Ruth L. Erikson was an 89-year-old White/Caucasian female whose death on December 17, 2020, was first publicly marked in the quiet language of an obituary: a longtime Richland Township woman, born in Hamilton, Ohio, remembered by family after dying at Concordia at Rebecca Residence in the West Deer/Allison Park area of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. At the time, nothing in the public memorial suggested a criminal case.
She was described as having died peacefully, and like many deaths inside long-term-care facilities, her passing did not immediately appear to draw public suspicion.
Years later, Ruth’s name emerged in connection with one of western Pennsylvania’s most disturbing nursing-home criminal cases. Investigators tied her death to Heather Irene Pressdee, a registered nurse who had worked at Concordia at Rebecca Residence. Authorities said Pressdee’s alleged pattern involved administering excessive doses of insulin to vulnerable patients in skilled nursing and rehabilitation facilities, including patients who either did not need insulin or were given far more than medically appropriate. Ruth’s death was identified in reporting as Pressdee’s first documented victim connected to the broader investigation, occurring in December 2020 before later deaths and medical emergencies at other facilities.
The case against Pressdee grew after her initial arrest in May 2023, when she was accused in connection with patients at Quality Life Services Chicora. By November 2023, Pennsylvania authorities filed additional charges and publicly connected her to a much wider series of alleged attacks across multiple facilities: Concordia at Rebecca Residence, Belair Healthcare and Rehabilitation, Quality Life Services Chicora, Premier Armstrong Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, and Sunnyview Rehabilitation and Nursing Center. Investigators said the conduct stretched from 2020 into 2023 and involved 22 patients, 17 of whom died. Ruth’s death at Concordia became part of that larger timeline, suggesting that what had once looked like an ordinary end-of-life passing may have been the beginning of a years-long pattern.
Pressdee was the central suspect and the only publicly identified person arrested in connection with the series. Prosecutors described the conduct as intentional, and reports said she admitted to administering insulin to numerous patients. The suspected motive, as reflected in public accounts of the investigation, was not robbery or a personal dispute with Ruth, but Pressdee’s alleged belief that certain patients should die or were suffering. Coworkers and investigators later described troubling comments and behavior around vulnerable residents, and families of victims were left to confront the possibility that their loved ones had been targeted in places where they were supposed to be protected.
In May 2024, Heather Pressdee pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder and 19 counts of criminal attempt to commit murder. The final plea did not publicly treat every death as a separate murder conviction by name, but it resolved the broader prosecution involving the patients authorities said she killed or tried to kill with insulin. She was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, plus an additional 380 to 760 years in prison. For Ruth Erikson’s family, the criminal case reframed her December 2020 death from a quiet nursing-home loss into part of a much larger story of betrayal inside the health-care system.
