Timea Faludi was twenty-four and had worked since 1994 as a nurse on the first internal medicine ward of the Nyiro Gyula Hospital in Budapest. The Hungarian press called her the Black Angel. Colleagues described her as hard-working and hard to get to know, and said she had been caught in small lies.
Rumours had circulated in the hospital since 1998 that she was giving patients intravenous drugs on her own initiative. The case began when the hospital's director general reported a pattern of suspicious deaths to the Budapest police. She was taken into custody on February 15, 2001, and held from February 19. The investigation closed that October.
The indictment covered eight elderly patients between May 2000 and February 2001: one in May 2000, two that December, three in January 2001 and two in early February. All were gravely ill, most of them incurably, and in severe pain. She had given them morphine, potassium or Seduxen without a doctor's instruction.
Her own account shifted throughout. At the first hearing she said she felt guilty not only for the eight in the indictment but for other patients too, while insisting she had given the injections to relieve pain and had not known they would kill. During the investigation, when a polygraph examination was ordered, she referred to several dozen lethal injections, and she has been reported as saying she gave drugs to about forty patients. A week after that first hearing she withdrew her confessions, and then said she could not remember the injections, in some cases not even the patient's name.
The prosecution case was therefore difficult. A forensic medical expert told the court that it could not be established by expert methods that she had administered lethal injections at all. What the court relied on instead was her own withdrawn confessions, the medical records, and the evidence of colleagues: an assistant nurse who had been on shift during several of the deaths and had both seen injections given and been told about them, and other nurses who said she had spoken of particular patients in terms of putting them away.
The Budapest court convicted her on December 2, 2002, and sentenced her to nine years, and barred her permanently from nursing. The conviction at that stage was for attempted murder of several people and four counts of deliberate endangerment in the course of her profession, not for completed murder.
On appeal the Budapest Court of Appeal increased the sentence to eleven years, and set out the count case by case. In one instance she had given intravenous potassium and the patient died within minutes: that was completed murder. In two instances she had given morphine in doses that suppressed breathing and an expert considered this the probable cause of death: those were attempted murder. In four instances she had given Seduxen or Dolargan and the patient died some hours later, and the court held the causal link was not proved beyond doubt, leaving only professional endangerment. The appeal court said it had resolved every doubt in her favour and charged her only with what was proved to the exclusion of doubt.
The appeal court also rejected the framing the case had attracted in Hungary, stating that what she had done had nothing to do with euthanasia, and that it had disturbed public order and shaken confidence in the health service.
The figures need keeping apart. One completed murder was established. Two further deaths were treated as attempts and four as endangerment. Eight were charged. The larger numbers, thirty or forty, come from her own statements during the investigation and were never tested.