BERLIN - A German palliative care doctor was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday for murdering 15 people with lethal doses of sedatives, and he remains under investigation for dozens more killings.
The court in Berlin convicted the 41-year-old of killing 12 women and three men during home visits between September 2021 and July 2024.
But presiding judge Sylvia Busch said the conviction for 15 murders may well be only a glimpse of his many crimes.
Prosecutors said during the proceedings that he was suspected of having killed more than 70 other people.
Detained in 2024, he is only partially identified in court records as Johannes M.
Busch described the man as a “serial killer” at the centre of an “unfathomable” and “extraordinary” case.
And as the court found his crimes carried a “particular gravity of guilt”, he was given the harshest possible sentence, making it much more difficult for him to ever win release.
The court also banned him from ever again practising medicine.
Death ‘within minutes’
The court ruled that he had killed not out of any compassion for his patients or a misguided sense of assisted dying, but instead by a drive for power over his victims.
Prosecutors had described the killer as having “a lust for murder”, saying the physician had had “no other motive for killing these people than the act of killing itself”.
The victims, all of whom were under his medical care at the time, ranged in age from 25 to 94.
The court found that he intentionally administered an anaesthetic and a muscle relaxant that “paralysed the respiratory muscles, leading to respiratory arrest and death within minutes”.
On at least five occasions, he allegedly set fire to the victims’ apartments to cover up the killings.
On Monday Johannes M confessed that he had “killed people” and told the court that “I despair at myself”.
He said he only now understood “the extent of the suffering” he had caused, the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported.
Arson to cover up murder
On one occasion, he killed two patients on the same day.
On the morning of July 8, 2024, he killed a 75-year-old man at his home in the central Berlin district of Kreuzberg.
A few hours later, said the court, he struck again, killing a 76-year-old woman in the neighbouring Neukoelln district.
His attempt to incinerate the crime scene failed when the fire did not catch, according to prosecutors.
Suspicions over Johannes’ M’s activities were initially raised by care services, leading to a police investigation. He was remanded in custody in August 2024.
To begin with, investigators looked into four cases, but the number of suspicious deaths continued to grow, with further cases still being looked into.
The case recalls that of the German nurse Niels Hoegel, jailed for life in 2019 for murdering 85 patients.
In another case, a palliative care nurse was sentenced to life in jail in November for the murder of 10 patients and attempted murder of 27 others with lethal injections.
