A nurse from the American state of Pennsylvania is said to have committed a series of murders at her workplace: the 41-year-old is suspected of killing patients with a fatal dose of insulin. 17 people died while Heather Pressdee was on duty. She had apparently ‘practiced’ killing on animals.
Pressdee was initially charged with the murder of two men, aged 55 and 83, and with the attempted murder of another victim. The indictment was recently expanded to include 19 other patients that Pressdee treated at five different nursing facilities between 2020 and 2023. The new charges include two counts of first-degree murder, 17 counts of attempted murder and 19 counts of neglect of a dependent, Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry said in a statement.
Prosecutor: Incidents “difficult to understand”
“The allegations against Ms Pressdee are disturbing. “It is difficult to understand how a nurse entrusted with the care of her patients could choose to deliberately and systematically harm them,” Henry said. A total of 17 of Pressdee’s patients have died, but authorities say she will not be charged in all of the deaths.
The victims were between 43 and 104 years old. “Pressdee often worked the medication cart and administered insulin during the night shift, when staffing levels were at their lowest and the facilities were quiet,” the agency said. She ensured her victims died before shift change to avoid a medical examination that could have exposed her machinations.
Suspect threatened with “pillow therapy”
In messages to her mother, she often complained about patients, colleagues and other people she encountered, for example in fast food restaurants, and threatened harm. She wrote to her mother: ‘I cannot work with this lady. She is receiving pillow therapy,” the 41-year-old apparently referred to a death by asphyxiation. She also lived out her murder fantasies publicly: in 2018, she wrote on Facebook: “Could kill a doctor today.”
Expert: “She experimented before she switched to humans”
Before she killed people, she apparently “practiced” on animals. “She has only been a nurse for five years. Before that, she was a veterinary assistant and one of her main duties was administering anesthesia to animals and euthanizing animals,” former Detective Tim Braun, who worked on a similar case, told Fox News Digital. “She experimented for years before moving on to humans.”
Source: Krone
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