Richard Angelo was born on August 29, 1962 to parents both working in the educational system. His mother was an economics teacher and his father was high school guidance consular for the Lindenhurst school district on Long Island.[1] He first came to the attention of the American public when he was suspected of poisoning Gerolamo Cucich at Good Samaritan hospital on Long Island. He was accused of injecting the patient with a drug into his I.V. and Gerolamo did not feel well after the injection so he paged another nurse to help him. Later it was found in his urine that he had amounts of Pavulon, which he was not prescribed, so Angelo was arrested for assault on the 73-year-old patient because he was the only person to match the description that was given to the police which was a ”heavyset man with a dark beard and glasses”. )[2]
Angelo was first suspected of these crimes on October 11, 1987 when he was a nurse working at the hospital and then later arrested for his crimes on November 15 of the same year. [3] He was found later to have poisoned at least 35 people at the hospital while working there for seven months, resulting in 10 deaths of the patients poisoned. He was using the drugs Pavulon and anectine to poison patients at the hospital so that when they went into cardiac arrest he could come by and save them.[4] He had gone to trial and by February 9, 1988; eight bodies had been exhumed by the Suffolk county district attorney’s office and they all had traces of the drugs that Angelo poisoned them with.
Angelo claimed that the reason he did all this was because he “wanted to look like a hero.” He poisoned patients at the hospital so that they would go into cardiac arrest and then he would come in and save them and look like a hero in front of his colleagues. [5]He was given the nickname the “Angel of Death” for killing the patients at the hospital. Eventually he was charged with four counts of murder and three counts of assault on his victims at the hospital.[6] Throughout the trial he would not pay bail for the fear of what the public would do to him if he was released which was a legitimate fear for him to have.
On January 15, 1989 he was convicted of 2 counts of murder, one count of manslaughter, and one count of criminally negligent homicide. He was 27 years old when he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms in jail without parole. He is now serving a 61 year sentence in jail in New York for his crimes of murdering and hurting his patients at the hospital.[7]