An orderly at a retirement home in Spain on Tuesday confessed to the “mercy killings” of 11 residents by poisoning them with bleach, an overdose of insulin or a cocktail of drugs, reports said.
Following his arrest on Oct. 18, Joan Vila, 45, who worked at La Caritat home in the northeastern town of Olot, admitted to killing three of the elderly residents “to end their suffering.”
He told a judge on Tuesday that he had killed a further eight since last year, according to his lawyer, Carles Monguilod, quoted by the newspaper El Mundo on its Web site.
OVERDOSE
Two of the victims were given an overdose of insulin and six others a cocktail of medicines. All were registered as natural deaths by doctors at the home.
However, doctors alerted police after they found burns to the mouth and throat of an 85-year-old woman.
Vila then confessed he had killed the woman and two others in the same way, by forcing them to drink bleach.
The first killing was carried out in August last year, another later that year and the other nine this year, the newspaper el Periodico quoted Monguilod as saying.
The latest confession came 10 days after a judge ordered eight more bodies exhumed as part of an investigation into suspicious deaths at the home.
Vila, who is being held in the psychiatric ward of a prison, told the judge that only six of those eight were among his victims, Monguilod said.
The lawyer said Vila acted out of “compassion ... because they were suffering and he wanted to give them some peace.”
The Europa Press news agency, quoting from Vila’s statement to the judge, said he believed all the victims had “admired him and liked him,” although none had asked him to kill them.
“If I was in those circumstances I would like someone to help me die,” he told the judge.
TERMINAL ILLNESS
Most of the patients were suffering terminal illnesses, some with Alzheimer’s, and had fevers or were disorientated.
The newspaper El Pais said that in the five years that Vila had worked at the home, 59 people had died. Of those, 27 died while he was on duty, which was only at weekends and holidays.
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