Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - This Nurse Murdered Her Patients - The Elizabeth Wettlauffer Story

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

Elizabeth Wettlaufer is a Canadian former registered nurse who confessed to murdering eight elderly patients and attempting to kill six others between 2007 and 2016 in long-term care homes in southwestern Ontario.

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So this nurse kind of goes crazy and just starts killing her patients. Now the nurse's name is Elizabeth. And Elizabeth is around 40 years old when this story starts and she's living in Ontario, Canada. Now Elizabeth, she's got all kinds of problems. She's struggling with addiction issues and relationship issues and mental health issues. Life is just not going well for her. But then one day in 2007, she gets a little bit of hope. She gets hired at a nursing home to take care of elderly people.

And this is great for her. I mean, it's a good job with good pay. However, a few days after being hired, things start to go south. Because Elizabeth, she's taken care of this 87-year-old dementia patient, and suddenly, she starts hearing a voice. She's thinking, oh, maybe this is like a demon or maybe this is some sort of God. But this voice is telling her to kill this patient. And so Elizabeth gets an insulin pin.

and she injects the patient with a really high dose of insulin. Then she leaves the room and she kind of just leaves her there to die. Now the other nurses, they notice something's wrong with this patient and they stabilize her and luckily she ends up surviving. And of course, no one suspects Elizabeth did anything wrong, you know, plus the patient has dementia so it's not like she can snitch. So then Elizabeth decides to do it again. One day, at work, she's working with another elderly,

patient with Alzheimer's. And Elizabeth, she finds this patient really annoying. Like he doesn't know where he is, he's been calling out for his wife all night. It's actually really sad. But Elizabeth starts getting that feeling again, that devil talking to her or however she describes it. And so she gets an insulin pin and she comes back and she injects the guy with 50 units of insulin, which is actually double the dose of the last time that she tried to kill a patient. The next day, the staff finds this man passed away in his bed. And again, no one sees anything out of the ordinary, elderly patients pass away all the time, so no one suspects Elizabeth.

So a few months later, she does it yet again. She unalives another patient in the exact same way as the previous one. But then, she stops. Like, no more murders for a while. However, that doesn't stop her from talking about it. Like, she feels like she's just got to tell people. Like one day she confesses to her girlfriend, just like randomly like, hey, you know, I killed two people at work. And her girlfriend is like, yeah, don't do that again, or I'll call the police.

And that's just kind of the end of the conversation. Like it never comes up again. Weird asses. Elizabeth also confesses to a nursing student what she did. But when the nursing student threatens to report her, Elizabeth convinces her that no one will believe her. So the nursing student ends up not reporting the confession. to anyone. And about two years go by, Elizabeth decides to get back in the game. So she's back at work, taking care of a dementia patient, and this patient is apparently being difficult and stubborn and refusing to take her meds and all that. So Elizabeth starts feeling that anger or hearing those

double voices or whatever it is, and that is when she snaps. And she gives this woman an overdose of insulin and the woman dies. A few weeks later, Elizabeth does it again. And this patient isn't being difficult or doing anything wrong at all. But Elizabeth sees her laying there quietly and she feels like she needs to die. So later that night, she injects her with a massive dose of insulin and that's it for her. While all this is happening, Elizabeth feels a lot of pressure from her job. I guess she finds it stressful to be in charge of so many patients. So to help her with the stress, she turns to pain killers. How does she get these pain killers? Well, she starts stealing them from work. Like she'll steal them from the drug supply, sometimes she'll steal them

from her own patients, sometimes she'll steal them from dead patients. But she gets her drugs, and you know, they relax her and they get her through her shift. And about two more years go by, and it's now 2013. And once again, her weird anger issues, devil voices, thing comes back and starts telling her to kill again, and she decides to unalive another patient at work. So she injects this 90-year-old patient with insulin multiple times. She gives her a bunch of insulin. In fact, she gives her so much that this patient starts to have a seizure before she, unfortunately, dies. So this death, I think due to the seizure of it all, is actually a traumatic experience for Elizabeth, and she finally starts to feel.

feel guilty about what she's been doing. So she drives to her pastor's house, because I guess she's religious. So she's at this pastor's house, sitting at his kitchen table, talking to him and his wife, and she confesses yet again to what she did. I guess she's like, I just killed someone with insulin. And the pastor and his wife, they aren't sure whether to believe her. So instead of reporting her, they decide to just pray for her and tell her, uh, if you murder her, you murder her, anyone else, we're going to report you to the police. And that's it. Elizabeth leaves and I guess they just forget about it from there. But then in 2014, boom, the nursing home finally fires her. But not for killing patients. She actually had a record of showing up to work drunk. She was suspended

from the job four times for medication related errors, and then she got caught giving the wrong medication to a patient. She's apparently a whole ass mess. So, Oh, the place fires her. But whatever, that's not going to stop Elizabeth, because she's still got those weird devil voices going on in her head. So she gets a few gigs working part-time at some other elderly care facilities and at one patient's home. And at some of these places, she, of course, unalives three more patients with insulin.

Now, at one point, she's working at a care facility and a pharmacist delivers four bags of painkillers to the. the place and Elizabeth is the one to accept them. Now, she's not about to let these pain killers go to waste. No, no. So she doesn't log them as received and instead she takes them home and she takes a bunch of them and she actually ends up overdosing and she ends up in the hospital. And because of this overdose, she decides to quit nursing completely and she checks herself into a rehab for a while. After rehab, she gets offered a new job at a school program to work with school-age children who have diabetes. And to be fair, Elizabeth does have a lot of experience with

insulin. Now, I don't know where this woman's morals lie because, you know, she keeps murdering elderly people, but she also does appear to have some sort of guilty conscience. And she actually gets worried that if she works around these diabetic kids, that she won't be able to control her impulses and that she might hurt one of the kids. And so, luckily, she passes on this job offer. And she decides to confess again. This time, she goes and talks to a lawyer. And I guess she's like, I killed a bunch of people. What do I do? And the lawyer's like, take your secrets to the grave, lady. So that doesn't work. So then she calls Narcotics Anonymous and says, I killed a bunch of people, what do I do? But I guess they don't believe her either. So like no one believes her.

But then in 2016, she checks herself into rehab again. And this time, she's determined to get someone to believe her. So for the next 20 days while she's there, she confesses her crimes to anyone who will listen. Patients, assistants, the psychiatrist, and the staff finally, finally, reports her to police, which is exactly what she wanted. And so, bam, she gets arrested. And I don't have a mugshot, but here is a picture of her getting arrested. And ultimately, she pleads guilty to murdering eight people and she's sentenced to life in prison.