Nurse Lucia de Berk was in jail for six years because of seven murders she had not committed

Lucia de Berk was a victim of one of the greatest judicial errors in the Netherlands, but she had always managed to protect herself from bitterness. “You just say to yourself: no, that doesn’t happen,” she said with typical simplicity of speaking on it TedxamsterdamWomen Congress In 2015. Yet her imprisonment took his toll. “The rest of your life in such a small box, it all grinds through your head.” After a failed cassation, she got a cerebral infarction, her right hand would remain numb.

The nurse from The Hague, who was convicted of lifelong in 2003, died on Friday at the age of 63, after a short sickbed. She was wrong for six years and then waited for another one and a half years at home the revision of her conviction. She was acquitted in 2010.

According to Ton Derksen, who threw himself into the case and has since wrote several books about judicial errors, the case of Lucia de Berk is even the biggest error in view of the accumulation of errors during her trial. The Emeritus professor of science philosophy never wanted to meet Lucia de Berk before she was acquitted in 2010. “I wanted to remain unbiased,” he once said in an interview with Omroep Gelderland. Only in 2014, when seeing the film by Paula van Oest about the case, did he realize how much she had suffered.

Another expert who attracted the business was professor of statistics Richard Gill. He was persuaded to seek the birch in the cell. “Such a sweet, humorous woman. Really moving,” he says. In nothing she was the ‘angel of death’, as she was called in the newspaper.

Tarot cards

De Berk was always found a bit strange in the department in the Juliana Children’s Hospital in The Hague. She had a preference for sinister literature and laid tarot cards. At the beginning of September 2001 Baby Amber died in a series of apparently inexplicable deaths in departments where the birch was always working. The director of the then Juliana Children’s Hospital in The Hague reported. He had calculated that there was a chance of 1 in 7 billion that it was merely a coincidence that she was always there. A week later he entered a press conference with his findings, on the same day that two aircraft bore in the World Trade Center.

Had a serial killer been active in a children’s hospital? De Berk kept to be innocent, but was convicted of seven murders and three attempts to murder. “I was always present when a child died,” she said in 2015. “I don’t know how that could.”

But little of the ‘switching certificate’ that led to her conviction led. A calculation that was commissioned by the OM pointed to a chance of 1 in 342 million that she had nothing to do with the deaths. In the article ‘A appearance of chance’ from 2004, in the science supplement of NRCthe Econometrist Aart De Vos already calculated a much higher chance of chance on the basis of another assumption and method. That was two months before the conviction.

Later, statistics professors also started to interfere with the business, including Richard Gill. He found errors in the calculation used by the OM, such as misunderstanding specific circumstances in a hospital. The chance that Lucia de Berks presence was pure coincidence at the deaths, drastically raised in Gills.

Natural death

The drivers behind the revision of her process were Derksen and his sister Metta de Noo, also nurse for her retirement. Their sister -in -law was involved as a pediatrician in the gathering of ‘evidence’, but they got suspicious. Derksens book The Lucia de B. case Led to a renewed investigation into the cause of death of Baby Amber, in which RIVM doctor and toxicologist Jan Meulenbelt concluded that there was no question of digoxin poisoning: Amber died a natural death. The switching certificate fell.

De Berk has extensively done her story in lectures and in the media, but in recent years she lived with her in the vicinity of her beloved Zuiderpark in The Hague. She also did not stir in the case of the British convicted nurse Lucy Letby, who has many similarities with those of the Berk. When Gill, in connection with his interference with the Letby case, was asked by a journalist to take a picture with Lucia de Berk, she announced that she no longer wanted to rise the case. “And she was completely right,” says Gill.

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