Ward at Night

On the night shift, the ward trusts the nurse.Between February 2003 and July 2004, Stephan Letter, a young nurse on a geriatric internal medicine ward at Klinik Sonthofen in the Bavarian Alps, killed at least twenty-nine patients using pharmacological agents stolen from the hospital's own medication stores. Sedatives to disable. Neuromuscular blockers to stop the heart. Deaths that looked, to every clinical eye, exactly like what they were supposed to look like: the natural endings of old, failing bodies in a place designed to manage old, failing bodies. The killings were undetected for seventeen months.The Ward at Night is the definitive account of one of post-war Germany's most disturbing criminal cases — and of everything that made it possible. Drawing on court records, forensic analysis, and the legal proceedings that resulted in Letter's conviction for twelve counts of murder, Francis Marks reconstructs not only the crimes but the institutional conditions, the pharmacological science, the forensic investigation, and the devastating human aftermath experienced by victims' families and surviving ward colleagues.This is a book about clinical trust — what it is, why it is necessary, and what happens when it is weaponised. A meticulous, morally serious account of how a care environment became the site of serial homicide, and what it cost everyone who trusted it.