10 Serial Killers Who Got Away With It

8. The Lainz Angels Of Death

Murders: 49 confessed (possibly responsible for 200)

Dates active: 1983-1989

Back in 2016, Vienna was named the world’s best city for quality of life, which could not have been said back in the '80s when these four women were deemed to have committed ‘the most brutal and gruesome crime Austria has ever seen’.

Maria Gruber, Irene Leidolf, Stephanija Meyer, and Waltraud Wagner were four Austrian women who worked as nurses' aides in Lainz General Hospital, Vienna. The hospital, for the most part, was the end of the road for most patients, being admitted with a variety of terminal illnesses or just old age... but that couldn’t have possibly been an excuse for these ladies to brutally murder up to 200 people within its walls.

The group started killing off patients in 1983 with high, illegal doses of morphine, insulin, and tranquilisers. These methods soon became mundane, and they turned their attention to more cunning ways to help them stay undetected. They would pin their victims down, hold their noses and force water into their lungs, which was harder to identify as the elderly were more prone to this happening naturally.

The women worked together calling themselves ‘angels’, and the only reason they killed the elderly patients was if they ‘annoyed them too much’, so they used to give them a ‘ticket to god’, killing them so they could no longer ‘bother anyone.’

Wagner later confessed that ‘holding the power of life and death in her hands was intoxicating’, as she was the first to kill an elderly patient who had asked her to ‘end her life for her’, escalating the whole situation out of control.

In February 1989, a doctor overheard the four nurses bragging and laughing about their latest kill, and they were finally arrested in April of that year. They were all sentenced to life in prison, but were all released back into the world by April 2008. Meaning these menacing murderers are out there with you, apparently now under different names.