The Pathology of Opportunistic Murder
"One of the things that jumped off the page for us is the high resident-to-staff ratios at these homes."
"One of our hopes is that there will be a recommendation along those lines."
"Another area where we think investments need to be made is with respect to improving and modernizing medication management for both the handling of insulin but also opioids."
Alex Van Kralingen, lawyer
"The best-case scenario is that the government, whoever is making the decision, actually listens and actually does something about the long-term care situation."
"The report is just a bunch of pieces of paper with a bunch of words on it."
"What matters is the people making the decisions and what they do with it."
Andrea Silcox, Woodstock, Ontario
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| Elizabeth Wettlaufer pleaded guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder for killing nursing home patients. Police now believe she committed additional attacks. (Dave Chidley/The Canadian Press) |
Andrea Silcox's father James Silcox was the first to die. Murdered at a a long-term care facility for the elderly and the frail, in August 2007 at Caressant Care, in Woodstock, Ontario, a facility overseen by the provincial government. His long-term care nurse, Elizabeth Wettlaufer now known as the worst serial killer that Canadian health care has ever reeled under, was never suspected of having killed a vulnerable, helpless old man. That gave her the green light to just go on killing, until seven more elderly people in her care were dead before their time.
Through it all, she was never a suspect. She herself revealed the crimes, when she sought treatment at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto in 2015. She informed health workers at the Centre that she had taken the lives of eight elderly people -- through the process of interviews presumably to lead to a therapeutic protocol she sought for herself. The interviewer immediately contacted police. And the news became a frenzied public revelation of institutional incompetence.
Her confession to the eight murders augmented by a descriptive admission of yet another attempt to kill another four in her care and assaulting two others, made up the grim story of her murderous spree and the disinterest of authorities at any level to investigate how and why it was that vulnerable, elderly people suddenly expired inexplicably. She injected them with a deadly amount of insulin, and then awaited the results.
There were warning signs. She had been fired from a northern Ontario hospital only months after her hiring because of suspicions of drug abuse and of theft. She had been fired much later by the Woodstock, Ontario long-term care home where seven people were murdered by her. And then went on to another placement at yet another long-term facility in London, Ontario, where her final victim met his untimely end.
In her seven years of employment at Carressant Care and then Meadow Park in London, the deadly toll she took was quite simply unnoticed. Without her self-incriminating admission after the death of eight people she could quite simply have continue her killing agenda with no one, apparently, any the wiser. A two-year investigation followed by public hearings ensued. Elizabeth Wettlaufer pleaded guilty to eight first-degree murders, four of attempted murder and two of aggravated assault.
The Province of Ontario oversees more than 600 homes holding about 78,000 residents, the largest and most complex long-term care system in the country. Their oversight so lax that one nurse succeeded in carrying out a years'-long deadly crime spree with the use of lethal insulin injections. She was sentenced to prison, with no chance of parole for 25 years.
Labels: Long-Term Care Homes, Murder, Province of Ontario, Wettlaufer
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, July 31, 2019
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