by John Askill
Steve admitted: ‘She used to hit me quite a lot and I just had to take it. The arguments were silly, but she’d end up thumping me in the face with her fist. Once she gave me a black eye and it turned all yellowy green. When I told the lads at work that Bev had walloped me they all laughed.
‘I’m around 6ft 2ins, I weigh around twelve and a half stones, but she could impose her will on me. She could get what she wanted any time and she did it with other people. Bev can manipulate people.’
Allitt became busy revising for her exams, restricting their time together even more; there was more disappointment when she announced she needed a break and was going away on holiday.
Steve asked: ‘Where are we going?’
But Allitt said she had already made up her mind to go away with a young nurse at the hospital.
Steve said: ‘I was jealous. There we were, going steady, and she was telling me she was going away for a fortnight to Spain with another girl. It was awful and I couldn’t work out why she was going with her, and not me. There were arguments but in the end I gave in.’
Before Allitt flew off on holiday she told Steve not to drive their car while she was away. She didn’t even want it moved. To make sure he complied she even put chalk marks on the tyres and recorded the mileage. ‘She said she’d know if I moved it. I thought it was a very odd thing to do, putting chalk on the tyres. I did move it just once while she was away. I drove a few miles, then I put it back in exactly the same spot where she’d left it, making sure the chalk was in the same place. When she got back she accused me of doing 100 miles and we had another row about it.’
Steve had to wait until they had been going out for a year before she finally agreed they could go away on holiday together to a seaside chalet near Great Yarmouth. The girl from the Fighting Cocks would join them with her boyfriend, making up a foursome. But a fortnight before they were to leave, she broke up with her boyfriend and Steve finished up taking both girls away on his own.
He had been expecting to sleep with Allitt but he found she was in no mood for romance. As soon as they arrived at the chalet she announced she would be sharing a room with her girlfriend, rather than with Steve.
‘I couldn’t believe it, but Bev said it wouldn’t be fair on her pal if we slept together, even though the girl said she didn’t mind being by herself. Bev insisted she had to keep her company and I finished up on my own. They slept in single beds in the other room. I didn’t like it, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it.
‘One night we were getting ready to go out and Bev came rushing out of the bathroom holding her thumb. She said she’d got it stuck in the tap getting washed. It was red raw so we rushed her to the hospital. We were there until 2am. It was broken and they had to plaster it up. But afterwards I got to thinking what an incredible thing to happen and I decided she’d done it deliberately to be the centre of attention. Bev always had to be the centre of attention.’
Steve was growing increasingly concerned at his sweetheart’s strange behaviour and he was shocked when she began holding her girlfriend’s hand in the street.
‘I thought it was a joke when she started holding her girlfriend’s hand, but it went on for two or three days. She started walking like a fella, too. I was getting worried. I asked her friend if she thought Bev had turned queer, and she was worried too. When I asked Bev about it she said she was only joking, but it made me wonder.’
Their stormy love affair continued in spite of his pointed questioning. Allitt persuaded him to grow a moustache. Even though he hated the idea, he complied. ‘She reckoned I looked gormless without one. I didn’t like the idea one bit, but I stood it for six or seven months because I was prepared to do anything to please her. When I shaved it off eventually she played hell.’
Allitt wasn’t particularly interested in how she looked. She never wore make-up, only studs in her ears, and spent money only on jeans, jumpers and sweat-shirts.
But suddenly she decided she was overweight and began working out, insisting that Steve needed to shed some flab, too. She would come home from the hospital and tell her fiancé to do 100 sit-ups. ‘I wasn’t fat. I really should have told her to get stuffed, but I even started working out at the keep-fit classes at the school in the village on a Tuesday night to keep her happy.’
One night, relaxing at the pub, she talked about her work and made an astonishing claim.
Steve recalls: ‘She was working with the old people in the geriatric ward and she said the old blokes would try and grab the nurses and it wasn’t very nice. There was me and her friend there, and she talked about drugs and said sometimes they would help the old people on their way.
‘I don’t know whether she meant she had been doing things herself, but she said they didn’t tell the families what was going on. I didn’t like what she was saying and I told her so.’
Despite everything, Steve was still hoping to make Allitt his wife, but started to doubt if it would ever happen.
‘I was keen to get married but, whenever I asked when it was going to happen, Bev would put it off and put it off.’
Their first holiday together had been a miserable affair but Steve felt sure things would be better when they arranged to go away again, this time to Tenerife, with a nurse from the hospital and her boyfriend, Andy Smith.
The four of them each paid £300 to share a self-catering apartment. They flew from East Midlands airport in mid October 1989, in high spirits, determined to enjoy their fortnight in the sun. But, as they arrived at the apartment, Allitt announced once more that she would not be sleeping with her fiancé, just as she had refused to do a year earlier at Great Yarmouth. This time she said she would be sharing a room with her friend from the hospital.
Steve was stunned by the news. Almost naïvely he had expected a fortnight’s romance, even passion: after all they were engaged to be married. He had imagined Andy would share a bedroom with his girlfriend and he would be next door with Bev.
‘But Bev told me she would be sharing a room instead with the other girl just to keep her company. She told me this in front of Andy and the nurse.’
Steve thought he would try to make the best of it. ‘I threw Beverley in the pool half a dozen times to have some fun, but she hated getting wet.’ At the end of the first week Steve’s patience was running out. He felt Allitt was ignoring him, and spending more and more time with her room-mate. Instead of passionate romance there were passionate arguments with Allitt still refusing to hold her fiancé’s hand when they went out together.
One furious row ended with Allitt attacking Steve with her nails, badly scratching the left side of his face. In the fracas he stuck out a leg to try and fend her off. Afterwards, Steve rushed from the apartment, frightened that he had hurt Allitt, and began crying beside the pool.
‘I told the nurse that I loved Bev and she must have told her what I’d said. I was crying by the pool when Bev came out and she burst out crying at the sight of me. It was the only time it ever happened, the only time she ever showed any real emotion. She turned to me and said: “Why didn’t you tell me you loved me?” I couldn’t understand it because I’d been telling her almost non-stop for two years that I loved her. I asked her to leave me alone to calm down.’
Later the unhappy boyfriends, in despair at the way the girls were spending so much time together, commiserated with one another.
Back home Allitt agreed to let her fiancé join her at discos at the hospital social club where he could meet her friends at the nurses’ home for the first time. But rather than dance with her fiancé, or even sit talking, Allitt preferred the company of the other nurses. Steve felt he was being ignored. ‘She was treating me like I didn’t exist.’
Steve, still desperately in love, decided to call Allitt’s bluff and announced he wanted to end their engagement. He broke the news as they sat watching TV at her parents’ home. Bev’s mother and father were out but her younger sister, Alison, was there. ‘I was fed up with Bev not sh
owing me any love. I said I wanted to finish with her.
‘I said I was going, but Bev slammed the door, tore at my hair and said: “You’re not going anywhere.” She grabbed my hair and dragged me on to the floor. I was on my knees and shouting, “Get off – let me go.” She had upset me so much I was crying. Alison stopped the fighting and said Bev ought to leave me alone.’
They decided to keep going but it was not to last. Out of the blue, in the spring of 1990, Allitt phoned Steve at his home in Corby Glen and said she had decided it was over.
A year later the police arrived unexpectedly at Steve’s door, wanting to ask him some questions. He thought it was about an accident he had had driving a lorry at work, so when they asked: ‘Do you know why we’re here?’ he said, yes, it must be about the accident.
But the officers wanted to know about Beverley Allitt. ‘I couldn’t understand why they would be interested in her. I said, “What’s she done?” They told me it was about the misuse of some drugs at the hospital.’
11. ‘Help Me!’
David Thorpe and Ruth Lindsey run a private investigation agency called City Life, based in Grantham. They were friends of Peter and Sue Phillips. David, a big man who wore his hair in a pony-tail, was nicknamed ‘Columbo’ by Peter after the scruffy TV detective; his partner, a short attractive girl in her twenties, with long, dark hair and a round face, is diabetic and takes insulin every day. This fact was to prove important when they began to question Nurse Beverley Allitt.
They were usually employed checking on wayward partners in divorce cases and working undercover for local solicitors. Suddenly they found themselves thrust into the middle of a major police investigation into attempted murder on a children’s ward. Peter and Sue were convinced that they could help and that, given time, the private-eyes would be able to prove that Beverley had been wrongly accused. If it cost money to find the evidence, then they were quite prepared to pick up the bill. After all, Allitt was a firm friend and they were in no doubt that she had saved Katie’s life.
The nurse seemed delighted that someone wanted to help her and returned to the Phillips’s house for a first meeting with David and Ruth in the evening of 13 June.
The investigators had known Peter and Sue for about a year and had been visiting one night when Becky had fallen ill. They had shared the despair over her death and, knowing what the family had been through, they were only too willing to lend a hand.
Peter explained that he wanted them to investigate the allegations because he felt not enough was being done to defend Beverley. David, clutching a black notebook in which he had recorded the conversation, recalled: ‘When we met Beverley, it was awkward at times. We started by putting together background information and then we did a character analysis of her. We were testing out what was going on. We talked for about an hour. She was totally lost. She might as well have been in a different country, speaking a different language. Peter and Sue were trying to comfort her.’
Ruth and David were well aware that the Phillips were convinced that their friend had been falsely accused.
Ruth said: ‘She had been questioned by the police under arrest and given police bail. When we saw her, she was like a frightened rabbit. But she was trusted as a friend by Peter and Sue and was going to be godmother to Katie.’
David tried to spell out to Allitt just how serious the situation could be for her. He knew that there had been talk of Allitt being charged by the police.
‘But we ran into problems with Bev straightaway. Sometimes she would talk to you and then would forget what she had said. She said she had got a poor memory. She couldn’t remember basic hospital routines. Vital things like where the fridge was in the ward, where the controlled drugs cabinet was and who had the keys. She couldn’t remember even who she had spoken to.
‘She would remember silly, pointless things which, if she was suffering from shock, I thought she would not have remembered. She remembered going to a car-boot sale, one Sunday, with her friend Tracy. She remembered what happened there.
‘Yet when I mentioned the following day, when she was at work, she could only remember starting the day. When it came to general day-to-day stuff, like what time she took lunch, she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure what time she usually did things. She wasn’t sure about anything. She said her lunchbreak was anything between 11.30 and 2pm which is quite a long time-span.
‘We began to wonder whether she was in a form of delayed shock, generally bewildered.’
They began to do a form of ‘psychological examination’, a DIY test that they had developed in their work as private detectives. They were trying to see if Allitt was telling lies or whether she had forgotten the truth through panic and shock.
‘It could have been panic. Most people react in an odd sort of way and you don’t know what to expect from different people.’
They gave her a short oral test, not telling her what they were trying to do. It was a test they had developed, using a series of set questions; they were looking for specific responses. ‘We were trying to build up a character analysis.
‘The first test lasted about an hour and we decided there was no sign of shock at all. She was very calm, a bit tense.
‘In training I studied clinical psychology and I needed to find the truth. I told her in front of Peter and Sue that if I found she was guilty I would nail her. I didn’t notice any reaction from her when I said that. She said she had nothing to fear, she had not done anything.
‘We asked straight out: “Did you do it?” She said: “No I did not.” That was as forceful as she got. She was so calm. Nothing I said was going to bother her.
‘I wasn’t intimidating in the way I was told the police were when they questioned her.’
David left the meeting with the impression that Allitt was holding back and not telling them something; he didn’t know what this could be. David and Ruth discussed her answers and studied her reactions.
David said: ‘We have a large board where we put all the answers down. We had asked her a lot of questions about the general routine on the ward and also about her relationship with the rest of the staff. And we asked her opinion of the rest of the staff, her opinion about the doctors.
‘I asked her about one child she had found who had turned blue. She had come rushing out with the child. She remembered going into the room (but she couldn’t say why she had gone in) and she recalled coming out. Then she remembered going back in there afterwards and she noticed there was a discolouration in the child. She remembered rushing out with the child and we were told she had shouted “Crash” as she came out.
‘But she did not remember that.
‘We asked her why she had looked into the room, on the second occasion, because the child was not under close observation. She said she looked in because she liked children.’
They asked her about the layout of the cubicles. She was so unsure that she had to ask Sue Phillips.
‘I asked her simple questions about what was in a particular room, what it was set out like and she couldn’t tell me. She couldn’t remember.
‘I wanted her to think about actual incidents. For instance, I asked her which side of the bed was the child’s head. Was the head pointing to the left or the right? She couldn’t remember.
‘But if you go into a room and pick up a child, I felt she should remember, but she couldn’t even remember the position of the bed.
‘There were just mental blocks. Over the next hour and a half, there were more and more mental blocks of a similar nature. She couldn’t remember obvious details. A nurse has a particular routine but Bev couldn’t remember it.’
Allitt’s first meeting with the private detectives lasted about three hours. They arranged to meet again the following evening at the modern, semidetached house in Grantham which she shared with Tracy. They arrived with a bottle of wine ‘to ease the situation’.
Ruth recalled: ‘When we turned up Bev was quite friendly. I think that was her nature, not beca
use of anything else.’
David said: ‘I asked her a question about insulin. Ruth is diabetic so we already had a good knowledge of it.
‘We gave her the needle and we asked Beverley to show us the actual amount that would have been given to the children. I asked her to do it twice. I wanted her to show us the amount that was supposed to have been injected. It had to be a guess because the amount the police were talking about was ridiculous. It was a massive amount. I wanted to see myself what it looked like.
‘She was very fumbly and had to ask Tracy, who was also a nurse, how to do it. In the end Tracy took it off Bev and showed what it would take. Bev had done it before at Pete and Sue’s and she had not had a problem. But the second time she began to show anxiety. The amount we had asked her to measure out was the amount the police had told her was used.
‘Tracy would answer the questions for her and Bev would correct her, until it got to the point where we might as well have asked Beverley and got the answers from Tracy. If Beverley got it wrong, Tracy would correct her. Bev actually turned round and said to us: “I am known for having a very bad memory.”
‘The meeting went on for a long time and, at one stage, Tracy told us she thought the house had been bugged. I offered to do a sweep of the place to check but her solicitor, John Kendall, told us not to because he said it would seem that Bev had got something to hide.’
David and Ruth asked Allitt whether she had ever had a spare-time nursing job.
‘We needed to know whether she had ever been working anywhere else, but she didn’t say. She sort of sketched over it. Much later we found out from Sue that she had been working in an old people’s home.
‘You are not supposed to work for anyone else when you are a full-time nurse, but Sue told us that Bev had walked on to the hospital ward one night wearing the uniform of the British Nursing Association, the nursing agency. They’ve got an office in Grantham. It’s a totally different outfit to the hospital’s uniform and, if the management or even the sister had seen her, she would have been sacked.
