The Lucia de Berk case was a miscarriage of justice in the Netherlands concerning the wrongful conviction for murder of a Dutch licensed paediatric nurse. In 2003, Lucia de Berk was sentenced to life imprisonment, for which no parole is possible under Dutch law, for four murders and three attempted murders of patients under her care. In 2004, after an appeal, she was convicted of seven murders and three attempted murders.
Her conviction was controversial in the media and among scientists, and it was questioned by the investigative reporter Peter R. de Vries. In October 2008, the case was reopened by the Dutch Supreme Court, as new facts had been uncovered that undermined the previous verdicts. De Berk was freed, and her case retried; she was exonerated in April 2010.
Suspicions and investigation
Colleagues started to notice that patients often died under de Berk's watch. Suspicions were raised when a five-month-old baby turned blue and died unexpectedly, only an hour after doctors had said that her condition was improving. Other colleagues requested an investigation. A post-mortem on the child indicated foul play.
Police investigators looked into all the deaths that had occurred between 1997 and 2001 while de Berk was working at three hospitals in The Hague: the , the , and the . In a few cases, evidence of poisoning through tranquilizer overdose was found, although in most cases no firm explanations could be found for the deaths.
Lucia de Berk was charged with killing thirteen patients and attempting to kill five others by injecting them with tranquilizers, painkillers and potassium. The alleged victims included four babies, several toddlers and some elderly persons.
Trial
De Berk's trial began in September 2002. Amongst the other evidence used against her were diary entries that the prosecution asserted showed that she was "obsessed by death". It was revealed that she had tried to burn these diaries to destroy them at the start of the investigation. A toxicologist, an FBI profiler and a statistician were also called by the prosecution as evidence. Another key piece of the evidence was traces of poisonous toxins found in the blood of three children she had been alleged to have killed, who had been exhumed as part of the investigation. Tests on the body of the five-month-old baby whose death had led to the initial suspicions of de Berk indicated that the baby had been poisoned. It was also noted that police had found books about crimes and murders in her home, such as Bad Blood: the Thanatos Syndrome Serial Murderer and Corpus Delicti: the 30 Most Notorious Crimes of the Low Countries. De Berk admitted that she had stolen these from the hospital library. The prosecution also highlighted the fact that she had forged a Canadian diploma in order to qualify for medical training, and de Berk also faced further charges for this falsification of records and the book thefts. De Berk admitted during the trial that she had lied about her nursing credentials and had stolen the books as well as medicine and patient files.
The prosecution argued that she had killed or attempted to kill patients by unnecessarily increasing dosages of medicines, or giving large doses of drugs that are difficult to detect. One of the trial judges noted that the cases in question seemed to follow a particular pattern, saying: "Lucia says she believes she sees a problem and starts to alert colleagues and soon enough a crisis occurs, did you perhaps raise the alarm first so that you could then introduce death?".
De Berk denied the charges, blaming the deaths and near-deaths on other staff in the hospitals or the quality of medical equipment. She said that the diary entries had been misinterpreted and taken out of context, and that the "compulsion" she had said she had given in to was actually her love for laying out Tarot cards for ill patients. One of the victims, a six-year-old Afghan boy, had died from a lethal dose of a sleeping medication; de Berk testified to the court "of course it's strange, but I don't know how it happened". Her defence argued that she was only more often present at deaths because she had a lot of concern for her patients.
During the trial proceedings were adjourned as de Berk was sent by the court for psychiatric tests at the Netherlands forensic psychiatric assessment centre, where she was found to have a personality disorder but to be completely responsible for her actions. De Berk had previously refused requests to undergo psychiatric tests. When a psychologist testified at the trial that de Berk was "theatrical, narcissistic, aggressive and suffering from a personality disorder", de Berk replied: "that sounds like me".