Forensic Transmissions Episode 22: Elizabeth Wettlaufer Confession, Part 2
In the second hour of Wettlaufer’s confession, she goes into more detail about her crimes. Elizabeth, who has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, says she would hear a voice telling her to kill – not in her head, but in her heart. At first she thought it was either God or the Devil. After a while, she realized it was part of her, and this was a just a way to get out her stress and anger with her patients, and with the world.
“It seems so stupid now,” she says. Every so often, she clambers to her feet and tries to clear her head. Sometimes she slurs a little; she has taken two Vicodin given to her by her doctor, but claims she is clear headed and knows what she is saying and doing. She describes the urge to kill that came on during her nursing shifts like a “red surge” of pressure in her chest, a compulsion that went away only when she’d injected someone with an overdose of insulin. “I thought this was something God, or whoever, wanted me to do,” she tells the detective.
As a nurse, Wettlaufer must have know that an insulin overdose is a grueling, painful way to die. She admits she knew what she was doing. She also admits that she picked some of her victims because they were “mean” and difficult to look after, and she did not like them.
She notes which patients seemed peaceful and who fought the injection. And she speaks for longer whenever the victim is one she found frustrating to care for. She complains, of the male patients she killed, that they were “grabby,” reaching for her breasts and butt. And of Maureen Pickering, a 79-year-old woman with dementia, Wettlaufer says, “She was a handful. She just got harder and harder to look after and, one night, when I had to look after her … I was starting to get the feeling, that surge again. I thought, I don’t want her to die, but if I could somehow give her enough … to give her a coma or change her brainwaves, maybe make her less mobile, less hard to handle.”