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What their diary entries would eventually uncover, however, even the nurses were not prepared for. Last week Sister Godfrida, 44, was in jail in nearby Ghent, and her neighbors in Wetteren, a quiet marketing town (pop. 25,000) in a stolid, conservative Catholic area of Belgium, were reeling from shock. The nun, a local woman whose name was Cecile Bombeek before she joined the Josephites, had been accused of stealing more than $30,000 from her elderly patients in order to support a morphine habit. Far worse, after she had been charged with theft, Sister Godfrida placidly confessed to killing...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: CRIME: The Nun's Story | 3/13/1978 | See Source »

Belgian police formally charged the nun with three murders. Meanwhile, a judge ordered crews into the graveyard to exhume not only the bodies of the three patients that Sister Godfrida admitted killing but also those of two other possible victims. While the police awaited the autopsy reports they needed before they could add more murder charges, embarrassed ecclesiastical authorities pondered a list of improprieties that violated most of the remaining Commandments and included several deadly sins as well...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: CRIME: The Nun's Story | 3/13/1978 | See Source »

Besides being addicted to morphine -drug abuse is a serious criminal offense in Belgium-Sister Godfrida was reputed to have carried on sexual relationships simultaneously with a retired missionary priest and with another nun who taught school in Wetteren. Her affairs were kept out of the public eye, but other members of her community knew about them. She and the teaching nun shared an expensively decorated apartment near the hospital. They frequently dined out together in the best restaurants; at other times, merchants recalled, they had expensive cuts of meat, fresh seafood and vintage wines delivered to their apartment. Sister...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: CRIME: The Nun's Story | 3/13/1978 | See Source »

...Sister Godfrida's peccadilloes escape the attention of officials? Dr. De Corte, who instigated the investigation that uncovered the murders, suggested that there had been a conspiracy of silence about the nun. She had finally been suspended last August and dispatched to a Ghent hospital, where she underwent an unsuccessful drug cure. Someone -police suspect the roommate, who visited her at the hospital-provided drugs during her stay. At a press conference, Dr. De Corte revealed that in January, when she returned unchanged, the geriatric-ward nurses decided to confront the hospital administrator with their growing diary of horrors...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: CRIME: The Nun's Story | 3/13/1978 | See Source »

...Sister Godfrida last week was undergoing psychiatric tests. If she is found to be mentally unstable, she may never come to trial...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: CRIME: The Nun's Story | 3/13/1978 | See Source »

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