Elizabeth Wettlaufer The Killer Nurse

By Pete Dover

There is something of the Kathy Bates about Elizabeth Wettlaufer. The great actresses' portrayal of Annie Wilkes in 'Misery' evokes a sense of similarity with photographs of the nurse from Ontario, handcuffed and looking strangely empty. Perhaps it is the hair, straight and of a style almost, but not quite, every day. Or it could be the slightly dumpy looks, creating a face that is pasty and unhealthy. Most likely it is the eyes – the windows on a mind where the view is too often one of the darkest, emptiest night...Elizabeth's criminal career began while she worked at the Caressant Care home in Woodstock, Ontario. Located handily in the middle of town, the long-term care facility had manufactured a good reputation locally. Indeed, right up until Elizabeth confessed to her serial killings, few had an inkling that something was very wrong with the nursing and retirement home. Or, indeed, that the helpful little night nurse who circulated with her clinking trolley of medications kept a very dark secret behind her smiling façade.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trellis Publishing
• Release date: Jul 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201672393

Book preview

ELIZABETH WETTLAUFER The Killer Nurse

––––––––

PETE DOVER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ELIZABETH WETTLAUFER

MICHELLE KNOTEK

MARY WINKLER

PAPIN SISTERS

CAROL BUNDY

CYNTHIA COFFMAN

LARISSA SCHUSTER

ALICIA SHAYNE LOVERA

BETTY LOU BRODERICK

A Nurse from Our Nightmares – The Murderous Reign of Elizabeth Wettlaufer 

There is something of the Kathy Bates about Elizabeth Wettlaufer.  The great actresses’ portrayal of Annie Wilkes in ‘Misery’ evokes a sense of similarity with photographs of the nurse from Ontario, handcuffed and looking strangely empty.  Perhaps it is the hair, straight and of a style almost, but not quite, every day. Or it could be the slightly dumpy looks, creating a face that is pasty and unhealthy.  Most likely it is the eyes – the windows on a mind where the view is too often one of the darkest, emptiest night.

Annie was, of course, famously a nurse; one who had a habit of sending her patients – elderly and weak – off to an early grave.  She’d experienced a tough upbringing and a failed romance.  She was a loner, one who was forced to enjoy her own company due to the absence of any other.

We don’t know if, like Annie Wilkes, Elizabeth Wettlaufer has a favourite author. One who (if chance should present itself) she would bring home from some accident or catastrophe, surround with stifling love and ensure he stayed with her, dependent and compliant, in order to finish his ‘greatest novel’. An undertaking which would naturally be dedicated to his somewhat unwanted angel of mercy.  But one thing we do know is that the similarities between Stephen King’s fictional murderess and the real life Canadian who dispatched at least eight elderly patients to an early death go beyond just the physical similarities they shared.

In fact, Wettlaufer fancied herself as a bit of a literary queen.  She published her own poetry online, writing under the name of Betty Weston.  One contained the following lines:

‘She watches some life drain

From the notch in his neck vein.

As it soothingly pools

It smothers her pain.’

Given the crimes she would go on to commit, those lines must be read with some trepidation.

Elizabeth’s criminal career began while she worked at the Caressant Care home in Woodstock, Ontario.  Located handily in the middle of town, the long-term care facility had manufactured a good reputation locally.  Indeed, right up until Elizabeth confessed to her serial killings, few had an inkling that something was very wrong with the nursing and retirement home. Or, indeed, that the helpful little night nurse who circulated with her clinking trolley of medications kept a very dark secret behind her smiling façade.

Elizabeth Mae Parker was born on June 10th, 1967.  Later, she added Tracey as an additional middle name, and an ‘e’ to the short-form Beth.  While those changing times around her birth might have been right in the heart of the high jinks of the swinging sixties, life at home for Bethe was no free and easy jaunt.  She was brought up in a strict Baptist home, under a restrictive regime led by her father.

Yet although her father was strict and unbending, the family were close. As Elizabeth grew up a strong bond developed between her and both of her parents.  Outside the home, though, life was more challenging.  As a girl, she might appear to be diminutive in size, but not in personality.  Yet appearances can be misleading.  The small and chubby kid might seem to bubble with enthusiasm, but in truth school was an ordeal.  She played goalkeeper for the field hockey team and was a trombonist in the school band.  But the fit for her was forced.  ‘She was often the odd kid out,’ remembers her neighbor and childhood friend Glyn Hart.  ‘She was shy and awkward a lot.’  Still, Bethe at least tried to fit in.  It was just that she didn’t know how to do so.

Perhaps a reason for this was that her home life, which she shared as a child with her brother, was stiflingly religious. Added to this, as adolescence beckoned, sexuality became an issue for her. Bethe was a lesbian, or at least held tendencies in that direction.  Some unsubstantiated reports talk of dabblings with other girls at High School during her school years.  Such adolescent experiments are hardly unusual, however. 

Yet her parents, her father in particular, believed homosexuality to be a sin, and Bethe was driven away from her sexuality.  While once again unsubstantiated, some of the blogs and accounts that naturally grow up around a sensational court case such as hers suggest that she was even sent on a camp to be ‘cured’ of her lesbianism during those crucial formative years.  The jigsaw that makes up a person’s life is created from numerous small, but important, pieces.

While many of the assertions about Elizabeth Wettlaufer are just speculation, what is more certain is that Bethe considered herself a lesbian, and somehow saw that as something wrong. The confusion her nature provoked promoted feelings that haunted her well into adult life.  One day, with a joy bordering on the unstable, she announced to friends in her tenement block that she ‘found God and wasn’t a lesbian anymore.’

The former nurse also suffered from drug addiction.  Twice she went into rehab to conquer her condition, which she claimed was fueled by the medications on the drugs trolley in the nursing home in which she worked.  Such was the nature of her role that she had access to these drugs without supervision.

When she was a child, however hard life was, Bethe seemed a girl who was determined to make the most of her lot.  After High School she earned a diploma in Religious Studies, taken at a bible college, then took a qualification at nursing school.  By 1995 she was a licensed registered nurse. 

By the time she had established herself at Caressant Care, she was moving up the ladder and earning close to $60000 per year.  A part of that was because she was more than happy to work night shifts.  More than happy.  Soon, a byzantine, troubled personality would seize the opportunity working nights presented and begin a killing spree that would turn her into one of Canada’s most prolific serial killers.

However, while it is undoubtedly the case that Bethe suffered from multiple mental health issues, she was far from an innocent victim whose actions were beyond her control.

‘She’d have temper tantrums if things didn’t go her own way,’ observed one former colleague. 

Her attitude towards her victims was complex as well.  She seemed to hold an illogical anger towards her male targetss, seeing in them aggressiveness and inappropriate behavior which she felt deserved punishment. ‘His time was up,’ she later said of the first man she killed.  For the women, she claimed that she was acting in their best interests, in her mind putting them out of their ‘Wettlaufer’ defined misery.  To her they were simply pets put down by an owner who means well but is uninformed about animal welfare.  Fundamentally, Elizabeth Wettlaufer liked to play God.  Both the one of the New Testament, and the one of the Old.

‘She disclosed that it wasn’t accidental,’ said Glyn Hart, ‘and then she disclosed that it wasn’t just one.’

Indeed, it was not. 

Yet what seems painfully apparent is that had Bethe not confessed to her crimes, they would not have been discovered. At her subsequent trial Wettlaufer was sentenced to a twenty-five-year term, without the possibility of parole.  Yet had she kept her story to herself, she would still most likely be free and practicing today.

An enquiry reached this conclusion, having looked in detail at all matters surrounding the murders, along with at least six failed attempts to kill other residents of the homes in which she worked.  Commissioner Eileen E Gillese said: ‘The evidence showed that no one suspected that Wettlaufer was intentionally harming those under her care – not the residents of their families.  Not those who worked alongside Wettlaufer, and not those who managed and supervised her.’ 

The commissioner also pointed out that as a senior nurse, Elizabeth was under the ‘indirect oversight’ of the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, which was responsible for inspecting the kind of institutions at which she worked.  Coroners had also investigated the deaths of some of the seniors who became her victims.  Not one of the individuals working at these offices suspected foul play had taken place.

Whether Bethe confessed to her crimes in an effort to stop is not clear.  Certainly, she later told friends of the guilt she felt for her actions.  She had given up her job in London, Ontario and enrolled for treatment in the Toronto Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.  It was while she was there that she confessed to a psychiatrist that she was, in fact, a serial killer.  He was not the first to hear Bethe’s confessions.  A lawyer had earlier advised her to keep her news secret.  However, following the report of the psychiatrist made to the police, Bethe took matters into her own hands, emailing the College of Nurses of Ontario to resign her position as a registered nurse.  She had ‘deliberately harmed patients...and was being investigated by police,’ she said in an email to the organization.  Her resignation was a case of too little much too late as far as her victims and their families were concerned.

While police decided whether to charge the 49-year-old nurse on eight counts of homicide, she was required to sign a peace bond which placed her under curfew and banned her from providing any form of health care.

Already struggling, despite her good salary, to pay her rent, she was forced to move out of her two bedroomed apartment and head back home to her parents.  Yet for all her troubles, to neighbors it seemed as though Elizabeth Wettlaufer could not come to terms with the seriousness of her situation.  An anonymous neighbor spoke to the Canadian newspaper, The Star.

This neighbor told the paper that Bethe has asked her what residents of the block were saying about her.  The neighbor replied that there were suspicions she had killed someone.  The former nurse’s reaction was hardly what might have been expected under such circumstances.  ‘And she starts laughing her head off.  She was hysterical.  She thought the whole thing was funny,’ reported the female neighbor.

Another neighbor, Nancy Gilbert, explained how the odd little nurse was frighteningly open – indiscreet perhaps – about her drug problem.  She was quite prepared to tell Gilbert that she took the drugs to which she was becoming addicted from the medical cart she ran at the nursing home.  ‘She said she got to the point where she didn’t want it to control her life or her job,’ said Gilbert, referring to Wettlaufer’s first of two spells in rehab.

A note on Facebook written by Bethe herself perhaps offered a further insight into the instability in her mind.  This was recorded in October 2015 and refers to her own battles with addiction. ‘My own voice called me in the darkness,’ she wrote, employing somewhat dramatic language, ‘Other hands lifted me when I chose the light.  One year ago, today I woke up not dead.  365 days clean and sober.’

But despite the rather flowery method of expression, once more we see the strong side of Bethe coming through.  The one that coped at school with being the outsider.  The one determined to see through