Angel of Death (19 page)

If they had harboured any suspicions, imagined for a minute that Timothy need not have died, then the news of the investigations at the hospital would have been easier for them to bear. As it was, the report that the police were enquiring into the deaths of four children and, worse still, the revelation that Nurse Allitt had been sent on extended leave, hit them like a bolt from the blue. For the first time Robert and Helen began to wonder whether their Timothy had died needlessly.

The couple decided to visit the social worker who had always taken such an interest in Timothy’s welfare. He contacted the police at Grantham on their behalf and, within a couple of days, a sergeant and a policewoman were at their door.

Helen recalls: ‘We didn’t know what they would say when they came to the house. Up till then we had just accepted what we’d been told about Timothy’s death but, when the officers came, they said right at the start that they weren’t satisfied with the explanation that had appeared on the death certificate. They said Timothy’s death was part of their enquiry. We’d always imagined that
he’d been having an epileptic fit at the time he died, but they told us that hadn’t been the case at all.’

In a state of bewilderment Robert and Helen waited for the police to return with more details. ‘Eventually, when they came back, they near enough told us it was murder. They said they had found a very high level of potassium in Timothy’s blood.’

Helen, whose Christian values had given her strength to face her own terrible handicap, wanted to know: ‘How on earth can a person do such a wicked thing?’ The policewoman, unable to provide the answer, could only tell Helen: ‘We know how it happened, we know who did it, but we don’t know why …’

Could it be, wondered Robert and Helen, that the killer thought death would be a blessing for the brain-damaged boy with the twinkling eyes. ‘It was awful trying to understand why someone would want to harm our little boy,’ said Helen. ‘Someone who didn’t know Timothy might think they were saving him from a lifetime of misery. But, in his own way, Timothy was happy, he wasn’t suffering and he didn’t deserve to die.’

The police were worried how Chris and Joanne Taylor would react to the news that baby Liam might have been murdered. Two police officers visited Joanne’s best friend to ask how the couple were coping. The officers said they suspected ‘something had gone wrong at the hospital’, but told the friend not to tell Joanne or Chris about
their suspicions. A week passed before the friend burst into tears and blurted out her secret to Joanne.

Joanne recalled: ‘I was shaking with emotion. I couldn’t take it in at first. I didn’t want to believe it. Then I thought back to what Dr Nanayakkara had said when Liam died. He told us he was 99 per cent sure there was no medical explanation for his death. I felt so angry.’

The news hit Creswen O’Brien and her common-law husband, Mick Peasgood, hard. Their baby son Christopher had nearly died on Ward Four, but had now recovered. But they were still haunted by the cot death of their ten-month-old daughter, Michelle, two years earlier.

The first news of the investigation came in a telephone call from a Professor, three weeks after Christopher was discharged from hospital. He told the couple to expect a call from the police, but they couldn’t wait.

‘We rang the police at Grantham and asked about the enquiry, but they couldn’t tell us anything. We heard nothing more until the next-door neighbour came round and told us it was on TV. The report said they were investigating the deaths of some children. I was furious. I went to the phone box and rang the police and asked them what the hell they were playing at.

‘It was on TV and they had not had the decency to come and tell us.’

But when the police arrived two days later they said that Christopher’s case was still being investigated;
they were not sure whether or not he was one of the children affected. Weeks later the police returned with the news that they believed Christopher’s illness was suspicious.

Hazel and Robert Elstone returned home from hospital in Nottingham to find two policewomen on their doorstep. They said they wanted a statement about what had happened to their seven-week-old baby son Patrick on Ward Four where his heart had stopped beating twice.

The couple were baffled by the request until the two officers broke the news that they were investigating the ‘misuse of drugs’.

Hazel recalls: ‘They asked if Patrick was diabetic. I said he wasn’t, but I thought it was strange they should ask me that. It never crossed my mind that anyone had tried to kill him. It’s the last thing you expect.

‘He was in the safest place you could ever put a baby – in hospital. I told the police that Patrick had been having fits, and they said if he’d been given insulin then that might explain it. But I still cannot believe how anyone could harm little children. I asked the police time and time again, but they couldn’t tell me.’

One by one other parents found the police at their door asking questions, wanting to know what they remembered about the treatment of their children on Ward Four. At first the detectives would only tell the families they were investigating the wrongful use of drugs. There was no talk of babies being poisoned, never mind murdered, and
not the merest hint that a nurse was the prime suspect.

The police had been uncertain how the parents would react to the news that the care of their children was under scrutiny. Detectives half expected to hear one or two complaints, grumbles about this and that but, instead, almost all the families stood fair square in defence of the hospital and its staff. The overwhelming response was that the children had been well cared for on the ward.

Only one couple, David and Kath Crampton, whose baby son Paul had suffered mysterious hypoglycemic attacks on the ward, had seriously challenged the belief that all was well. The results of the medical tests were proving their suspicions to be well founded.

Five months after the start of the police investigation, Sister Jean Saville found it all too much to bear.

The dawning realisation of the enormity of what had happened on Ward Four hit many of the nurses hard. They were gentle, caring people who had devoted their lives to helping sick people get better. Some were so badly distressed that they had been receiving counselling. All of them had been questioned by detectives, many of them several times, in the never-ending search for the slightest clue.

But on Friday, 20 September, two weeks after a police file accusing Beverley Allitt had been sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sister Saville committed suicide.

She was the hospital's night services manager and one of the most senior nurses and respected members of staff. She had been on duty when a number of the youngsters had suffered unexplained heart attacks and respiratory failures, and she had helped in the battles to save young lives on Ward Four. She had helped save twin Katie Phillips and she had shared the anguish of Chris
and Joanne Taylor on the night baby Liam had collapsed. She was forty-nine years old, a highly experienced and devoted nurse. She and her husband Barry had recently been on a holiday to Australia to celebrate their Silver Wedding anniversary.

The police interviews at the hospital had gone on for weeks and everybody was well aware by then that the detectives were investigating serious matters. What had happened to so many youngsters right under their noses? It was almost impossible for some nurses and doctors to accept that children had been murdered and that the finger of suspicion was pointing at a colleague they had trusted. For some, their very faith in human nature was being destroyed day by day.

But then, as the police enquiry was drawing to a close, Sister Saville took a massive overdose of Paracetamol at her home in the village of Leasingham, near Sleaford, and killed herself. There had been no warning of what was to happen. Jean Saville had told her farmer husband about the police investigation and her dislike of the questions. But she had always enjoyed her work and he didn't think she was worrying unduly about the events at the hospital.

But Sister Saville left a suicide note in which she wrote that she had nothing to do with the deaths of the children. She said: ‘Please, please believe me.' There had never been any suggestion that she had been involved in the deaths of the children.

Like many of the nurses she hadn't wanted to be interviewed by the police, but she'd faced their
questions, answered them honestly and had never been a suspect. Nobody fully realised the effect the investigation was having on the kindly and popular nurse.

On the morning of her death Barry left for work but, when he arrived home at 7.45pm, he found a 100-tablet box lying empty and his wife dead in their bed in her nightdress. Her body was taken, ironically, to the Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, where she had spent so many years of her life, and placed in the mortuary to await a post-mortem examination.

Relatives were in no doubt what had driven Jean to take her own life. Her father-in-law, Ernest Saville, who lived just a few doors away, said: ‘Jean left a note saying she definitely had nothing to do with the deaths. I think it just got too much for her. She was so upset that the babies were dying on the ward where she was in charge. I believe that hospital affair just upset her so much she couldn't take it. She was perfectly happy otherwise.'

Several of the families who had seen their children survive on the ward, thanks to her skill, attended the funeral, determined to pay their final respects to a nurse whose devotion to saving lives had been legendary in Grantham. Sue and Peter Phillips were among those who would remain eternally grateful to Sister Saville. She had been the nurse who had refused to give in, battled against the odds and won, the night their baby Katie nearly died on the Children's Ward. They knew they had her to thank for Katie's life.

Sue Phillips recalls: ‘It had certainly got to Jean. When we spoke to her about it, Bev had already been given extended leave from the hospital. Jean told us she just couldn't understand how things had happened to the children. Everything was taking place on her ward and it was really upsetting her. She was disgusted.

‘Somehow she felt responsible and felt she should have been able to do something to stop it. She was such a caring person. She'd lived for nursing, she'd done so much to help people. When we heard she was dead, it was just awful.

‘There were really five deaths on Ward Four – the children plus Jean Saville.'

Her suicide raised obvious questions about whether she had ever come under suspicion herself. At the inquest into her death the coroner took the unusual step of clearing her name. Deputy Sleaford coroner, Glyn Williams, refused to read aloud her handwritten note which had made it clear she had intended to take her own life. But he announced: ‘I have made enquiries, and I have spoken to the police, and they are satisfied that she had no involvement in the tragic deaths which have recently occurred at Grantham hospital.'

Other nurses, too, had been finding it hard to carry on their duties. The strain became so acute that the Royal College of Nursing offered its members counselling to help them cope. Hospital manager Martin Gibson announced that a consultant had visited the hospital and agreed there was a need for a trained and sympathetic person to
consider ‘all aspects of the effects staff are feeling from the current situation'.

While the pressure grew amongst her former colleagues, Allitt remained on ‘extended leave'. But her ‘holiday' was interrupted when she was summoned to return to Grantham police station for more questioning.

This time the police directly accused her, for the first time, of murdering the four children and attempting to kill the others.

Instead of repeating her protests of innocence, Allitt remained tight-lipped, exercising her right to remain silent, refusing to answer one question. A detective said: ‘We had prepared all our questions but, as we went through each case, Allitt just stared ahead and said nothing. At the most she would say: “No comment.”

We put it to her quite forcibly that she had murdered the children but she didn't say anything. She didn't even tell us that she hadn't done it. All the interview was taped but there was nothing to listen to except our own voices.' She was eventually allowed to leave the police station with her bail extended.

Supt Clifton's file on the case, 118 pages long and more complex than anything he had ever prepared in twenty-five years as a policeman, was being slowly assessed by the Director of Public Prosecutions in London. It would be up to him to decide whether the detectives had managed to amass enough evidence to bring any charges.

Supt Clifton suggested there should be twelve charges in all, four accusing Allitt of murdering Liam Taylor, Timothy Hardwick, Becky Phillips and Claire Peck, and another eight offences alleging the attempted murder of Kayley Desmond, Paul Crampton, Bradley Gibson, Henry Chan, Katie Phillips, Christopher Peasgood, Christopher King and Patrick Elstone. The evidence was amassed and all he could do now was sit back and await a decision.

Parents whose children had suffered at the hospital were anxious to know just how long it would take. Their lives had been ripped apart by the enquiry and now, after five months, they thought they had waited long enough for some answers. A police spokesman predicted there would be news in five weeks or so and, when there was no word by mid October, the families ran out of patience, complaining that ‘red tape' had ground the enquiry to a halt.

They had formed their own Support Group, united by the knowledge that they all had children who had died or had survived the incidents on Ward Four. It gave them a chance to share their grief with others and to talk about their problems in a process that would help each one of them to come to terms with what had happened. Their leader was Mrs Judith Gibson whose five-year-old son, Bradley, was one of the survivors.

The strain of not knowing whether charges would be brought, and the fear that the case would be buried for lack of evidence, was beginning to
tell. The families decided to call a press conference at Grantham Guildhall to voice their growing concern. About twenty journalists from national and local newspapers, TV and radio stations scribbled furiously as first one parent, then another, revealed their emotions. Seven families appeared before the cameras, along with a Manchester-based solicitor, Ann Alexander, who had offered to help them bring a civil action against the hospital because of their suffering and the possibility of long-term effects on their children.