By the spring of 2001 the staff at the Eichhof, a municipal old people's home in Lucerne, had noticed that deaths were bunching on certain shifts. The nurse the pattern pointed to was Roger Andermatt, thirty-two, a popular figure outside work who taught dancing, had won a major title in couples dance, and played records in Lucerne and Sachseln bars as DJ R.O-Gee. He was arrested in June 2001. When detectives followed his career back to his earlier jobs, at the Am Schärme home in Sarnen, in his native canton of Obwalden, and at a home in Küssnacht, in the canton of Schwyz, they found eighteen more killings. The bodies of suspect deaths were exhumed and examined during 2001.
Andermatt was born in 1969 and had worked at Am Schärme, and for the home nursing service in Sarnen, before he trained as a nurse. A former colleague there remembered that he asked to care only for women, which often meant rewriting the rota, that his favorite shift was nights, and that whenever the team discussed active euthanasia his views were the most extreme in the room. "Why not?" he would say. She also remembered that many people died in those years. He talked readily and at length, she said, but at times seemed absent, and it frightened her.
Between March 1995 and June 2001 he killed elderly residents in his care, many of them with Alzheimer's disease or advanced dementia. Most he killed with overdoses of sedatives and painkillers; others he smothered, pressing a cloth and a plastic bag over the mouth and nose. He confessed to twenty-seven killings and five attempts. He said he had acted out of pity for people who were suffering, and complained that he and the nursing teams around him had been overwhelmed by the work.
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, more than the prosecution had asked for. The court refused the defense's account of the killings as mercy. A doctor at the Lucerne home was separately convicted of negligent homicide and fined 15,000 francs for failing to act on the warning signs in time.
On appeal in February 2006 the Lucerne High Court kept the life sentence but not the characterization. It found murder proved in only seven cases and reclassified the other fifteen as intentional homicide, a lesser offense in Swiss law, alongside the three attempted killings and the two abandoned attempts. It left the sentence at the maximum because of the number of victims. The twenty-seven in his confession were never all established.
With at least twenty-two dead he remains the most prolific serial killer in Swiss criminal history. The case led the authorities to review procedure in state-run care institutions, particularly the handling of medication and the monitoring of residents, and counseling was set up for the families.
Under Swiss law a life prisoner is considered for conditional release after fifteen years, and every year after that. Andermatt's first review came in June 2016 and was refused. By then he had been moved to open prison conditions and allowed regular work inside the institution, and his confession, which had helped clear up other cases, was counted in his favor. The Lucerne probation service has turned him down at each yearly review since, including in 2023 and again in July 2026, twenty years after the final judgment.