Angel of Death (16 page)

But the meeting ended with the experts deciding to prepare new and detailed reports reappraising the cases one by one; then a file could be sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions who would decide what further action to take. It would be many weeks before a final decision would be made.

The detectives and some of the medical experts adjourned for further discussion to the Blue Pig, a move that almost wrecked arrangements to take Professor Marks back to Guildford by patrol car.
Uniformed road traffic officers, who had been given the job of driving him home, combed the town looking for their VIP passenger. When, finally, they arrived at the Blue Pig they burst in so quickly that they silenced the entire pub. Regulars said they thought they'd been caught up in a police raid.

Sue Phillips was just about to go shopping when Allitt arrived at the house. She brought with her a letter from the police saying that her bail period, due to end in two weeks, would be extended, due to further investigation.

Peter Phillips, who was still doing all he could to help Allitt prove her innocence, comforted her with the view that the police obviously hadn't found anything in their investigations.

Looking relieved, Allitt offered to take Sue shopping in her car, just the two of them.

As they arrived in the town centre, busy with crowds of shoppers preparing for the weekend ahead, Allitt turned to Sue nervously and asked: ‘Are you sure you want to walk round town with me? People may see us. A lot of people are not talking to me any more. They may take it out on you'.

Sue told her not to talk rubbish.

But, as they walked past Marks and Spencers, they spotted another nurse from the hospital walking towards them – and Sue watched in amazement as they saw the nurse deliberately duck round a corner, quite obviously intent on
avoiding them. Sue felt even more sorry for Allitt.

The suspended nurse was still a regular visitor to the Phillips household; Sue and Peter were not aware that detectives were, by then, investigating the cases of Becky and Katie.

Saturday, 15 June, was an awful day. The rain was cascading down when Allitt arrived at the front door.

Katie was ‘playing up', Sue recalls, as Allitt joined the family for lunch. Afterwards, Allitt offered to take Katie for a walk in her buggy while Sue cleared up the lunch. It was raining outside, Sue questioned the wisdom of the venture but Allitt countered: ‘Don't worry, it will give you a rest.'

She got out the buggy, placed Katie in it, attached her protective hood, then dashed to the car in the pouring rain to get her own coat, and then set off.

She'd been suspended from duty, accused by the police of attempting to murder Paul Crampton and was now dashing off into the rain with baby Katie. Both Sue and Peter Phillips were so utterly convinced of her innocence, so sure the police were wrong, that they didn't give it a second thought.

Five short minutes later Allitt was back, bursting through the door ‘like a rocket'. She left the buggy in the hall and then, huffing and puffing as she tried to get her breath after sprinting down the road, she told them to telephone for a doctor straightaway because she was certain Katie was about to go into convulsions at any minute.

She told them: ‘Get a doctor. You must get a doctor.'

Sue heard Katie crying and ran to the buggy to find her face was ‘as red as a postbox', and she was sweating.

Oh no! Could this be Becky all over again?

Allitt was, by now, pleading with them – just get a doctor.

But the Phillips had no telephone of their own. Their car-valeting business had collapsed with the arrival of the twins. Sue had been unable to work and, amidst the ensuing financial chaos, they had just had their telephone disconnected. Allitt volunteered to drive Sue round to her parents, Bill and Hazel Garrett, to phone their GP.

The woman locum doctor responded so quickly that she pulled up outside the house at the same time as Allitt and Sue arrived back.

The doctor decided to take no chances and sent Katie back to Ward Four. Once again, suspecting nothing, Sue and Peter thanked Allitt for her swift actions. They felt that the nurse had done the right thing in reacting so quickly to the potential emergency. Peter recalls thinking she was ‘a real brick'.

Katie recovered rapidly in hospital, though the cause for her relapse was never detected.

But, while she was in hospital, Peter used the opportunity to speak to nurses during his visits, trying to gather any evidence that would help Allitt's defence.

His activities, however, infuriated the police
who were in the middle of a delicate murder investigation. Peter's DIY detective work, although well intentioned, was becoming a nuisance. They even considered giving him an official warning to ‘back off' or end up being arrested himself. If the senior detectives involved in the investigation were in any doubt about how strongly the Phillips felt about the situation, it was rudely spelled out to them when two detectives called at their house on Monday, 17 June. By then, the police had received the results of the blood tests on Becky.

The two CID officers arrived at the Phillips's home at 9am to ask Peter and Sue to accompany them to Grantham police station to see Detective Superintendent Clifton. Peter, by now wound-up like a watchspring by the obvious unfairness (as he saw it) of the police suspicions, couldn't hold back his anger.

‘If he wants to f.… well see us, he can f.… well come up here!' he snapped. He went on: ‘Look, we have told you lot everything we know about Paul Crampton and we just don't want any more.'

The police officers explained that there was something else that Supt Clifton wanted to tell them for himself. Peter demanded to know what they meant by ‘something else'.

Then came the bombshell.

It wasn't about Paul Crampton at all, they told him. It was about Becky and Katie.

The mention of their two babies' names was enough.

Sue and Peter went to Grantham police station, sitting together in the back of the unmarked police car, hardly daring to look at each other, let alone speak.

In the first-floor room at the stone-built police station, Supt Clifton was flanked by Detective Chief Inspector Alan Smith, Detective Inspector Neil Jones, Policewoman Jane McGuire and Detective Gerry Thorold.

Softly, the police broke the news. DCI Smith told them that the police had been investigating incidents involving several children. A professor had looked at samples of blood taken from Becky.

He went on: ‘We have found something in the blood sample.'

Looking across from his desk, Supt Clifton told them: ‘I have to tell you some bad news. We have found insulin in your daughter's blood which measures a level of nearly 10,000.'

Peter asked: ‘What does that mean?'

Supt Clifton told them: ‘It means your daughter was murdered.'

Sue remembers gazing out of the window at an oak tree, swaying in the breeze; she uttered not a word, her mind a total blank, in a state of shock. Peter reacted differently and began to cry, unable to speak. Neither of them could take in the enormity of what they were being told.

Sue broke the silence: ‘Do you know who is doing this?' she asked.

The police chief nodded.

Sue told him she'd spoken to Bev Allitt who had
told them she had been questioned about Paul Crampton.

Supt Clifton told her: ‘Yes, but she failed to tell you that we have also interviewed her about both your daughters and other children.'

The penny finally began to drop.

Peter asked: ‘What does Bev say?'

The police chief told him: ‘Don't worry about her.'

Sue believes they were the last of all the families involved to be told of the police suspicions.

News had already started to leak out to the press and, even as they left the police station, a TV crew was waiting outside. Quietly, they slipped out through a back door.

Alone with their thoughts, they started to look back, churning over in their whirling minds every detail of Becky's death, hunting for clues they might have missed. How, they wondered, could it be true? Sue had never accepted that Becky had died from a ‘cot death' because, right from the beginning, she knew it had been nothing like that. But being given the news that Becky had been murdered was like reliving the night she died. It was like her dying all over again, only this was worse.

They were driven straight home by the same two CID officers who had taken the full force of Peter's wrath. Now they were all silent.

Back in the safety of their own four walls, Sue and Peter needed to let the awful news quietly sink in, to come to terms with the mixture of shock
and blind anger building up inside them. But yet another unexpected problem was waiting for them.

When they reached home they were greeted on the doorstep by Peter's sixteen-year-old schoolgirl daughter Emma who told them: ‘Bev's been here while you were out.' She went on: ‘Bev wants to know whether she can stay here with us.'

Allitt had asked her if Sue and Peter had read that morning's newspapers which had printed the story of the police investigation. Emma told her truthfully that they had not. Allitt wanted somewhere to hide because eager newspapermen were trying to find her, she said.

Sue and Peter stood in virtual disbelief as Emma told them: ‘She wants to put her car in our garage and move in upstairs where they will not find her.' Emma had told her to call back later when Sue and Peter had returned. Sue turned on the kettle to make a much-needed cup of tea. They were both angry and appalled by Allitt's request.

Sue said later: ‘I couldn't believe my ears. After what we had just heard from the police, I couldn't take it all in. We had just been told that the police suspected her of poisoning both Becky and Katie, and here she was, asking us to help shelter her in our house.

‘Becky was dead and Katie was in hospital and she wanted to move into our house? She wanted us to protect her?'

The two CID officers, who had just driven them home, bluntly told Peter and Sue: ‘Just keep her
away.' They drove off to find Allitt to tell her not to go back.

She would never set foot in the Phillips' house again.

Beverley Allitt desperately needed somewhere to hide.

She had been turned down by the Phillips and she couldn't use the nurses' home because she had been barred from going anywhere near the Grantham and Kesteven Hospital.

Hotly pursued by newsmen, the young nurse turned for help to Tracy Jobson, her closest friend for two years. The two girls had worked at the same hospital, shared a house, been on holiday together and had rarely been apart. They knew each other almost like sisters.

Tracy, a lean girl with short, dark hair who worked in the intensive care unit at the hospital, had been one of the casualty ‘crash team' sent dashing to Ward Four to try to save some of the children. At the same time she had been sharing a rented house with Allitt in Grantham.

Like the rest of the medical staff she never imagined that the children were being deliberately harmed at the hospital where they both worked. There was never anything in Allitt's behaviour to ever make her suspicious.

Trusting her friend entirely, Tracy suggested that she move in with her mother Eileen, and her fifteen-year-old brother, Jonathan, who lived in a terraced house in Orton Goldhay on the outskirts
of Peterborough, thirty miles to the south of Grantham. No one surely would think of looking for her there. It was to be a move Mrs Jobson would live to regret for the rest of her days. During her four months as guest of the Jobsons, strange and bizarre incidents began to happen that would first baffle and, eventually, strike an awful note of terror.

It was mid June when Allitt arrived in Orton Goldhay to escape the reporters and TV crews who had gathered in Grantham. Mrs Jobson welcomed her with open arms and treated her like a daughter. Like Tracy, she thought the police had made a ghastly mistake.

The three women spent hours analysing the allegations, trying to prove Allitt's innocence. At one stage Allitt sat down and carefully wrote down on paper details of her every movement on Ward Four on the days when children had been taken ill.

Tracy recalls: ‘I used to put it to her: “What have you been doing?” But Bev had it all worked out. I believed her, of course I believed her, I believed what she told me. She would break down, start crying, and say if I didn't believe her she would kill herself. She said it hundreds of times.

‘She would look me in the eye and say: “I didn't do it. I had nothing to do with it.” And, remember, I didn't work on the ward and had no information about what had gone on there.'

She added: ‘People who don't know Bev will never understand how she is so normal, so convincing. She has an answer for absolutely
everything. It was difficult to believe that anyone could do this, let alone someone you think you know. She's not an obviously mad person – far from it.'

Mrs Jobson believed her too. She said: ‘When she was living here I never once suspected her. Bev is a very bright, clever girl.'

But, just days after Allitt's arrival, odd things began to take place behind the door of Mrs Jobson's neat and smartly decorated home.

Curtains in the bathroom were found with scorch marks where an attempt had clearly been made to set them alight. Then a knife from the kitchen drawer was discovered plunged through the pillow on her bed. Money mysteriously went missing and Mrs Jobson's purse vanished, only to be found later in Allitt's car. Bleach was spilled on the lounge carpet and also on a bed, leaving huge, unrepairable stains. Mrs Jobson's walking stick, left in one room, would vanish and reappear in another part of the house. And a dish moved from a shelf to a settee.

When Allitt was asked about these occurrences, she insisted it was nothing to do with her and tried to suggest that a poltergeist had taken over the house. The strange events suddenly took a more sinister twist when Mrs Jobson's Jack Russell, called Jack, coughed up the obvious remains of two tablets in the back garden. Allitt, who had been alone in the house, had run outside as Mrs Jobson returned from work, to announce: ‘Come quickly. Jack's ill.'