Patient Killers: Angel of Mercy Crimes and Disabled Subjectivities // Derek Newman-Stille

Derek Newman-Stille looks at the problematic lens through which much of the media and true crime novels examine 'Angel of Mercy' crimes as part of our guest edited month “My Dark Places.”

'Angels of Mercy' cases involve the murder of care-receivers by a care-giver, often a personal support worker, nurse, or doctor and often under the guise of “helping” the care-receiver. In 2016, Canadian nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer was arrested for eight murders, all of whom were elderly patients under her care. Her crimes, and others like hers, are intensely shaped by ideas of gender, notions of care labour, and numerous other entrenched ableisms.

True crime media frequently interrogates the motives of the 'Angel of Mercy' killer, often ascribing their motives as helping those they believe would be better off dead. This notion is shaped by systemic ableism and discrimination toward disabled people. Frequently, 'Angel of Mercy' true crime novels portray the victims of these killers as passive subjects, often only identifying them by their disease rather than salient features of their lives—such as the elderly patients in Wettlaufer’s nursing homes, or the terminally ill under Donald Harvey’s supervision. When aspects of the victims' lives are described, frequently these aspects are written in a way that evokes sympathy rather than elucidating the complexity of disabled lives and the complexity of disabled people's identities. Characters are largely described by the impact they have had on able-bodied members of their families or friends. This description of disabled people is, of course, not limited to true crime novels; the cultural imagination in general tends to represent disabled people as victims (of nature, of accident, or of circumstance), as tragic figures (as in the disability trope often called the "Tiny Tim"), and as having little interiority, instead focusing on the impact of disabled lives on the surrounding abled lives.

Systemic ableism does not just affect the writer of the true crime story, but also shapes the decisions of the 'Angel of Mercy' killer. When presented with the idea that disabled lives are without value and that they are shaped only by suffering, a killer may perceive death as being better than disabled lives. These notions are culturally entrenched, shaped by eugenics movements of the past (and present),and by cultural images of disabled people as suffering bodies. The 'Angel of Mercy' killer often perceives themselves as "saving"their victims; there is an entire subtype devoted to such motives in most modern criminology fields.

Yet our cultural imagination also shapes those in medical fields as care-workers who selflessly give their lives to helping others. The authors of these novels frequently have to begin by first distancing their killer from the wider realm of care-workers. The killers are described as "bad nurses" and these notions often shape the title of these true crime novels (as is the case for TheGood Nurse by Charles Graeber). The authors frequently list characteristics of good nurses in order to then illustrate that their killer differs from these notions. Interviews with those involved (including colleagues and the police) frequently focus on how different this killer is from other care-givers. In constructing a killer, the author needs to differentiate their killer from others in order to hold up medical professions as intrinsically driven by care work.

To further support the killer's difference from the “normal” care worker, authors frequently focus on the incredulity of the killer's colleagues and their disbelief that medical murders could be occurring. The process of medical murders is situated as unbelievable and frequently those involved in the investigations of the 'Angel ofMercy' killers will talk about how they dismissed evidence because it was so impossible to think of a care-giver as a murderer.

Care-giving and gender entwine in these novels, and are of particular interest when the murderer identifies as female. In these cases, the author not only has to distance the killer from the general field of care work, but also has to distance entrenched notions of women as care-givers from their subject. Attention is given in these novels to the idea that the woman is "unnatural" or "monstrous" for being a murderer, and often the woman's social life is interrogated in a way that male killers' lives are not. In particular, women's relationships to their families and their decisions about whether or not to have children are central to the discourse of the novel, and the killer's attributes are often described as unfeminine, unmotherly, and counter to family life. Attention is given to divorces and past relationships, and assumptions are made about their relationship to their own children (if they have them), or assumptions are made that they are unmotherly and therefore uncaring if they do not have children; all of which were questioned in the Wettlaufer case.

In order to further distance the killer from the "normal" care worker, the author will frequently investigate the background of the killer with an interest in spotting mental illness or any signs they can interpret as precursors to mental illness. This explanation is already pervasive in our cultural milieux. For example, in cases of violence by mass shooters, there is frequently a similar media interest in suggesting that the killer is mentally ill despite the fact that people with mental health concerns are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators. In both cases, authors and news reporters will frequently focus their attention on any signs of neurodiversity, suggesting that teachers noticed that the killer was distant as a child or that the parent suspected that their child was autistic. This use of ableism and assumptions about the killer functions as a tool for differentiating the killer from the "normal" care-giver, using ableist ideas as a way to construct an abnormal subject to differentiate from the assumed normalcy of the rest of the care-giving profession.

Ableism shapes these notions of the murderer as a disabled (mentally ill)subject at the same time as it dismisses the possibility that the murderer may decide to kill because of systemic societal ableism in the first place. In 2016, we still had this problem as Wettlaufer emerged. She is not the first, and, unfortunately, she will not be the last if the state of our culture and systemic ableism remains as they currently are.

Derek Newman-Stille is a queer, disabled, Canadian PhD student who teaches at Trent University. Derek is the 7-time Aurora Award-winning creator of the digital humanities project Speculating Canada and the creator of the website Dis(Abled) Embodiments. They have published in academia for Mosaic, The Canadian Fantastic in Focus, and Misfit Children: An Inquiry into Childhood Belongings, and in public for The Playground of Lost Toys and Accessing the Future. Derek combines art, academia, and activism in their work with disability.