{"id":20124,"date":"2019-06-06T15:36:57","date_gmt":"2019-06-06T15:36:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/associatednews.us\/content\/2019\/06\/06\/former-german-nurse-guilty-of-killing-85-patients-in-serial-murder-case\/"},"modified":"2019-06-06T15:36:57","modified_gmt":"2019-06-06T15:36:57","slug":"former-german-nurse-guilty-of-killing-85-patients-in-serial-murder-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/associatednews.us\/content\/former-german-nurse-guilty-of-killing-85-patients-in-serial-murder-case\/","title":{"rendered":"Former German Nurse Guilty Of Killing 85 Patients In Serial Murder Case"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bill Chappell<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n <\/a><\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n Enlarge this image<\/a>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n

\n Former nurse Niels H\u00f6gel was found guilty of killing patients in his care by injecting them with drugs and then trying to resuscitate them. He’s seen here in court, awaiting his verdict in Oldenburg, Germany.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Hauke-Christian Dittrich\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

<\/b>
\n hide caption<\/b><\/b>\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

toggle caption<\/b><\/b>\n <\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Hauke-Christian Dittrich\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

<\/span>\n<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Updated at 1:32 p.m. ET<\/strong><\/p>\n

Former nurse Niels H\u00f6gel \u2014 who has admitted to giving potentially lethal drugs to patients so he could try to resuscitate them \u2014 has been sentenced by a German court to life in prison for murdering 85 people.<\/p>\n

“Your guilt is unimaginable,” Oldenburg district court Judge Sebastian B\u00fchrmann said as he sentenced H\u00f6gel, according to Deutsche Welle<\/a>. “The human mind struggles to take in the sheer scale of these crimes.”<\/p>\n

It’s the latest judgment in what the local police chief in Oldenburg has called a “horrifying” serial killer case. H\u00f6gel is already serving a life sentence for killing two patients.<\/p>\n

The disgraced nurse’s victims ranged in age from 34 to 96, according to the district court in Oldenburg<\/a>. H\u00f6gel was found to have injected them with a variety of drugs that included the heart medicines ajmaline, amiodarone and sotalol, along with potassium and the anesthetic lidocaine.<\/p>\n

As the scope of H\u00f6gel’s crimes became clear, authorities exhumed dozens of bodies to test them for the cocktail of drugs he had administered to his victims. The true extent of his killings may never be known \u2014 in some cases, the bodies of people who died under H\u00f6gel’s care already had been cremated.<\/p>\n