Germany: Doctor suspected of murdering 15 patients to be tried from Monday

Johannes M., 40, married with one child, could even be the biggest serial killer in recent decades in post-war Germany, newspapers report: 96 other suspicious deaths, including that of his mother-in-law, are currently under investigation, a spokesperson for the public prosecutor's office told AFP.

His wife's mother, who had cancer, died the weekend the couple visited her in Poland in early 2024. For the time being, "Doctor Death," as the weekly Die Zeit dubbed him, is officially being prosecuted for killing 12 women and three men in Berlin between September 2021 and July 2024.

He allegedly administered to his patients, aged 25 to 94, "without medical indication or consent," a sedative followed by a muscle relaxant. This combination causes "paralysis of the respiratory muscles" then "respiratory arrest and death within minutes," according to the prosecution.

In at least five cases, he is suspected of setting fire to his victims' homes to cover up his crimes. Most of them lived in working-class neighborhoods in the south or southeast of the German capital.

According to several German media reports, Johannes M. scientifically studied homicides as part of his medical doctoral thesis, which he completed in February 2013 when he was 28 years old. "Why do people kill?" began his thesis, in which he focused, among other things, on undetected homicides and the homicide of patients.

According to Die Zeit, his boss raised the alarm with the police at the end of July 2024. Within the Berlin home care service, she found it strange that so many of Johannes M.'s patients were dying so suddenly and that so many apartments were burning down at the time of their deaths.

The doctor was arrested in early August upon returning from vacation, initially for the murder of four patients. But the list of his alleged victims grew: it rose to eight in November, ten in February, and then fifteen in April.

The summer of his arrest, he is suspected of having killed two patients on the same day: on the morning of July 8, a 75-year-old man in his home in Kreuzberg, in the center of Berlin, then, "a few hours later," a 76-year-old woman, in the neighboring district of Neukölln, where he set fire to her apartment.

The arson attempt having failed, "he allegedly alerted a relative of the woman and claimed to be in front of her apartment but that no one answered the doorbell."

So far, Johannes M. has not confessed to the facts. The suspect "would have had no motive other than homicide," according to the prosecution. The prosecution is seeking a conviction with a recognition of special gravity, resulting in additional imprisonment and a lifetime ban from practicing his profession. At least 35 hearings are scheduled between now and next January in his trial.

This case echoes the case of a serial killer who was active in the early 2000s: Niels Högel, a former nurse suffering from "a severe narcissistic disorder," according to psychiatrists, was sentenced in June 2019 to life imprisonment for the murder of at least 85 patients in two hospitals in Lower Saxony, in northwest Germany.

Between 2000 and 2005, he caused cardiac arrests in arbitrarily selected patients and then attempted to resuscitate them, hoping to appear a hero to his colleagues. Investigators estimated at the time that the death toll could actually exceed 200, as many patients were cremated.