A German doctor is set to go on trial on Monday, facing charges of killing 15 patients with lethal injections. Investigators fear this grim tally may only be “the tip of a deadly iceberg.”
The 40-year-old palliative care specialist, identified by German media as Johannes M, is accused of murdering 12 women and three men between September 2021 and July 2024 while working in Berlin. He allegedly injected the victims, aged between 25 and 94, with a deadly cocktail of sedatives. In some cases, he is accused of setting fire to their homes in an attempt to cover up his crimes.
According to Die Zeit newspaper, a co-worker first raised the alarm about Johannes M last July after becoming suspicious due to the unusually high number of his patients dying in fires. He was arrested in August, with prosecutors initially linking him to four deaths. However, subsequent investigations uncovered numerous other suspicious cases, leading prosecutors in April to charge Johannes M with 15 counts of murder. A prosecution spokesman told AFP that a further 96 cases are still being investigated, including the mysterious death of Johannes M’s mother-in-law, who had been suffering from cancer and died the same weekend he and his wife visited her in Poland in early 2024, as per media reports.
Use of Muscle Relaxant Dubbed “doctor death” by German media, the suspect reportedly trained as a radiologist and a general practitioner before specializing in palliative care. According to Die Zeit, his 2013 doctoral thesis, which examined the motives behind a series of killings in Frankfurt, began with the chilling question: “Why do people kill?”
Prosecutors assert that in all 15 cases, Johannes M “administered an anaesthetic and a muscle relaxant to his patients… without their knowledge or consent.” The relaxant, they explain, “paralysed the respiratory muscles, leading to respiratory arrest and death within minutes.”
In five of these cases, Johannes M allegedly set fire to the victims’ apartments after administering the injections. On one occasion, he is accused of murdering two patients on the same day. On the morning of July 8, 2024, he allegedly killed a 75-year-old man at his home in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg. “A few hours later,” he is said to have struck again, killing a 76-year-old woman in the neighboring Neukoelln district. Prosecutors allege he started a fire in the woman’s apartment, but it went out. “When he realized this, he allegedly informed a relative of the woman and claimed that he was standing in front of her flat and that nobody was answering the doorbell,” prosecutors stated. In another case, Johannes M “falsely claimed to have already begun resuscitation efforts” on a 56-year-old victim, who was initially kept alive by rescuers but tragically died three days later in the hospital.
‘No Motive Beyond Killing’ Johannes M has not commented on the accusations against him. Prosecutors contend he had “no motive beyond killing” and are seeking a life sentence.
This case bears similarities to that of notorious German nurse Niels Hoegel, who received a life sentence in 2019 for murdering 85 patients. Hoegel, believed to be Germany’s most prolific serial killer, murdered hospital patients with lethal injections between 2000 and 2005 before being caught. More recently, a 27-year-old nurse was given a life sentence in 2023 for murdering two patients by deliberately administering unprescribed drugs. In March, another nurse went on trial in Aachen, accused of injecting 26 patients with large doses of sedatives or painkillers, resulting in nine deaths. Last week, German police revealed they are investigating another doctor suspected of killing several mainly elderly patients, “reviewing” deaths linked to the doctor from the town of Pinneberg, just outside Hamburg in northern Germany.
