Insulin and Dunedin

I saw a movie recently that was a semi-fictionalized telling of Dr. Colin Bouwer's murder of his wife in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1999-2000.

The real life events are compelling, (he killed her slowly over a period of months, with insulin in her tea mostly, and through an injection only for the coup de grace, in what must have been for her an excruciating and inexplicable decline from good health) but the movie makers didn't manage to do much with it. They would probably have been better off abandoning the trappings of fiction altogether and doing a straightforward documentary.

For those who don't know, Bouwer was the head of the psychiatric department at the University of Otago -- see the photo above -- and the head of psychological medicine at Dunedin Hospital. He was, if anyone would be, 'above suspicion' among the people of both town and gown.

A doctor can of course write prescriptions and obtain as much insulin as he may need for such crime. But Bouwer was apparently concerned about leaving a paper trail if he prescribed the medicine for any of his real patients. So he created prescriptions for imaginary patients. That proved to be his undoing.

"It ain't the crime, it's the cover-up that gets you."

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