Roger Andermatt was born in 1969 and worked as a nurse in a number of old people's homes and care homes across central Switzerland, among them the Eichhof home in Lucerne, and in the canton of Obwalden. Locally he was also known as a dance teacher and as a DJ under the name R.O-Gee. The Swiss press called him the death-nurse of Lucerne.
Between 1995 and 2001 he killed patients in his care, women aged between sixty-six and ninety-five, many of them with Alzheimer's disease or advanced dementia. He gave lethal doses of medication or smothered them with plastic bags.
What exposed him was not a single incident but a shape in the statistics: deaths were accumulating in particular homes. The suspect deaths were exhumed and examined post mortem during 2001. He was arrested in June 2001 and admitted the killings.
His account, then and at trial, was that he had acted out of compassion for patients who were suffering, and that he and the staff around him had been overwhelmed by the workload. He confessed to twenty-seven killings and five attempts.
On January 28, 2005, the Lucerne Criminal Court convicted him of murder in twenty-two cases, of three completed attempts and of two attempts he had abandoned, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The sentence was heavier than the prosecution had asked for, and the court explicitly declined to follow the defence's framing of the killings as mercy.
The appeal, decided on February 15, 2006, is the part of this case most often left out. The Lucerne High Court upheld the life sentence, but it did not uphold the characterisation. It convicted him of murder in only seven of the cases and reclassified the remaining fifteen as intentional homicide, a lesser offence in Swiss law. It kept the maximum sentence anyway, on the ground of the number of victims.
So the same twenty-two deaths are, in the final judgment, seven murders and fifteen intentional killings, with three attempted murders and two abandoned attempts alongside them. The figure of twenty-seven is his own confession and was not established.
With twenty-two deaths he remains the most prolific serial killer in Swiss criminal history. The case caused the authorities to review procedure at state-run care institutions, with particular attention to the oversight of medication and the monitoring of patients, and counselling was set up for the victims' families.