A gothic tale of morphine and murder in Flanders
Was it coincidence? Or was something more sinister behind the high death rate in the 38-bed geriatric ward of the public hospital in the picturesque Flemish Belgian town of Wetteren? Early last year, some of the nurses assigned to the ward, presided over by a short, plump nun named Sister Godfrida, of the Apostolic Congregation of St. Joseph, decided to compile a secret diary about the peculiar goings-on there. In their record they listed not only the continuing deaths and the circumstances surrounding each one but also various incidents of what appeared to be extreme maltreatment of old people. To their horror, the nurses gradually realized that the common element in all these episodes appeared to be their cherub-faced Sister Godfrida.
What their diary entries would eventually uncover, however, even the nurses were not prepared for. Last week Sister Godfrida, 44, was in jail in nearby Ghent, and her neighbors in Wetteren, a quiet marketing town (pop. 25,000) in a stolid, conservative Catholic area of Belgium, were reeling from shock. The nun, a local woman whose name was Cecile Bombeek before she joined the Josephites, had been accused of stealing more than $30,000 from her elderly patients in order to support a morphine habit. Far worse, after she had been charged with theft, Sister Godfrida placidly confessed to killing three old people with overdoses of insulin because they had been "too difficult at night." But she did it "sweetly," she insisted, and none of the three had suffered. Admitted Dr. Jean-Paul De Corte, a member of the hospital's governing board: "It could just as well be 30 people as three."
Belgian police formally charged the nun with three murders. Meanwhile, a judge ordered crews into the graveyard to exhume not only the bodies of the three patients that Sister Godfrida admitted killing but also those of two other possible victims. While the police awaited the autopsy reports they needed before they could add more murder charges, embarrassed ecclesiastical authorities pondered a list of improprieties that violated most of the remaining Commandments and included several deadly sins as well.
Besides being addicted to morphine —drug abuse is a serious criminal offense in Belgium—Sister Godfrida was reputed to have carried on sexual relationships simultaneously with a retired missionary priest and with another nun who taught school in Wetteren. Her affairs were kept out of the public eye, but other members of her community knew about them. She and the teaching nun shared an expensively decorated apartment near the hospital. They frequently dined out together in the best restaurants; at other times, merchants recalled, they had expensive cuts of meat, fresh seafood and vintage wines delivered to their apartment. Sister Godfrida had to loot her patients' funds, police surmised, as much to finance her epicurean tastes as to pay for her drug habit.