The nurse imposter: a tale of medical fraud
Kayla was scheduled for surgery to remove endometrial tissue at BC Women’s Hospital in Vancouver in May of 2021. The attending nurse was a woman named Melanie. She was around 50, loud and boisterous, with clumpy mascara and frizzy black hair. Wearing a hospital gown, an already-anxious Kayla was disturbed when Melanie couldn’t insert an IV. The nurse tried and failed repeatedly, moving the needle around on Kayla’s arm. Eventually, she had to call a colleague over to help.
In a mugshot taken last summer in Ottawa, Cleroux appears under bad lighting with her thick black hair pulled back, her eyebrows unevenly pencilled in, the corners of her mouth turned down and her eyes crowded by enormous fake eyelashes. She has the dejected look of someone who knows the jig is finally up.
One student I interviewed—I’ll call her Rachel—was in Grade 10 that year. She remembers Cleroux for her heavy makeup, tight jeans and low-cut leopard-print tops. She says Cleroux would tell students stories about parties she attended on the weekend and intimated that she had both a husband and a boyfriend. As for her work, she didn’t seem to know what she was doing, teaching her students the kind of simplistic verb conjugation they had already covered in grade school.
At some point after leaving the Gatineau school, Cleroux picked up and moved again—this time to Calgary. She followed Joele Pharand Fournier, a friend and neighbour from the Ottawa area. It was, for a while, a cozy arrangement, with the two families—four adults and four kids, including Cleroux’s husband and five-year-old daughter—sharing a rental house. Fournier told thethat Cleroux was a caring friend, someone who would babysit and help make ends meet, someone who was always there.
Why did she keep going? Perhaps her trajectory seemed like the path of least resistance; it might be easier to continue with an old habit than work on establishing new ones. Maybe there was a thrill for her in pulling a fast one on the unsuspecting—what psychiatrists call the “duping delight.” N.G. Berrill, executive director of the New York Center for Neuropsychology and Forensic Behavioral Science, studies the behaviour of imposters.
Nault was conflicted. He wanted to give Cleroux the benefit of the doubt, and he could understand why someone might try to cover up an off-colour past to avoid being pigeonholed. “Just because someone’s been in jail doesn’t mean they’re a bad person,” he says. “I wanted to have an open, real conversation with her.” He invited Cleroux for coffee at the café next to the salon.
A representative from Royal Arch told me that Cleroux had been working for a third-party contractor when Royal Arch was informed she was not a registered nurse. The representative says Royal Arch hired an external nurse consultant to conduct an investigation, which ultimately determined there were no incidents involving resident care that violated B.C.
And yet, even after the alert, Cleroux soon found other nursing jobs. She moved back to Ottawa, where she again used the name Melanie Smith. She forged an impressive resumé, gaining employment at a fertility clinic and a dental surgery clinic. At the fertility clinic, Cleroux often monitored blood pressure and heart rates. She was present during egg retrievals and administered fentanyl. In late July of 2021, Cleroux tried multiple times to draw blood from a patient.
In Ontario, where Cleroux worked several times as a nurse, a valid certificate of registration from the College of Nurses of Ontario is required of all nurses who wish to perform procedures authorized to nursing in legislation, says Kristi Green, a spokesperson for the college. Green also tells me that employers are expected to cross-reference potential hires with both the college’s Find a Nurse online directory and its online list of unregistered practitioners. When I reached out to B.C.