Nurse's Resentment

Among his many patients in the East German town of Waltershausen, fiftyish Fritz Rudloff was known as a kind and gentle man. "He took real pride in healing the sick," said one of Rudloff's friends. But because he was only a male nurse and not a licensed doctor, Rudloff nursed a deep-seated resentment against those more qualified to heal than he. Beyond all of them, Rudloff resented most the stiffly disciplinarian chief surgeon at Waltershausen Municipal Hospital.

One day early this year, the chief surgeon, a stern moralist as well as a martinet, learned that Rudloff was involved in a clandestine love affair with a female nurse on the staff. The chief surgeon told them bluntly to break off their romance or get out. Rudloff bowed to the edict, but his resentment deepened. Soon bad luck began to attend the chief surgeon's practice. Three of his patients, well on the road to recovery after their operations, suddenly took a turn for the worse and died. In each case, death was attributed to postoperative complications and the bodies were cremated. Nobody noticed that shortly before each death Nurse Rudloff had withdrawn a small amount of arsenic from the hospital stores.

Two months ago, as a fourth patient of the chief surgeon's returned to robust health, Rudloff was particularly careful to make a note of his home telephone number, in case of unforeseen accident. "That won't be necessary," the patient's wife told the nurse. "My husband will be coming home very soon." But Rudloff was persistent. "One never knows," he said darkly. A day or two later, when the patient suddenly died, his widow demanded an autopsy. A lethal dose of arsenic was discovered in the corpse. Confronted, Nurse Rudloff confessed to killing all four patients, just to discredit the chief surgeon. From East Germany last week came word that Rudloff the resentful nurse had been sentenced to death by guillotine.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.