Trial Opens in 42 Water Torture, Drug Deaths in Vienna Hospital

Four nurse’s aides accused of killing at least 42 elderly patients with overdoses of medicine or water torture went on trial Thursday in Austria’s largest murder case since World War II.

Chief defendant Waltraud Wagner, who is charged with 32 murders and two more attempted killings, stared at the floor as state prosecutor Ernst Kloyber read an 88-page indictment to a packed courtroom.

Wagner became “mistress over life and death” as she and her alleged accomplices killed patients they found tiresome, Kloyber charged.

Irene Leidolf, 29, charged with four murders, wept as she answered questions. Stefanija Mayer, a 51-year-old native of Yugoslavia who is accused in 12 murders, pleaded guilty to helping Wagner in some murders that Wagner denies. Maria Gruber, 29, was charged with two murders.

Both Wagner and Leidolf pleaded guilty in some deaths but said they were mercy killings. Gruber pleaded not guilty.

The four women were detained in April, 1989, after a series of suspicious deaths in wards where they worked at Lainz hospital in suburban Vienna.

Kloyber dismissed the argument that the deaths were mercy killings, suggesting that the aides had other motives.

“It is only a small step from the murder of the incurably ill to the murder of those who appear to be incurably sick and from there to the murder of bothersome, cheeky patients,” Kloyber told the court.

“The next step is simply the killing of a patient whose life doesn’t seem to be worth anything. That brings us to the euthanasia practiced in the Third Reich. This door should never, never be opened again,” the prosecutor said.

Kloyber said Wagner began killing patients in 1983 after watching a nurse inject the sedative rohypnol into a young patient who then briefly stopped breathing.

She is also accused of inventing a deadly water torture that involved holding patients’ tongues and pouring water into their lungs.