Wikipedia – Lainz Angels of Death: Maria Gruber, Irene Leidolf, Stephanija Mayer, and Waltraud
Wagner made up one of the most unusual crime teams in 20th Century
Europe. The four Austrian women were nurse's aides at Lainz General Hospital in
Vienna who murdered scores of patients between 1983 and 1989. The group killed
their victims with overdoses of morphine or by forcing water into the lungs. By
2008, all four of the aides had been released from prison.
Wagner, 23, was
the first to kill a patient with an overdose of morphine in 1983. She
discovered in the process that she enjoyed playing God and holding the power of
life and death in her hands. She recruited Gruber, 19, and Leidolf, 21, and
eventually the "house mother" of the group, 43-year-old Stephanija
Meyer. Soon they had invented their own murder method: while one held the
victim's head and pinched their nose, another would pour water into the
victim's mouth until they drowned in their bed. Since elderly patients
frequently had fluid in their lungs, it was an unprovable crime. The group
killed patients who were feeble, but many were not terminally ill.
Investigators
criticized the hospital for meeting them with "a wall of silence" as
they attempted to look into a suspicious 1988 death. The aides were caught
after a doctor overheard them bragging about their latest murder at a local
tavern. In total, they confessed to 49 murders over six years, but may have
been responsible for as many as 200. In 1991, Wagner was convicted of 15
murders, 17 attempts, and two counts of assault. She was sentenced to life in
prison. Leidolf received a life sentence as well, on conviction of five murders,
while Mayer and Gruber received 20 years and 15 years respectively for
manslaughter and attempted murder charges.
In 2008, the
Justice Ministry in Austria announced that it would release Wagner and Leidolf
from prison due to good behavior. Mayer and Gruber had been released several
years earlier and had assumed new identities.
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In custody, the
“death angels” confessed to forty-nine specific murders. Wagner allegedly
claiming thirty-nine on her own. “The ones who got on my nerves,” she
explained, “were dispatched directly to a free bed with the good Lord.” It was
not always simple, she allowed: “Of course the patients resisted, but we were
stronger. We could decide whether these old fogies lived or died. Their ticket
to God was long overdue in any case.” [Michael Newton, Bad Girls Do It!: An Encyclopedia of Female Murderers,
Loompanics Unlimited, 1993, pp. 8-9]
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