Online Reporter
PARIS.—A French anaesthetist described by prosecutors as “Dr Death” has been found guilty of intentionally poisoning 30 patients and killing 12 over almost a decade as a top medic.
Frédéric Péchier, 53, once seen by colleagues as a “star anaesthetist”, was sentenced to life in prison yesterday after State prosecutors said he was “one of the biggest criminals in the history of the French legal system”.
The state prosecutor Christine de Curraize said Péchier was a “serial killer” who was “highly twisted” and had tampered with colleagues’ paracetamol bags or anaesthesia pouches to poison patients, triggering heart attacks.
Another state prosecutor, Thérèse Brunisso, said Péchier was not a doctor “but a criminal who used medicine to kill”. The victims were aged between four and 89.
The three-month trial had attempted to unpick Péchier’s reasons for poisoning patients during his work in private clinics in Besançon, in the east of France.
Curraize and Brunisso said the reasons were varied. In some cases, they said, Péchier intervened to resuscitate patients he had poisoned not because he wanted to save them, but to cover his tracks.
He wanted to show he was “all powerful” in contrast to his fellow doctors’ distress, they said.
The court heard he had acted to damage and discredit co-workers with whom he was in competition or conflict, targeting their patients to make them look incompetent.
Curraize said Péchier had a “need for power”. The court heard he poisoned patients to deal with his own feelings of inadequacy and frustration. Killing had become “a way of life”, she said.
Brunisso said Péchier’s crimes had two aims: “the physical death of the patient” and “the slow and insidious psychological attack on his colleagues”.
Péchier, who has 10 days to appeal, denied any wrongdoing throughout the trial, telling the court:
“I have never poisoned anyone … I am not a poisoner.” He was described by lawyers for the victims as emotionless and lacking empathy in court.
Péchier, whose father was an anaesthetist, was described as having had a privileged upbringing.
He lived in a large house with his cardiologist wife and three children before they divorced.
He had worked at two private clinics where patients went into cardiac arrest in suspicious circumstances between 2008 and 2017.
Twelve patients could not be resuscitated and died.
Over the course of the inquiry, investigators examined more than 70 reports of “serious adverse events”, medical terminology for unexpected complications or deaths among patients. Péchier’s youngest victim, a four-year-old identified as Tedy, survived two cardiac arrests during a routine tonsil operation in 2016.
Tedy’s father, Hervé Hoerter Tarby, told the court: “What happened to us is a nightmare. We trusted medicine and we feel betrayed.” —The Guardian
