In February 2001 the director general of the Nyírő Gyula Hospital in Budapest went to the police about a run of suspicious deaths on the hospital's first internal medicine ward. Before they arrested anyone, detectives watched the ward with a hidden camera and saw nothing unusual. Then they took one of its nurses, Tímea Faludi, twenty-four, into custody. She admitted giving incurably ill patients intravenous morphine, or potassium mixed with Seduxen, on her own initiative. The Hungarian press named her the Black Angel.
She had worked on the ward since finishing nursing school in 1994. Colleagues described her as tireless, experienced and hard-working, but hard to befriend and given to pointless boasting. Rumors that she was giving patients drugs without orders had gone around the hospital for years before anyone acted on them.
Her account never stayed the same. At different points she said she had wanted to help the patients die, and that she had only wanted to ease their pain without meaning to kill them, though a psychiatric examination found she understood that the drugs could kill. She took responsibility for twenty-one deaths, and when a polygraph examination was ordered she referred to several dozen lethal injections; investigators could not rule out thirty to fifty victims. Then she withdrew her confessions altogether.
The prosecution was left with far less than her words suggested. It eventually charged seven cases between May 2000 and February 2001: four completed murders and three attempts. Her lawyer, József Szőgyényi, asked for an acquittal, arguing that not a single piece of evidence had been put before the court. On December 2, 2002, the Budapest court convicted her of attempted murder of several people and four counts of deliberate endangerment in the course of her profession, sentenced her to nine years and banned her from nursing for life. The judge said he had relied chiefly on her confessions and the medical records, on an assistant nurse who had worked shifts with her during several of the deaths and had partly seen the injections and partly heard about them from her, and on other nurses who said she had talked of particular patients as ones she would "put away."
On November 4, 2003, the Budapest Court of Appeal raised the sentence to eleven years and set out the case count by count, resolving every doubt in her favor. The death of a patient who died within minutes of an intravenous potassium injection was completed murder. Two deaths after morphine injections that suppressed breathing, which an expert thought the probable cause, were attempted murder. In four other cases a direct causal link between the drug and the death could not be established, leaving endangerment. The court treated as an aggravating factor that what she had done could shake public trust in the health service.
The case set off a national argument over euthanasia, which Hungarian law does not allow. Some doubted the scale of it; the physician Róbert Frenkl argued that a single nurse could not have carried out killings on the scale she described without anyone noticing. In prison she was a model inmate and was commended several times. She was released in June 2009, having served two-thirds of her sentence, and has lived quietly since.