Nurse accused of murdering patients read tarot cards to the ill

A DUTCH nurse, accused of murdering 13 patients with drug overdoses, yesterday told a court she secretly read tarot cards to the terminally ill “so they wouldn’t worry about their futures”.

Lucy Isabella Quirina de Berk, 40, faces 18 counts of murder and attempted murder for a series of deaths from February, 1997 to September 2001.

Her alleged victims ranged from infants to a 91-year-old Chinese judge from the UN war crimes tribunal.

On the first day of de Berk’s trial in The Hague, prosecutors detailed their case against a women they say was obsessed with death and ended the lives of infants, the elderly, and crippled because she felt they were not fit to live.

De Berk insisted she never broke the law and always acted in the best interest of her patients.

The charges cover a period when she worked as a temporary nurse at three hospitals in The Hague, where de Berk was on duty every time patients died. Some had been cleared for release, while others had terminal cancer.

“I never murdered anyone. I never even thought about it,” she said. “We were there to cure people.”

Prosecutors cited statements from former colleagues, who described her as hysterical, too involved with her patients, and said she was sometimes frightening. Prosecutors quoted from the defendant’s diaries, which she apparently tried to burn in her garden. In entries from the period of the alleged murders, de Berk called herself depressed, confused and said she had contemplated suicide.

The child of alcoholic parents, de Berk spent several turbulent years as a teenager in Canada after moving to Winnipeg from the Netherlands.

She was arrested while working as a prostitute in Vancouver and later applied to training courses with fake credentials, her indictment says.

While working at one hospital in The Hague, de Berk met with a social worker to discuss her problems and said she feared she had something to do with the string of deaths. “Lucy, why do you do these dangerous things,” she was quoted as having written in her diary. The entry, she said yesterday, referred to tarot card reading, which was “not done” in hospital circles.

She criticised her own behaviour in her writing, calling it “compulsive”. She vowed to take her deepest secret to the grave.

“What compelled you was murdering the patients, was it not?” prosecutor John Remmerswaal asked. “Can you explain how these people died?”

The judges and prosecutors challenged her to call witnesses to substantiate her claims about tarot card reading, but she said she couldn’t remember their names. “Did any of them survive?” prosecutor Remmerswaal asked the defendant.

“Reading the cards became compulsive. I did it so they wouldn’t worry about their futures,” she said.

De Berk gave her account of the death of a six-year-old Afghan boy, Ahmad Noory, who died of a lethal dose of a sleeping medication at the Juliana Children’s Hospital.

It was the first time de Berk gave up her right to remain silent and answered questions from judges and prosecutors about the circumstances of the deaths.

“I have a clear conscience. I didn’t do a thing,” de Berk told presiding judge Jeanne Kalk. “I only did what was best for the child.”