Maureen Pickering, a 79-year-old female resident of Woodstock, Ontario, was remembered by a friend as a “wonderful and beautiful lady” with a “cheerfulness and lovely smile.” Formerly of the nearby town of Tillsonburg, Maureen was a widow who had moved into the Caressant Care Nursing Home after the death of her husband, Hubert, in 2009. She was close with her cousins and special friends, who would have had no reason to suspect the peaceful end to her life was anything but natural.
On Friday, March 28, 2014, Maureen passed away at the nursing home. Her obituary noted her peaceful death and even extended special thanks to the staff at Caressant Care for their "wonderful care." For more than two years, her death was not considered suspicious. Like the other victims of a serial killer preying on the elderly, her death was attributed to the frailties of old age. The truth was far more sinister and would only come to light because of a confession from the killer herself.
The woman responsible for Maureen’s death was Elizabeth Tracey Mae Wettlaufer, a registered nurse who worked the night shift at Caressant Care. Over a period of seven years, starting in 2007, Wettlaufer murdered seven residents of the Woodstock facility. Maureen Pickering was her final victim there. In each case, Wettlaufer used the same method: a fatal injection of insulin, a drug that is difficult to detect in the body after death. Days after killing Maureen, Wettlaufer was fired from Caressant Care, not for murder, but for a series of medication errors, including giving one patient insulin that was prescribed for another. She had been suspended several times before for similar mistakes.
The shocking truth of the murders remained a secret until September 2016, when Wettlaufer, who had since left nursing, checked into a psychiatric hospital in Toronto. There, she confessed to staff that she had killed multiple patients with insulin. The hospital contacted the police, triggering a massive, multi-jurisdictional investigation. On October 25, 2016, Wettlaufer was arrested and charged with eight counts of first-degree murder. The investigation revealed she had told others about the killings over the years, including friends and a pastor, but no one had reported her to the authorities.
Wettlaufer told police that before killing, she would experience a "red surge" of anger, followed by a feeling of euphoria after the murder. Her confession detailed a horrifying betrayal of trust against some of society's most vulnerable members. In addition to the eight murders, she also admitted to attempting to kill four other patients and committing aggravated assault against two more.
On June 1, 2017, Elizabeth Wettlaufer pleaded guilty to all charges: eight counts of first-degree murder, four counts of attempted murder, and two counts of aggravated assault. The judge who sentenced her to eight concurrent life sentences, with no possibility of parole for 25 years, called her "a shadow of death that passed over them." Though she will be eligible to apply for parole in 2041, the judge noted it is unlikely she will ever be granted it. The case led to a provincial inquiry into the systemic failures in Ontario's long-term care system that allowed a serial killer to operate undetected for nearly a decade.
