Dutch court acquits nurse of killing 7 patients, prosecutors apologize for her years in prison

Dutch nurse acquitted of being a serial killer

AMSTERDAM — A Dutch nurse who served more than six years of a life sentence for allegedly murdering seven patients as a serial killer was exonerated Wednesday, and the country’s attorney general personally apologized for her ordeal.

The ruling ended a bizarre legal odyssey during which the country’s judicial system — right up to the Supreme Court — interpreted evidence wrongly, including statistics, autopsy results, and the nurse’s diaries.

“I’ll have to let it sink in a little while,” a beaming Lucy de Berk told reporters after the verdict clearing her of all charges was read.

The nurse is now a free woman and will receive a financial settlement from the government.

Looking back on the complex case, doubts were present from the time of the original verdict, but the forensic evidence in the patients’ deaths wasn’t seriously re-examined until a group of legal experts lobbied on De Berk’s behalf.

De Berk, now 49, was released from prison in 2008 pending a retrial after an extraordinary review of her conviction — which had been upheld by the country’s Supreme Court.

During last month’s retrial, prosecutors conceded the evidence they had used to build their original case was flawed and that they were not flexible enough after they became convinced of De Berk’s guilt early on in her case.

That led to Wednesday’s ruling, during which the Arnhem Appeals Court found that none of the deaths in which De Berk had once been implicated were even definitely unnatural.

Attorney General Harm Brouwers said he wanted to restore De Berk’s reputation.

“I’ve offered my apologies for what happened to her,” Brouwers said, adding that the ministry was negotiating a financial settlement with her lawyers.

De Berk was arrested in 2001 after a 6-month-old baby died while De Berk was on duty in a hospital in The Hague, in an incident initially thought to have been a poisoning.

After De Berk’s arrest, investigators uncovered what they saw as a trend of deaths and near-deaths in suspicious circumstances while she was alone with patients.

Prosecutors charged her with 13 killings and five attempted murders in Dutch hospitals between 1997 and 2001. All her alleged victims were very young and disabled or very old and ill.

She was convicted of three murders in 2003, including the baby’s death, and sentenced to life in prison as a serial murderer. Prosecutors at the time said De Berk may have seen herself as an angel of mercy, delivering death to patients who were suffering.

Wednesday’s ruling said a new analysis of the death of the baby that sparked the case was ambiguous at best. That made it impossible to argue that the baby had been killed, “much less that the baby’s death was the result of intentional action” by De Berk.

Trial judges heard testimony by a statistician who put the odds at one in 342 million that it was mere coincidence she had been on duty when all the incidents deemed suspicious occurred.

That calculation was challenged and later proved bogus, but in 2004 appeal court judges upheld De Berk’s sentence and convicted her on four additional counts of murder and three of attempted murder.

Her sentence was unusually heavy by Dutch standards, in part because De Berk continued to deny wrongdoing and had shown no remorse.

During her initial trial, judges accepted as evidence entries in De Berk’s diaries in which she wrote about a “strange compulsion” and a secret she would take with her to her grave. On Nov. 27, 1999, the day an elderly woman died in her care, she wrote that she had “given in” to her compulsion.

Wednesday’s ruling found there were no signs the elderly woman’s death was unnatural and there were many innocent explanations for the diary entries. It formally dismissed all charges.

“With respect to the other deaths and life-threatening incidents, the court believes that investigations have uncovered no facts or circumstances that could give grounds for suspecting an unnatural cause,” the ruling said.