‘Serial killer’ doctor convicted of 15 murders, under investigation for 70 more

(LifeSiteNews) — A German palliative care doctor has been sentenced to life in prison for killing at least 15 of his patients as he remains under investigation for more than 70 other deaths.

A Berlin court convicted a 41-year-old man identified as Johannes M. of killing 12 women and three men ranging in age from 25 to 94 during the span of about three years. 

Judge Sylvia Busch described the doctor as a “serial killer” in an “unfathomable” and “extraordinary” case, Courthouse News Service reported. He is suspected of killing over 70 other people.

The man told the court he thought was doing a good thing by sparing his patients “suffering and infirmity.”

“Throughout it all, I thought this was the best thing for everyone,” he said.

However, prosecutors argued that he did not kill out of a misguided sense of compassion but out of a “lust for murder,” with “no other motive for killing these people than the act of killing itself.”

The court found that the man administered to his patients an anesthetic and a muscle relaxant that “paralyzed the respiratory muscles, leading to respiratory arrest and death within minutes.”

He reportedly set the victims’ apartments on fire to cover up the killings at least five times.

It was shared in court that the man killed two patients on the same day: On July 8, 2024, he killed a 75-year-old man in Berlin and then killed a 76-year-old woman in a neighboring district only a few hours later.

Earlier in the trial, relatives of the victims expressed their shock at the doctor’s crimes, the BBC reported. The mother of the youngest victim, a 25-year-old woman, cried over the loss of her daughter. “She never said she didn’t want to live anymore,” the mother said.

The son of a 72-year-old woman murdered by the doctor said his mother had planned to go to the Baltic Sea with her sister. “My mother wanted to keep on living,” he said.

On July 6, Johannes told the court, “I despair at myself.” He said he only then understood “the extent of the suffering” he had caused and apologized, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily reported.

Johannes is only the most recent German convicted of “medical murder.” Nurse Niels Hoegel was a similarly prolific killer, having been jailed for life in 2019 for murdering 85 patients.

Late last year, a court in Aachen convicted a 44-year-old male palliative nurse of 10 murders and 27 attempted murders via overdoses of morphine, sedatives, and other drugs, mostly to reduce his workload during night shifts, prosecutors argued.