10 Serial Killers Who Got Away With It

7. Arnfinn Nesset

Murders: 27 upwards

Dates active: 1977-1983

By the looks of it, lots of doctors and nurses in the past have been inclined to murder, and it’s never a one-time thing either.

In this case, Arnfinn Nesset was a former nurse who then worked as a care home administrator in Orkdal, Norway. In 1977, when he became Orkdal Valley Nursing Home’s director, an unusual number of patients started dying... in fact, they'd been poisoned! This went unnoticed as, due to the age of the victims, the deaths weren't unexpected. That was until 1981 when an employee noticed the purchase of a large amount of ‘curacit’, a derivative of the poisonous curare used as a muscle relaxant.

Nesset was in charge of buying the drugs for the home, so was brought in for questioning soon after this discovery. He first of all said he had bought such a large amount of curacit to kill packs of wild dogs outside, but reluctantly then confessed to 27 murders of patients between 1977 and 1980. He is actually believed to have slaughtered as many as 138 over his 20-year care home career, but this is unclear as the drug can be incredibly difficult to detect in an autopsy with the passage of time.

He was finally convicted with a 21-year sentence in 1983, which was the longest possible under Norwegian law, and was released back to the streets of Norway in 2004.