Lucia de Berk, better known to the media as Lucia de B., is a licensed pediatric nurse from The Hague. In 2003, she was sentenced to life in prison for four murders and three attempted murders.

As it turned out later, it was all a big mistake.

Her case has become one of the most famous miscarriages of justice in the history of the Netherlands.

But… how could something like this happen?

Deliberate incidents or a tragic coincidence? Let’s set the scene. At the end of 2001, Lucia worked at the Juliana Kinderziekenhuis, a children’s hospital in The Hague.

Her co-workers became suspicious after a baby unexpectedly died of “possible unnatural circumstances” under her supervision.

Tragically, similar incidents had occurred during Lucia’s shifts before. Between September 2000 and 2001, she was present for nine instances of infant death or resuscitation.

Though there was no direct evidence against Lucia, the chances of these incidents occurring so frequently were said to be medically and statistically very unlikely.

How unlikely, you ask? Experts claimed there was just a 1 in 342 million chance.

Based on this claim, the Juliana Kinderziekenhuis Children’s Hospital decided to press charges against Lucia, and other hospitals in which she had been working over the years supported the decision.

The trial During her trial at the court of The Hague, the evidence seemed to pile up against De Berk. Besides the statistical unlikelihood of what had happened, her diary became the most important piece of evidence against her.

On the night of one of the incidents where a patient had died, Lucia wrote that she had “given in to her compulsion.”

However, the final conviction was based on an expert’s statement. The expert claimed that the first victim had died due to a non-therapeutic administration of digoxin.

He believed that at least one of the victims had died as a result of a crime.

Based on this evidence, De Berk was eventually sentenced to life in prison for the murders of four patients and the attempted murders of three others on March 24, 2003. She was imprisoned at Scheveningen prison.

In her appeal in 2004, De Berk also received detention with ‘TBS’ (coerced psychiatric treatment), but the psychological observation unit found no evidence of mental illness.

De Berk continued to plead her innocence while at Scheveningen prison. She spent five years behind bars before her case was reopened in 2008.

[more at link]