Marie-Godfrida Cecilia Bombeek, alias Sister Godfrida, went down in criminal history as a drug-addicted, lesbian serial killer who murdered at least three people between 1976 and 1977. She was born in 1933 in the Belgian village of Overmere. At the age of just 15, Marie-Godfrida decided to join the Apostolic Congregation of St Joseph, not far from the small town of Wetteren, to become a nun. From then on, Marie-Godfrida – now known as Sister Godfrida – lived in the convent and worked at the municipal care home. Godfrida was regarded as a diligent and self-sacrificing nun who worked hard and was therefore quickly appointed Mother Superior. In the mid-1970s, she also became head of the geriatric department at St Joseph’s Hospital in Wetteren. Everything had been going normally up to that point, until Sister Godfrida underwent a complete transformation following the removal of a brain tumour. After the operation, she had been given morphine for the pain, to which she became addicted. Her personality had changed completely. The once-conscientious Mother Superior began drinking vast quantities of alcohol and had sexual relationships with a retired priest and a fellow nun, with whom she dined in expensive restaurants. For some time, the other nuns, who also worked in Sister Godfrida’s 38-bed ward, had noticed that an above-average number of patients died when she was on duty. They believed that Sister Godfrida, who openly used cocaine and morphine, was responsible for this. This was because jewellery and money had usually been stolen from the deceased patients. Sister Godfrida used this to buy her illegal drugs. Sisters Pieta, Franziska and Godive expressed these suspicions to officers at the Wetteren police station on 16 January 1978. They also testified that they had documented cases of abusive physical punishment of elderly patients by Sister Godfrida, both at the convent of the Apostolic Congregation and at St Joseph’s Hospital. Sister Godfrida was subsequently arrested. During police questioning, she confessed to having murdered 87-year-old Maria van der Gunst, 82-year-old Pieter Diggmann and 78-year-old Leon Maihofer by administering an overdose of insulin. Sister Godfrida, who was deemed not of sound mind and was admitted to a psychiatric institution, is believed to have killed up to 30 patients between 1976 and 1978. Sister Godfrida lived in complete anonymity until her death in 2019; she passed away at the age of 86 at the St Joseph Care Centre in Wetteren. Sister Godfrida also became famous through the film “Killer Nun” by the Italian director Giulio Berruti, in which Anita Ekberg played the lead role and which is based on her story.
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Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
