava. He resisted, and officers had to restrain him, the detective Petr Gruber later told TV Nova's news site. The trial judge noted in 2008 that Zelenka had been injured during the arrest, which he said can happen, but found that no one had threatened him.
He was charged at first with eight murders and nine attempted murders. Police had initially said seven people had died, then confirmed eight, and the east Bohemian police director, Petr Přibyl, apologized for a press release that had been transcribed wrongly. Reports of a ninth death were corrected: one patient listed among the dead had been saved by doctors and died about six weeks later of an unrelated cause, and police counted that patient among the attempted murders. By the time of the indictment the counts stood at seven murders and ten attempted murders.
At a press conference on December 3, 2006, the police described him as highly intelligent and said he appeared to regret only that he had been caught. He confessed during the pretrial investigation; Novinky later reported that he had confessed three times in pretrial proceedings.
His first lawyer, Vítězslav Menšík, said in December 2006 that his client had given a consistent explanation: he had wanted to see how the doctors would respond to sudden changes in a patient's condition. The lawyer described him as calm and cooperative under questioning, not evasive and not denying the allegations. He had been confident that he could hide what he was doing and had believed he would not be suspected. His arrest had surprised him, the lawyer said, and he now seemed resigned to a long sentence and said he regretted what he had done. Radio Prague reported that, according to the lawyer, he may have acted to test whether the doctors were good enough to discover the truth, and that he reportedly said he had wanted to "see some action."
His family replaced his lawyer on December 8, 2006. The next day the new defense said he suffered from a mental disorder and regretted the killings. By the time of the trial he was represented by Jan Herout, who also argued his appeal.
The police psychologist Ludmila Čírtková told Radio Prague that offenders of this kind take pleasure in harming people who depend on others.
The regional governor of Vysočina, Miloš Vystrčil, dismissed the hospital director, J. P., on December 5, 2006. Vystrčil said he had learned of the situation only on December 2 and had convened a crisis team the next day, and he said J. P. had not informed him properly. The health minister, Tomáš Julínek, set up an expert commission to examine the hospital and a second one to look at Zelenka's time in Jihlava.
On the Czech Television discussion program Questions of Václav Moravec on December 10, 2006, Julínek and the former health minister David Rath agreed that the hospital had suffered from failures in its system. Julínek criticized the hospital's management for how it had handled information and said the head physician's initiative was the only reason the police had learned more and stepped in. He suggested that the last victim might have lived had the hospital acted faster. Rath, a physician, argued that such cases were straightforward to detect and to treat. Both said the region should seek settlements with the families out of court.
Radio Prague reported that the case was treated as isolated, but that hospitals were expected to tighten security and checks. Julínek compared hospitals to airports as sensitive places that needed repeated checks, more controls and more staff.
The trial opened at the Regional Court in Hradec Králové on January 21, 2008, more than a year after the arrest. More than 60 witnesses were expected, among them nurses and doctors from the hospital. If he was found responsible for his actions, he faced between 15 years and life in prison. TN.cz later called it the most closely followed case in Czech judicial history.
On the first day Zelenka spoke to the court for the first time. He withdrew the confession he had given to the police, saying officers had beaten him severely and that he had signed whatever they asked because he feared more beatings. He admitted giving the medicine to five patients and said he could not recall the details of the others. He said he had not intended to kill anyone. The urge, he said, had come suddenly, as if an inner voice kept telling him to do it. He said he had wanted "some action." He had told the police he was healthy; in court he said he was mentally ill and had been taking pills he prescribed for himself.
Herout asked for a team of experts to reassess his client's mental health, arguing that one psychiatrist's opinion was not enough in so complex a case, and Zelenka's father asked that more than one psychiatrist examine his son. Jaroslav Ortman, who represented the victims' families, called the testimony confused and said the claim of mental illness was an attempt to avoid prison.
The trial ran through January and February. On January 22 Pavel Longin testified. On January 23 doctors from the ministry commission said the medicine might not have directly caused the deaths of some patients and that some cases could have been detected earlier. On January 24 hospital doctors said the misuse could not have been detected sooner. On January 25 the prison chaplain, Petr Kobiela, testified that Zelenka had told him the police beat and insulted him. On February 11 the detectives who had questioned Zelenka denied beating him or forcing his confession. Zelenka called their testimony a lie.
During the trial the prosecution also opened a separate case. On January 23, 2008, the district prosecutor, Zdeňka Tománková, charged the former director, J. P., with failing to report a murder and an attempted murder.
At a hearing in mid-February 2008, reported by Aktuálně.cz on February 13, the court's psychiatrist, Vanda Valentová, said that Zelenka was mentally healthy and had never had a mental disorder that would have kept him from controlling his behavior. Asked by the defense about hallucinations, she said he had never mentioned any to the experts; they had learned of them from the media, asked him directly, and he had not confirmed them. She said he had only gradually realized what he had done and that he seemed to pity himself more than the patients.
The psychologist Petr Goldman told the court that Zelenka had wanted excitement and control over others, had wanted to disrupt his workplace and to compete with the doctors, and had expected never to be found out. He had said he was pleased to have done something the doctors could not solve. Goldman described him as emotionally cold, with little empathy. Zelenka rejected the conclusions and said he had never had the feelings the experts described. Another psychologist, Slavomil Hubálek, who had prepared an earlier expert report, was ruled biased because of statements he had made to the media, and other experts were appointed.
The court's forensic pathologist, Josef Pleskot, examined the individual deaths. The defense attacked his qualifications and set his findings against those of the ministry commission's hematologists. On February 19 the court rejected the defense request for two more expert reports as unnecessary.
The prosecutor, Lenka Faltusová, took the court through all 17 cases on February 21, 2008, in a closing speech of about an hour and a quarter. She argued that the crimes showed moral depravity, cruelty, reckless selfishness and contempt for human life, and that Zelenka had made himself a "lord over life" over sick and defenseless patients whose condition he knew well. As a trained health worker, she said, he knew that giving medication without a doctor's order was forbidden and could cause serious harm or death. She called the killings the "physical liquidation" of people who happened to be helpless at that moment. His confession was the only mitigating factor she identified, and she asked for a life sentence.
Herout argued that the ward had suffered from failures of management and treatment, that staff should have reacted to the bleeding at once and looked for its cause, and that his client may not have known why he acted. The statement that he had wanted power over the doctors, Herout said, had been produced under police pressure; the real reason, given in custody, was that he had needed "action" to hold off depression. The defense asked the court to treat the acts as bodily harm rather than murder, because he had never meant to kill.
On February 21, 2008, after 32 days of trial, the Regional Court in Hradec Králové found Zelenka guilty of seven murders and ten attempted murders and sentenced him to life imprisonment in a high-security prison, as the prosecution had asked. He stood motionless and looked at the floor as the sentence was read, and afterward wiped tears from his eyes while speaking with his lawyer, Radio Prague reported. Before the verdict he had asked the court for clemency, saying he had never meant to hurt the patients' relatives or to kill their loved ones.
The presiding judge, Jiří Vacek, said guilt had been fully proven. The court found no proof that Zelenka had been pressured into confessing, and noted that he had the right to change his testimony. Vacek said that without the death penalty, abolished in 1990, no sentence other than life could have been considered, and that to consider any other would have been a mockery. He called the acts incomprehensible, because a caregiver's role is to help patients. Given his training, the judge said, Zelenka must have known that the unprescribed medicine could kill, and he had admitted as much and said he did not care. The court found that he had intended to kill.
Vacek also defended Longin, whom the defense had accused of poor management, and credited his diligence with bringing the case to court. The commission's criticisms, he said, had been organizational; the harm had come from the medicine no one had prescribed. The court rejected the plea of diminished responsibility. Experts had found him sane and fully responsible, with a craving for power over others.
The court ruled that his time in the high-security prison would not count toward the period after which he could ask for conditional release. That extended the usual 20 years to 30, Novinky reported, so that he could apply no earlier than 2038, when he would be 62. He was ordered to pay compensation of more than 2.5 million crowns to the bereaved, and some families were referred to the civil courts. Radio Prague reported that he would become the 34th prisoner serving a life sentence in the Czech Republic if the verdict stood.
Zelenka's father attended the whole trial. He criticized the court for refusing further expert reports, called the trial full of lies, and said the family had lost a battle for the truth but not the war. Relatives of the patients appeared unconvinced by Zelenka's claim that he had never wanted to harm anyone.
Zelenka appealed at once, and his father appealed too. Herout asked the High Court in Prague to annul the verdict and send the case back to Hradec Králové. He challenged the motive assigned by the prosecution and the expert medical opinions, argued that at least some of the deaths need not have been caused by his client's acts, and leaned on the report of the ministry commission, which had been critical of the hospital's staff and had been unable to say with certainty in some cases whether patients died of the medicine, of serious illness or of incorrect treatment. In his written appeal Zelenka said he had confessed under police coercion and gave depression as the reason for what he had done. The appeal asked for a sentence of 15 to 25 years and argued against the restriction on conditional release.
The High Court heard the appeal on June 11, 2008. Zelenka said he had not planned to appeal but had decided to fight to the end, whatever the outcome. He apologized again to the families, said he was not innocent and would accept whatever punishment was imposed, and said he had never wished for his patients' deaths and had taken no joy in their suffering. He said he did not know why he had started. His father told the court that no one present knew which patients had died of their illnesses and which deaths his son was responsible for, and that the family, his wife above all, had suffered. Zelenka cried during his father's speech.
The High Court upheld the life sentence the same day, and the judgment became final. In its judgment, the court annulled the first-instance judgment in full on both appeals and issued its own. It again found him guilty on all 17 counts, seven as completed murders and ten as attempts, and classified the acts as murder under Section 219(1) and (2)(a) and (h) of the Criminal Code then in force, partly completed and partly attempted, committed against several persons and from a particularly reprehensible motive. Novinky reported that the court treated the acts as one crime against 17 people, because they shared the same method and the same place. The court imposed the exceptional sentence of life imprisonment, kept him in a high-security prison, and again ruled that time served there would not count toward conditional release. It changed the compensation order: 11 injured parties and a health insurer were awarded sums by the court, and the remaining claims were sent to the civil courts.
A new psychiatric evaluation ordered by his appeal lawyer had not helped him before the High Court, Aktuálně.cz reported; the psychiatrist Jaroslav M. Kašparů compared him to a gambler following a race, whose bad feelings when a patient died gave way quickly to excitement over the next one. The Supreme Court judge Jiří Lněnička said the Czech courts had not dealt with a case like it since the Second World War. In early September 2008 Zelenka lodged an extraordinary appeal with the Supreme Court, disputing mainly the conclusions of the medical expert reports.
In April 2009 the Supreme Court upheld the sentence; it had been his last chance to reduce it, Radio Prague reported. In November 2009 the Constitutional Court's general secretary, Tomáš Langášek, announced that the court had rejected Zelenka's complaint, finding that the courts had not violated his basic rights, the Slovak news agency TASR reported.
J. P., who after his dismissal had become head of a department at the town hall in Nové Město na Moravě, called the accusation against him nonsense and said he had filed the criminal complaint himself. At the end of July 2008 he was sentenced to ten months for failing to alert the authorities in time; ČT24 later described the sentence as suspended. He appealed. The regional court annulled the sentence and acquitted him in full, finding that he had not intended to conceal the killings or to delay their discovery. In June 2009 he asked the state for a public apology and 1.5 million crowns for the harm the long proceedings had caused him, saying he would give the money to a foundation for children with cancer.
The ministry commission flagged further deaths on the ward, and in February 2007 the police opened an inquiry into whether doctors or other staff bore criminal responsibility for 11 suspicious deaths. In July 2008 the police shelved it, and no doctor was charged. One doctor on the ward, Jitka Satrapová, told ČT24 that the staff felt a great weight had been lifted.
ČT24 also reported in July 2008 that transcripts of Zelenka's statements suggested he had spoken of giving the medicine to about twenty people, nine of whom died, and of a first death in March 2006 rather than in June. The prosecutor, Lenka Faltusová, said the authorities had not ignored his possible further crimes. In January 2009 police said that Zelenka was probably responsible for three more deaths and one more attempted murder. He was not charged with them because he was already serving a life sentence, Radio Prague reported, citing a police spokesperson's statement to Novinky.
In July 2008 the Prison Service decided that Zelenka would serve his sentence at Valdice, one of the most tightly guarded prisons in the Czech Republic. Prisoners serving life there could leave their cells for an hour a day and receive one visit a month, Aktuálně.cz reported, and could work only inside their cells, for little pay. TN.cz reported in November 2016 that he was serving his sentence at Valdice. He may first apply for conditional release in 2038.
In February 2007 the Vysočina Region decided to pay the families more than one million crowns in all: 100,000 crowns to each bereaved family and 20,000 crowns to each surviving patient. Relatives then sued the hospital. In September 2008 the first lawsuits came before the Regional Court in Hradec Králové, with relatives seeking a million crowns each for non-material harm; one family asked for ten million.
The courts turned the claims down one after another. In June 2011 the Hradec Králové court rejected two men's claims of a million crowns each, and in November 2011 Judge Věra Adámková dismissed the claim of a man whose wife had been one of the patients Zelenka targeted, because it had not been established that she died of what he gave her. About five similar claims were before the courts at that time. ČT24 reported that under the criminal judgment Zelenka himself owed the relatives nearly 2.4 million crowns.
In November 2016 Judge Jan Fifka in Hradec Králové dismissed the seventh such lawsuit, brought by five relatives of one patient who had sought 8.8 million crowns; the six earlier suits had all failed. He found that the hospital had not neglected the patient's care and had done everything it could to identify the perpetrator. The family's lawyer, Jan Bunganič, argued that the hospital should have investigated the sudden bleeding more forcefully and should already have had preventive rules in place. The hospital's lawyer, Jan Mach, said Zelenka's conduct had been an excess no one could have foreseen, for which the murderer and not the employer was responsible. In May 2020 the Constitutional Court rejected a complaint by relatives of a man who had died after Zelenka gave him the medicine, who had sought 8.8 million crowns from the hospital and lost. The lower courts had found that his death was caused by Zelenka's unlawful conduct "in clear excess of his work duties," for which the hospital bore no responsibility.
The hospital's spokeswoman, Petra Černo, said in 2016 that the hospital regretted what the families had been through, acknowledged that it had employed a person who gave medication without orders, and called the case the most serious in Czech health care.
By the time of the trial the hospital had tightened its handling of medicines, installing cameras and carrying out monthly audits, its spokeswoman told Czech Television. Years later the cardiac surgeon Jan Pirk, head of the cardiac center at IKEM in Prague, said on TV Nova that the medicine was by then very strictly controlled in Czech hospitals.
The psychiatrist Miroslav Skačáni wrote a book about the case, Vraždy ze závisti, which was adapted into the feature film Hodinu nevíš, ČT24 reported; its makers said they wanted to show how a likable young man could become a killer. TV Nova's series Příběhy českých zločinů also devoted an episode to the case.
Zelenka's account changed over time. He confessed to all the acts before trial, then admitted five at trial and said he could not recall the rest, then told the High Court he was not innocent. The courts rejected his claim that police had beaten a confession out of him.
His motive was argued over at every stage. The courts accepted that he acted for the excitement of the crises he caused and the staff's response, and that he craved power over others; he and his lawyers spoke of a sudden breakdown, depression, or a wish to create emergencies so that he and the doctors would have to rescue patients.
The defense and the ministry commission questioned whether the medicine caused every one of the seven deaths, given how ill the patients were. The courts at every level held that it did, and that he intended to kill.
The number of victims shifted. Police first charged him with eight murders and nine attempts; the indictment and the verdicts settled on seven and ten. In December 2006 Novinky reported that the cases stopped in mid-September while he was on vacation and that a patient died on September 24, after his return; that death was not among the seven in the final verdict. The further deaths that police linked to him in 2009, and the larger figures in the transcripts reported by ČT24, were never tested in court.
2006, May: The first attempt; a bedridden man survives. Zelenka begins giving patients a medicine no doctor has prescribed.
2006, June 11 to August 25: The seven deaths later listed in the indictment.
2006, August: Pavel Longin establishes that patients have been given the medicine.
2006, September 25: The hospital ends Zelenka's employment by mutual agreement; the director learns of the suspicion.
2006, October 13 to 23: The hospital's complaint against an unknown perpetrator goes to prosecutors and police.
2006, November 27 to 30: Police take up the case; Longin names Zelenka.
2006, December 1: Arrested at the hospital in Jihlava.
2006, December 5: The regional governor dismisses the hospital director.
2007, February: The region pays the families; police open an inquiry into hospital staff.
2008, January 21: Trial opens at the Regional Court in Hradec Králové.
2008, January 23: The former director is charged.
2008, February 21: Convicted of seven murders and ten attempted murders; life imprisonment.
2008, June 11: The High Court in Prague upholds the conviction and life sentence.
2008, July: Sent to Valdice; police shelve the inquiry into doctors.
2008, late July: The former director receives a ten-month sentence, later overturned on appeal.
2009, January: Police attribute three further deaths and one further attempt to him; no charges.
2009, April: The Supreme Court upholds the sentence.
2009, November: The Constitutional Court rejects his complaint.
2016, November: Reported serving his sentence at Valdice; the seventh compensation suit against the hospital fails.
2020, May: The Constitutional Court rejects a family's complaint over compensation from the hospital.
2038: Earliest year he may apply for conditional release.