Angel of Death (25 page)

Michael Davidson, admitted after being accidentally shot in the stomach with an airgun, collapsed after a doctor injected him with a syringe prepared by Allitt; this caused his heart to stop. The prosecution alleged that Allitt had tampered with the drug. Michael survived.

Christopher Peasgood, admitted with a chest infection, turned blue and stopped breathing seconds after being left with Allitt. He recovered, then collapsed a second time with Allitt at his side. The prosecution said it was ‘not simply coincidence’ that he had collapsed the moment Allitt took over. She must have interfered with his breathing. Christopher survived.

Christopher King, admitted with vomiting, was alone with Allitt when he turned blue and stopped breathing. The prosecution alleged that Allitt used asphyxiation or a drug. Christopher survived.

Patrick Elstone, admitted with diarrhoea, stopped breathing and turned blue; his emergency alarm had been switched off. Patrick survived but with serious and lasting damage.

Claire Peck, admitted with asthma, was alone
with Allitt when she stopped breathing and turned dark blue. She recovered. Then she collapsed again while Allitt was alone with her. The prosecution alleged that she was poisoned with potassium, either injected or introduced through her drip.

Dorothy Lowe, a resident in an old people’s home where Allitt worked in her spare time, suffered a hypoglycemic attack. Allitt was seen giving her an unscheduled injection of insulin. She survived.

Jonathan Jobson, collapsed while on a trip to a Sunday market with Allitt and his mother Eileen. The prosecution alleged that he suffered a hypoglycemic attack after Allitt doctored a soft drink with insulin-producing tablets. Jonathan survived.

As the story unfolded, Allitt sat almost transfixed as if she had switched off. Very occasionally she flicked a darting glance in the direction of the jury. Mr Goldring, anticipating the inevitable question in the jury’s mind, raised the issue of motive. He said: ‘Why should a nurse do these things? The short answer is, we do not know. If you are satisfied she did it, you must convict her, even if you are baffled as to why’.

He went on: ‘You must not speculate on her mental state in your verdict. You have to decide, did she do these things? Not why’.

Mr Goldring began calling the evidence. One after another the parents were called into the witness box, giving evidence just a few yards across the court from where Allitt was sitting. For some it was too much of an ordeal to bear. Sue Peck was so upset she couldn’t face it, and her statement had
to be read to the jury. Chris Taylor choked back his tears. Mercifully his wife Joanne was spared the ordeal when she was not called. But she broke down in the public gallery and had to be led from court. Nobody knew just how much her emotions were in turmoil. She had only just been told that she was expecting another baby.

Doctors, nurses and medical experts followed the parents into the witness box. The saddest must surely have been paediatrician Dr Nannayakkara. The jury heard how he had been so unhappy with the post mortem results on the very first victim, Liam Taylor, that he had pleaded for a specialist paediatric pathologist to check the findings, but his request had been turned down. He also told how much he regretted bringing perfectly well Katie Phillips into the hospital for checks after the death of twin sister Becky. He told the jury: ‘I wish now I hadn’t’.

The trial was entering its fifth week when it came to a sudden halt. Allitt collapsed at Rampton while the court was in recess for three days for legal argument. She was rushed to the Bassetlaw Hospital at nearby Worksop in Nottinghamshire where doctors battled to keep her alive. Her barrister, Mr Hunt, announced that she was suffering from the severe effects of anorexia nervosa. She was being fed through the nose by ‘nasal gastric tube’ and she was ‘grossly underweight’.

Back in Grantham, the parents who feared the trial was about to be abandoned were furious. They were convinced it was just another cynical
piece of theatre from Allitt’s repertoire of feigned illnesses; a clever attempt to gain sympathy and escape justice. Chris Taylor was damning in his condemnation. ‘She’s just a very wicked and evil person. I’m sure she is just putting it on’. Sue Phillips snapped: ‘She’s just making herself ill again. It’s what she’s been doing for years’.

Back in court Mr Justice Latham and the two counsel were presented with a legal dilemma. How could the trial carry on without a defendant in the dock? After the months of detective work, painstaking analysis by the world’s medical experts and the agonizing ordeal of the families, was it about to end with no verdict at all? Allitt herself provided the answer. When Mr Hunt visited her in the specialist psychiatric wing at Bassetlaw Hospital she declared that she was willing for the case to continue in her absence, even though she would not be in the dock to hear the evidence against her.

When the court resumed on 22 March there was an empty chair in the dock where Allitt should have been sitting. Later she wrote a long letter to the judge explaining that she was fit to give instructions to her lawyers but she did not want to give evidence herself to the court from the witness box. Instead, she would leave it to her Counsel to present her defence. She also made it clear that she would not have wanted to give evidence herself, even had she been well enough to do so.

Instead, it was left to police officers to tell the jury just how strongly she had protested her
innocence when she was questioned by them. She told them she had done nothing wrong. In one interview with Detective Inspector Neil Jones she had told him: ‘It can’t be no fault I’m making. What can I do deliberately to do it? I wouldn’t know what to do. Something has happened, yes, but I just can’t help being there, can I?’

The Inspector told her: ‘You are a young lady, just been made an enrolled nurse. Have you got to prove your credibility on that ward or show them you are the best one?’. Allitt replied: ‘I have got nothing to prove. I just want to be a Staff Nurse. That is as far as I go’.

In five hours of taped questioning she still denied committing any offences. When she was asked about the attack on Paul Crampton she insisted: ‘I told you. I didn’t do it. I am telling the truth – God’s honour. I deny giving him anything whatsoever, other than the medication prescribed. I would not give anything maliciously’.

The detectives asked her if she had a problem, to which Allitt replied: ‘I tell you what. I will see a psychiatrist if you want, and I will talk to them. There is no problem.’ She added: ‘I am just fed up. I am being accused of something what I haven’t done and I wouldn’t dream of doing. I cannot get it through to nobody. No matter what you say, I am sticking to my story, I didn’t bloody do it. I am not bloody lying. Everyone on that ward knows how much nursing means to me. It means more than living.’

*   *   *

During the trial, Sue Phillips kept her mind occupied by snipping newspaper cuttings and typing notes for her bulging files in which she recorded everything that had happened. Giving evidence in the witness box, though she was outwardly clear and strong, had tested the very depths of her drained emotions at the end of nearly two years of torment since Becky’s death and Katie’s miraculous escape. But somehow the mere task of recording every detail, her determination to miss nothing, helped numb the pain of the memories the trial had brought flooding back.

It was while she was busily typing in her dining room that Sue felt she was being watched. She wasn’t sure what made her look round at the glass partition dividing the room from the hallway, except that she was convinced that someone was there. She decided that husband Peter was playing jokes and walked into the lounge, only to find him dozing on the settee with Katie sleeping quietly in his arms. It clearly wasn’t him. Sue decided to carry on her work, but moved seats, so she was facing the glass partition.

What suddenly appeared before her made her gasp. In the glass just four feet in front of her appeared a face, staring at her from the hallway. Then it was gone. Sue ran into the lounge, expecting to find Peter laughing at the joke. But he was still asleep with Katie. She thought she heard a noise in the room above and dashed upstairs. But four year old son Jamie was asleep in his bed. Sue said: ‘I felt such a fool. I was so convinced that the
face was real but I knew it must be my imagination after all the tensions of the trial. I kept thinking: “Oh! God! I’m seeing things now”. I knew I’d got to pull myself together or I would think I was going mad.’

Sue went to the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea. When Peter woke up, she made a joke of it and they both laughed. The next morning, little Jamie was getting ready for school when he announced: ‘Becky came to see me last night, mummy. She came to my bedroom and talked to me’.

Sue recalls thinking she was going to faint. Becky had been dead for two years. They had buried her in a white coffin with her teddies alongside; Sue could remember tossing a red rose into her grave. Jamie was aged two at the time but he was always closer to Becky than he was to her twin sister Katie.

Sue said: ‘When I found my voice, I asked Jamie what Becky was like. He said she often came to see him. He said: “She different now, Mum. She’s got long blonde hair and she can walk, not like Katie.” ‘He told me when she went to see him at night, Becky had a glowing light behind her head. I’ve never believed in anything like this before and I felt a mixture of fear and excitement inside me. I just knew that Becky had come home.’

Sue and Peter decided to consult their vicar, the Rev. Ian Shelton, who had given them so much comfort previously. Becky was buried in his churchyard and he had conducted her funeral
service. Sue told him she wasn’t frightened and she didn’t want anything done that would force Becky out of her home. She certainly didn’t want an exorcism to drive out her spirit.

It was in February 1993 that Ian Shelton arrived at their home to carry out a service of Blessing with Sue and Peter. Sue said: ‘We prayed that Becky would always be welcome, whenever she wanted to come home.’

Beverley Allitt spent the remainder of the trial in the relative comfort of her room at Rampton complete with television and en-suite bathroom. She was effectively ‘off sick’ as she had been for so much of her training as a nurse.

During her two years as a student at Grantham, Allitt had missed a total of 191 days through sickness, 94 of them in 1990, although this had not kept her away from hospitals. She admitted herself so many times to accident and emergency departments with cuts, sprains and illnesses that staff became convinced that she was deliberately inflicting the misery on herself. In all, she was treated twenty-nine times at hospitals in Grantham, Boston, Great Yarmouth and Peterborough.

She complained fictitiously she was pregnant or suffering from a brain tumour or ulcers. Several times she made repeat visits as her wounds strangely became re-infected or stitches ripped open. A hospital physio was so concerned about the volume of her visits that she warned the authorities in Grantham that she suspected Allitt was suffering from Munchausen syndrome
but nothing was done. Owing to strict rules on the confidentiality of patient’s records, none of the information about her hospital visits could ever be passed on and Allitt was allowed to carry on nursing.

The judge, Mr Justice Latham, would not allow evidence of Munchausen syndrome to be given to the jury fearing it would make it impossible for Allitt to have a fair trial. The jury finally retired to consider their verdicts at lunchtime on the forty-fifth day of the trial. The parents, now packed into the public gallery, drew comfort from one another. They were bound together in their suffering.

The verdicts took almost a week to deliver. Each one in turn brought tears and cheers from the waiting families: guilty to the murder of ‘Little Pudding Pants’ Liam Taylor, guilty to the murder of twin Becky Phillips, guilty to the murder of Claire Peck, guilty to the murder of ‘My Special Boy’ Timothy Hardwick.

The jury found her guilty too of attempting to murder Paul Crampton, Katie Phillips and Bradley Gibson. They also found her guilty of attacking Kayley Desmond, Henry Chan, Patrick Elstone, Christopher King, Michael Davidson and Christopher Peasgood, causing them grievous bodily harm with intent. But the jury cleared her of charges of attempting to murder and causing grievous bodily harm to Jonathan Jobson and Dorothy Lowe.

The judge ordered that Allitt should be brought from Rampton to the dock at Nottingham Crown
Court to be sentenced. The law dictated only one punishment – life imprisonment. The parents too faced their own life sentence, each family scarred forever by the dreadful memories of what happened in sixty days on Ward Four.