One such killer is typical, in a number of ways, of all the others: a middle-aged nurse who was known to her coworkers in small-town Ontario as Bethe Wettlaufer. When the scholars were publishing their 2015 review of her fellow predators, Wettlaufer was winding up a decade-long killing spree that, to this day, would have gone completely undetected if she hadn’t decided to walk into a Toronto psychiatrist’s office and confess.
Eight people had died at her hands, she confided. She’d injected them with lethal doses of insulin between 2007 and 2016. There were, she added, six more victims who survived, in three different long-term care homes and one private residence. These were men and women with long, vibrant lives and families who loved them and were shocked by their sudden passing but accepted the institutional write-offs, the lack of autopsies, and the shrugging condolences: Old people. They die.