Waltraud Wagner was a nurse's aide on Pavilion V of the Lainz hospital in Vienna, a city-run hospital whose First Medical Department cared for elderly and often frail patients. In April 1989 she and three other aides from the same ward were arrested on suspicion of killing patients. At her trial two years later the prosecutor called her the main culprit. In March 1991 a jury in the Vienna Provincial Court convicted her of 15 counts of murder, 17 of attempted murder and two of bodily harm, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment. She was released on parole in August 2008.
The case shook Austria. Federal Chancellor Franz Vranitzky described the killings as the worst crimes in the country's history, according to United Press International. How many patients died at the aides' hands was not settled. The four women first admitted involvement in 42 deaths, then retracted most of those statements; the court convicted them of far fewer.
The Lainz hospital in Vienna stood beside a nursing home of the same name, and both were run by the City of Vienna. The ward where the four women worked belonged to the First Medical Department, headed in 1989 by Professor Franz Xaver Pesendorfer. Its patients were elderly, many of them bedridden.
Wagner was 32 when her trial opened in February 1991, UPI reported. Her three co-defendants were Irene Leidolf, 29; Stefanija Mayer, 51; and Maria Gruber, 28. All four were nurse's aides, not trained nurses.
Little is known of Wagner's life before the case. Her date and place of birth, her schooling and her family have not been made public. Psychiatrists who examined her for the court testified that she did not have a psychopathic personality. UPI's report of their testimony described her as barely of average intelligence and neurotic, but otherwise of normal character. The Vienna health councillor, Alois Stacher, said at the time that neither patients nor relatives had complained about the aides or about the care on the ward, according to the Austria Press Agency (APA).
The court found that Wagner killed 15 patients and tried to kill 17 more. Testimony at the trial and later reports describe the means: overdoses of insulin and of the sedative Rohypnol, and drowning with water. Other aides said Wagner had coined a euphemism, "oral hygiene," for the drowning method, UPI reported. A pathologist testified that one of the exhumed bodies showed signs of drowning.
The aim, according to the APA's later reconstruction, was to kill in ways that would stay hidden from the doctors for as long as possible. Stacher said the women had used methods that were barely detectable, or not detectable at all, in clinical terms.
The prosecution put the figures in a different light. When the trial opened, the prosecutor, Ernst Kloyber, told the court that the ward's death rate was three times the normal rate when Wagner was on duty, and that her nursing station had used six times as many ampules of Rohypnol as another station, UPI reported. He said she had begun killing in 1982. Later Austrian reports give the period of the killings as 1983 to 1989.
Wagner did not deny everything. She told the court that she had given high doses of Rohypnol to ten patients who, she said, were about to die, and that she had acted out of compassion. Her lawyer said at the start of the trial that she would plead guilty to killing some helpless and incurable patients. In a 2022 overview of Austrian murder cases, the news magazine News reported that Wagner called her killings "Sterbehilfe," the German word for assisted dying. The same article said stress and staff shortages were cited as having driven the aides to kill.
Testimony at the trial painted a more troubling picture of motive. The son of one patient, a man who survived an insulin injection, told the court that Wagner had threatened his father after he wet the bed. Wagner, UPI reported, said she had given the injection because the man was a burden and she wanted him moved to another ward. The court convicted her of attempted murder over that injection, among others.
The prosecutor rejected the language of mercy. Kloyber told the court that the step from killing terminally ill patients to killing burdensome ones led to "that which was known as euthanasia in the Third Reich." He added: "And that's a door that should never be pushed open again."
Wagner was not alone on the ward. The prosecution said she showed the other aides her methods and that some killings happened in their presence, UPI reported. At trial her three former colleagues called her a "witch" and the mastermind. Mayer testified that Wagner had twice made her watch the drowning method, and that she had gone along with it because she feared losing her job.
Leidolf cried quietly while the 88-page indictment was read at the opening of the trial. Her lawyer, like Mayer's, said she would confess to killing some patients out of sympathy. Gruber pleaded not guilty.
According to the APA's account, suspicion on the ward began in the spring of 1988. Pesendorfer and his team looked increasingly into a possible misuse of sedatives, among them Rohypnol, Valium and Dominal forte, though at that stage no one spoke of killing. The aides then turned to insulin.
On April 1, 1989, Wagner and Mayer injected an 80-year-old patient who was not diabetic with insulin, the APA reported. A sudden drop in blood sugar in a patient without diabetes is suspicious in itself. The man survived. Interviewed by the APA in his hospital room on April 11, he said he could not remember the aide, had only wondered why he was being given an injection, and then felt dizzy. He wept as he spoke of having survived.
Pesendorfer called Stacher with what the councillor later described as a "more or less vague" suspicion, and the police were brought in. Stacher said afterward that, without confessions, the case could hardly have been solved from the medical side.
On Friday, April 7, 1989, at midday, Wagner and Leidolf made their first confessions at the Vienna police security office, the APA reported. That afternoon Stacher returned to his office on the Schottenring at about 4 p.m. and found two notes asking him to call the police president, Günther Bögl, and Pesendorfer. After speaking to Bögl he went straight to police headquarters.
Gruber and Mayer were arrested later. Mayer had at first been questioned only as a witness. Another woman, named by the others out of spite, was later ruled out as a suspect, the APA reported.
At her arrest Wagner went through a death book from the ward and marked 39 names as patients she had killed, UPI reported. She later retracted that confession. At the opening of the trial UPI reported that she had recanted parts of what she told police, saying she was unsure how many people she had killed. The four women together first admitted involvement in 42 deaths between 1983 and 1989, the Deseret News reported, before retracting most of those confessions.
On April 11, 1989, the investigating judge, Klothilde Eckbrecht-Dürckheim, said she had felt sick while typing the arrest warrants, according to the APA. Bögl, the police president, described the motive as roughly a misguided idea of euthanasia.
The trial of the four aides opened in the Vienna Provincial Court at the end of February 1991. The courtroom was packed with spectators and foreign journalists. The prosecutor, Ernst Kloyber, read an 88-page indictment. Wagner was charged with 32 of the 40 killings in the case.
Kloyber told the court that the victims were so numerous that the charges were "only the tip of the iceberg," and that how big the iceberg was "will never be known." Vienna's mayor compared the killings to Nazi medical experiments, UPI reported. The trial was expected to last a little more than a month.
Her former colleagues testified against her. The son of one surviving patient described her threat to his father. A pathologist gave evidence about an exhumed body. Psychiatrists described all four defendants as free of psychopathic personality. Testimony described the state-run hospital between 1983 and 1988 as understaffed and poorly supervised, UPI reported. In the week before the verdict, the City of Vienna pledged to renovate and modernize several geriatric wards in its hospitals.
The trial lasted 17 days.
The jury returned its verdicts on a Friday at the end of March 1991, and a three-judge panel set the sentences, the Deseret News reported in its edition of March 30. Wagner was convicted of 15 counts of murder, 17 counts of attempted murder and two counts of bodily harm, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Two of the women collapsed during the proceedings, the paper reported.
Leidolf received the same sentence, life, for five murders and two attempted murders. Mayer received 20 years for seven attempted murders and one count of manslaughter, and was acquitted on five other charges. Gruber received 15 years for two attempted murders, according to UPI.
The convictions across the four women came to fewer deaths than the confessions had suggested. The Deseret News in 1991, and the Associated Press in 2008, described the four as convicted of killing at least 20 patients.
In July 2008 Austria's Justice Ministry said that she and Leidolf would be conditionally released by the end of August for good behavior, the Associated Press reported in a story carried by CBS News. AP noted that a life sentence in Austria typically meant about 15 years in prison. A weekly magazine had reported that the two women were already taking supervised day trips from prison; the authorities declined to comment. AP set the news alongside the Josef Fritzl case and a public debate over whether Austria's justice system was harsh enough.
Wagner and Leidolf were released on parole on August 7, 2008, according to News. The two other aides had been released earlier, the magazine reported. The dates of their release have not been reported.
The hospital's name became tied to the case. Since the killings of the late 1980s, the old name Krankenhaus Lainz had a bad reputation, the APA reported, and the hospital was later renamed Krankenhaus Hietzing. The neighboring nursing home was renamed in 1994, from Pflegeheim Lainz to Geriatriezentrum am Wienerwald, though the new name never fully caught on. Separate irregularities uncovered in 2003 became known as the Lainz care scandal.
The number of victims is the central open question. The four aides first admitted involvement in 42 deaths, the Deseret News reported, and later retracted most of those admissions. At her arrest Wagner marked 39 names in the ward's death book, then withdrew that confession. The indictment charged 40 killings across the four women, 32 of them against Wagner. The jury convicted Wagner of 15 murders and Leidolf of five; Mayer and Gruber were convicted of attempts and, in Mayer's case, manslaughter, not murder. The prosecutor told the court the full number would never be known.
The start date also differs. The prosecutor said at trial that Wagner began killing in 1982. Later Austrian reports give the period as 1983 to 1989.
Wagner's own account, that she gave high doses of a sedative to dying patients out of compassion, was set against testimony that at least one patient was injected because he was considered a burden.
1982 or 1983: The killings begin, by the prosecutor's account (1982) and later Austrian reports (1983).
Spring 1988: Doctors on the ward begin looking into a possible misuse of sedatives.
April 1, 1989: Wagner and Mayer inject an 80-year-old patient who is not diabetic with insulin; he survives.
April 7, 1989: Wagner and Leidolf make their first confessions to Vienna police at midday.
April 11, 1989: The investigating judge speaks publicly of the arrest warrants.
February 1991: The trial of the four aides opens in the Vienna Provincial Court.
March 1991: After a 17-day trial, Wagner is convicted of 15 murders, 17 attempted murders and two counts of bodily harm, and sentenced to life.
July 2008: The Justice Ministry announces that Wagner and Leidolf will be released early.
August 7, 2008: Wagner and Leidolf are released on parole.