The Caretaker

TW: murder

1.

As I waited for the EMTs to arrive I stood over her body and remembered the first time I had thought about killing her. It had been one of those passing thoughts that come in a moment of anger.

If I smothered her with her pillow, they would probably never know. They'd just assume she died in her sleep.

At that moment, it had felt like more than a passing thought. It had felt like a desire.

I could feel the longing to pick up the pillow and lay it over her face. I would just have to hold it down until she stopped breathing.

She’s a fairly heavy sleeper. I wonder if she would even struggle.

For a moment, I had thought I might actually do it. The urge had frightened me, and I'd quickly left, closing the door to the bedroom so I wouldn't wake her. 

That had been two years ago.

But now it had finally happened. She was actually dead. I couldn't believe that after all these years I was finally free!

I was really and truly free. Or almost free. There were a few more things that had to be taken care of before this woman was truly gone for good from my life.

But after that? After nearly a decade of slowly giving up my life for that woman, I would have it back once and for all.

She was dead.

I was free.

My heart stuttered when the knock came at the door.

I took one last look at the woman I had called Aunt Claudia, smiled briefly, and then went to let in the three EMTs who were waiting outside.

I already knew that they wouldn't be allowed to declare her dead. She'd have to be transported to the ER one last time so a physician could do the honors. I had done my research. I was ready for the next steps.

Okay, I thought as I led them to her bed, let’s do this.

2.

When I was younger, I was the type of person who helped others. I liked helping others. It felt good to help others. I was the crazy woman who would answers shopper's questions at the store, even though I didn't work there. I was the person who would offer recommendations to total strangers while standing in line. I was the type of person who constantly got asked for directions because people could tell by looking at me that I would help them.

I was proud of how helpful I was. I knew I had the ability to be empathetic to others' problems and I prized that quality in myself. It was a quality I required in the people I hired to work with me. I believed you had to put yourself in someone else's shoes to really understand where they were coming from.

Growing up, I was the child that other adults told their children to emulate. The helpful one, the respectful one, the well-behaved one.

As a teenager, I witnessed my grandmother get repeatedly yelled at by her daughter who lived with her. I could never understand how she had so little patience for her own mother. To make up for it, I would go out of my way to help my grandmother to make up for my aunt's nasty behavior.

It was because I was so helpful that I ended up helping Aunt Claudia, a childhood friend of my mother's. She had always claimed that I was her favorite and as a result, we were as close as if she’d actually been my aunt.

But it was also because of Aunt Claudia that I stopped helping people.

3.

I didn’t always wish for her to be dead. That didn’t start to happen until after her husband died and she had no one else to help care for her.

Aunt Claudia and her husband had been a family to me when my own family had moved away. I had spent time with them, and I was always happy to help if they asked. But after his death, I learned that Aunt Claudia needed a lot more help. He had done so much more than I had realized.

I also learned that nothing was ever her fault. Someone or something else was always to blame.

“I would have known where to find that if you hadn’t cleaned up in here” was her answer to a missing item.

“My blood sugar wouldn’t be all out of whack if that doctor hadn’t changed my meds” she’d rant as I watch her eat something sugary.

“What do you mean I’m late on my payment? I sent you a check, you must have lost it!” was her reply to the bill collectors on the phone.

In addition to never taking responsibility, she hung on to everything – old newspapers, junk mail, old clothes, old medicines, even food that had expired and this made her house unsafe and unsanitary to live in.

Because I cared about her, I felt I had no choice but to step in and take over where her husband had left off. But what had started out as a labor of love, quickly become a burden of time.

I cleaned, I paid bills, I took her to appointments. I kept track of her medical problems, kept a list of her meds, her allergies, and her past surgeries.

Because I was keeping track of things, she decided she didn’t have to anymore. She stopped speaking at doctor’s appointments and expected me to explain what was ailing her. She left all her appointments for me to schedule. She stopped driving, so I had to drive her. I didn’t want to take away her freedom, so I bent over backward to accommodate her wishes and demands. She left all the decision-making to me, but when I would make a decision, it was often met with great resistance because she didn’t like what I had decided.

I quickly began to feel like taking care of her was akin to trying to herd cats. It was time-consuming, frustrating, and often futile.

While trying to take care of her, I had run out of time to take care of my own life. While I did her laundry, mine piled up. While I washed her dishes, mine sat dirty in the sink. While I looked after her health, mine began to suffer.

If I tried to take time for myself, she would complain about how my extracurriculars were taking too much time away from her.

“You know how much I rely on you. I’d be so lost without you. I’m not trying to be selfish; I just can’t do it on my own.”

I soon began to cringe every time she would tell a stranger “My Melanie takes such good care of me! I’m so lucky to have her!” and I would feel ashamed as dark thoughts flitted through my mind when they would confirm how lucky she was indeed to have such a caring niece.

If I got frustrated with her she would say “I never wanted to be a burden!” and she would say this with tears pooling in her eyes so I would feel guilty for feeling like she was a burden.

I soon began to understand why my aunt had been nasty with my grandmother because I had begun to respond harshly to Aunt Claudia. The things she said would to anger me. Her tone of voice angered me. Her constant neediness angered me. Everything about her had started to anger me!

To try to get rid of my anger, I joined a caregiver support group. I had hoped to find advice on how to handle this increasingly needy adult who acted like a five-year-old so much of the time.

At first, I took some solace in the knowledge that I wasn't alone. But then, I began to get angry with the other caregivers who were themselves being treated like doormats, like servants, at the beck and the call of the sick and elderly. I wanted to rage against these people who would come to the group to complain but would seemingly never take any of the suggestions on how to take care of themselves or how to put down boundaries.

And then, I realized I was so angry with them because I was one of them!

The very people I couldn’t stand – I was exactly like them. I was the doormat! I was the slave!

I decided then, it had to change.

4.

Did you know that insulin was once considered the perfect murder weapon? You see, because insulin occurs naturally in the body, it was believed to be an unprovable crime.

The problem with an insulin overdose, however, is that it will leave physiological effects that show up in a postmortem. Things like dilated pupils, excessive sweating, or even seizures.

I know this because I did my research.

I have no doubt that insulin had been used successfully as a murder weapon in the past, but in 1957, Kenneth Barlow was the first person to be convicted of killing someone with insulin.

Another famous conviction was Beverly Allit in 1984, a nurse who killed 3 children by injecting them with insulin.

More recently, in 2017, a health care worker in Germany killed six of his charges with insulin before the authorities caught on.

But that was the problem. The authorities did eventually catch on.

The details in every case vary of course, but what I was amazed to learn was how many of the victims weren’t even diabetic! That’s just sloppy. You can’t give insulin to a non-diabetic and expect to get away with it. Needle marks can be found by an attentive coroner and excess insulin remains in the tissue after death. It is not an undetectable murder.

When thinking about killing someone, you also have to consider what motive the police will tie you to.

When Kenneth Barlow killed his wife, it was because she was pregnant, and he didn’t want the baby. Apparently, he didn’t want a wife either.

Poor Beverly Allitt was diagnosed with Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome – the need to make someone sick so she could save them. Her problem was that she didn’t always succeed in saving them.

And in the case of the German health care worker, he already had a record. He was an ex-con who became a home-visit nurse who robbed his elderly clients. After stealing from them, or determining they had nothing to steal, he would drop them as clients. At some point, he must have decided that killing them was a much tidier ending. Like me, he probably thought “Who would ever investigate the death of an elderly person?” Apparently, someone did.

But I knew I was smarter than any of those other killers. For starters, Aunt Claudia was a diabetic. She had a prescription for insulin. Overdosing on insulin wasn’t an unlikely scenario for someone with poorly managed diabetes. They would never have suspected me.

But I didn't kill her with insulin.