SERIAL KILLER NURSE Ayumi Kuboki #truecrime

Ayumi Kuboki

Hospitals are where we go to get well when we are sick, and put back together when injured. But in some cases, those tasked with looking after the patients sabotage them or actively seek to harm them. This so sometimes due to something called Munchausen by proxy syndrome where a caretaker of some sort seeks to gain attention by causing emergencies in their proximity. Such as a fire fighter who is also an arsonist or nurses and doctors who poison their patients. The men and women of the medical field who commit such acts are often referred to as angels of death. Ayumi Kuboki falls in the latter category. She was a nurse at the Oguchi Hospital in Yokohama Japan and at least 3 lives were lost to her twisted urges in 2016 leading her to be called the Devil in White.

The terminal ward are the Oguchi hospital was having a bad year in 2016. Despite the nature of the ward, the rate of patients, especially elderly patients, passing away, had gone up significantly. 48 to be exact from in just a few months from July to September. The ward has only 42 beds so the turnover has grown exponentially.

On top of this there had been personnel issues at the hospital. Arguments between staff and vandalism of the medical supplies had led multiple people to resign or be fired. Unfortunately the truly evil member of staff remained.

Things came to a head when on September 20 of that year, a nurse noticed a strange thing when she dropped an IV bag she was taking of a deceased 88 year old patient named Nobuo Yamaki. When the liquid sloshed around it foamed, which was absolutely not normal so the nurse raised the alarm.

After all a life had just been lost after Mr Yamaki deteriorated then sadly passed away of unknown causes not long after having a drip started. But an autopsy soon showed that he had in fact been poisoned. At that point they just needed to find the source.

When inspected, the bag was found to contain diamitol which is a liquid antiseptic used to clean wounds and prepare a patient for surgery. At first, no one knew how the chemical got into the IV bass and so they Immediately checked the others on the floor and found something horrifying. There were small punctures in 10 of the bags meaning that the diamotol had been added using a syringe, likely by a member of the hospital staff. Even worse, some of the tainted bags had already been administered to patients.

One of them had been given to an 88 year old man named Sozo Nishikawa 2 days earlier. He had passed away after his condition had rapidly declined without an obvious cause. But, in an instant they knew that he had been poisoned.

As an investigation began, others were found to have been poisoned, with one more having lost their life to the unknown monster. Asae Okitsu was the youngest of the 3 proven victims at 78 years old. He had suffered respiratory failure 1 hour after an iv drip had been administered. Police needed a way to find the poisoner, but the chemical was stored in multiple places throughout the hospital.

They started by taking an inventory of the hospitals Diamitol and searched the employees belongings. When they came across one nurses bag they found some residue of the chemical in question. It was 29 year old Ayumi Kuboki who had been a registered nurse since 2007. When the investigators asked her coworkers about her, more than one had seen her acting suspiciously, including one saying he had seen her going into one of the patients rooms shortly before they expired. At the time she had not been assigned to monitor this patient.

There was also some strange footage of Kuboki wandering through the ward with a bottle of insulin. At the time there was no medical reason for her to be carrying it around. In large doses insulin can causes seizures and can be fatal. This was enough to bring her in for questioning, but many of the hospital staff were as well as this time.

As the investigation progressed, it became clearer and clearer that Kuboki likely had something to do with the fatalities in the terminal ward. So in June of 2018, they once again brought Kuboki in for questioning. This time, she quickly admitted that she had in fact injected the diamitol into the iv bags of at least 20 patients. With this confession she was charged with homicide in 3 of the cases.

Meanwhile, she was writing letters denying her responsibility. Eventually she stopped the facade of innocence and once again admitted what she had done. This is where it gets even worse. When asked why she did it, she said that she disliked having to talk to deceased patients families after they passed away. To this end, she poisoned them so that they would expire during someone else’s shift.

She is quoted as saying she found these conversations with loved ones troublesome and so wanted to avoid them at all costs. At one point a coworker had expressed suspicions about her having something to do with the rising death rate of the patients and she admitted that after this she fantasized about taking his life as well.

By December of 2018 she was charged with homicide. There were several other cases she was suspected of which did not have enough evidence to charge her with, but is is likely that she was behind many more of the deaths in the terminal ward. An investagiot is still ongoing regarding the 48 lives that were lost in during this time period.

Kubokis trial began on October 1 2021 with her defense arguing that she had mental deficiencies which reduced her culpability. This included schizophrenia but that was dismissed by the prosecution and she was declared legally sane.

While the death penalty was on the table, the claims of psychological problems was enough to avoid it and she instead received life in prison on November 9th. However, this sentence was not acceptable to either the defense or the prosecution and the case is currently being appealed to the Tokyo high court. Based on the evidence, it seems like the defense is playing with fire and I would not be at all surprised if she ended up on death row where she belongs.

#crime #evil #medical #nurse #creepy #listenable