Richard Angelo was born in 1962 on Long Island. He was an Eagle Scout and a volunteer fireman, and by 1987 was a twenty-five-year-old nurse working the night shift at the Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip, New York.
Over about six weeks in the autumn of 1987 he injected patients with Pavulon and Anectine, muscle relaxants that paralyse the respiratory system, so that they would go into crisis while he was on duty and he could lead the resuscitation. He told investigators afterwards that he had felt inadequate, that he wanted to be seen as a hero, and that he had wanted to prove himself in an emergency.
He was caught on October 11, 1987, when a patient named Gerolamo Kucich felt something being injected into his drip, pressed the call button, and told a nurse that the man in the room had put something in his tube. The nurse kept the urine sample. It contained Pavulon.
Bodies were exhumed and the drugs were found in several. He was convicted in December 1989 of two counts of second degree murder, one of manslaughter, one of criminally negligent homicide and six of assault, and sentenced to fifty years to life. At least four patients died and investigators believe he interfered with more than thirty.