Here’s a scary story for the day before Halloween. A German nurse named Niels Hoegel who was convicted of killing six patients by injecting them with deadly drugs has admitted he may have actually killed as many as 100 patients. This guy is the adult equivalent of Kermit Gosnell. From the Washington Post:

Hoegel had already been sentenced to life in prison after being charged with at least six murders and several more attempts. But prosecutors pushed for a new trial after details indicated Hoegel may have killed 100 more victims, injecting them with deadly drugs such as lidocaine and calcium chloride, according to prosecutors who said Hoegel acted out of “boredom.”…

As his trial got underway Tuesday, Hoegel admitted that the accusations were largely correct. “That’s the way it is,” he said.

His mass murder went unnoticed for years, partially because many of the patients he treated were already critically ill and because Hoegel tried to resuscitate his victims after deliberately putting them on the brink of death. In some cases, patients survived the ordeal, but records show that fatality rates regularly increased when Hoegel was on shift.

Hoegel was caught red-handed injecting unauthorized drugs into a patient in 2005 but no one at the hospital intervened. It was only after he killed another patient the same way that the hospital finally called the authorities.

The Guardian reports that the real number of victims may be as high as 200 but will probably never be known. The worst part is his motive for this mass slaughter. He apparently liked the attention he received for his attempts to rescue the patients he had injected with deadly drugs.

Investigators say the final toll could be more than 200 but fear they might never know for sure because the bodies of many potential victims were cremated.

Hoegel appears to have followed a similar procedure each time, first injecting a medication that triggered cardiac arrest, followed by an often futile attempt at resuscitation.

Prosecutors say he was motivated by vanity, to show off his skills at saving lives, and by simple “boredom”…

Killing in itself was never his aim, according to one psychologist who evaluated him. When he managed to revive a patient, he was sated, but only for a few days, the expert said, adding: “For him, it was like a drug.”

Hoegel has already served ten years of his “life sentence” but the Post says a life sentence in Germany usually amounts to about 15 years.