by John Askill
Experts who examined the bizarre attacks in detail found that a mother often became the life and soul of the hospital ward where her child was being treated. She would look after other children, become friends with other mothers and see herself as an expert on medical matters, often challenging nurses and doctors over the type of treatment.
Professor Meadow wrote: ‘For most mothers there is personal gain in terms of status, contacts with helpful nurses, doctors and social workers, financial benefits, contact with other mothers, and a different society in hospital, escape from an unhappy marriage or the capture of an absent husband to share a problem.’
He concluded: ‘After talking with many of these mothers my main impression is of their immense selfishness; they are able to do horrific things to children because of their own unhappiness, and to satisfy their own needs. In a minority, particularly those who indulge in suffocation or poisoning, there commonly is envy of, and violence and hatred towards, the abused child.’
The professor gave a simple set of checks for doctors to use when they were suspicious. He suggested that they should secure and verify charts and records, retain and analyse samples – such as blood and urine – for toxicology, increase surveillance, involve the social services and exclude the mother, through legal force if necessary. But his warnings and guidance had been targeted on parents whose children repeatedly suffered from unexplained illness.
In Grantham, the hospital found itself dealing with the virtually uncharted possibility that genuinely ill children were being systematically attacked inside hospital by a nurse.
Supt Clifton decided that, if this case was ever to go to trial, he needed Professor Meadow to be a Crown expert.
The police team was surprised that a nurse could ever dream of harming a patient; they were ‘angels’ who had dedicated their lives to saving people, not harming them. But around the world nurses had been accused of killing their patients, some in the most horrific circumstances.
In the most bizarre incident nurses at the Las Vegas Sunrise Hospital were accused of running a sweepstake on the time patients would die; one nurse was charged with murder by tampering with life-support systems to increase her chances of winning the bet. The New York Post splashed the story over its pages with the headline: ‘Angel of Death’, adding in smaller type: ‘Nurse Accused of Pulling Plug in Lethal Hospital Betting Scandal’. The case shocked and gripped America although the charges were eventually dropped.
In Austria four nurses were charged with killing more than forty patients. The police said they had injected insulin or water into terminally ill patients ‘to help them on their way’.
But in an analysis of the British record, the magazine Nursing Standard concluded: ‘British nurses should feel proud of their sparse, if not spotless, record for murder. Not only do they compare favourably to their foreign counterparts but, unlike their British medical colleagues, they are also noticeably absent from the murderers’ hall of fame.
‘Convictions of nurses for actual murder – if not attempted murder – of patients are, so far, mercifully unknown.’
The magazine quoted Val Cowie, Director of the Royal College of Nursing’s labour relations and legal department, as saying that British nurses did not have a record of killing their patients because ‘the notion is so contrary to everything that our profession believes and holds dear. It’s difficult to comprehend how a nurse in a nursing role could murder anybody.’
The only exception had been the case of Sister Jessie McTavish who, at the age of thirty-four, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a patient at Ruchill Hospital, Glasgow, by injecting her with insulin.
She had denied murdering eighty-year-old Miss Elizabeth Lyon, a geriatric patient at the hospital, by injecting her repeatedly with insulin without medical authority or prescription. She was convicted by a majority verdict in the Edinburgh High Court.
But, in February 1975, after spending three months in prison, Sister McTavish was freed amid emotional scenes when the Court of Appeal quashed her conviction.
One case in particular, however, grabbed the attention of detectives investigating the events on Ward Four.
It was the trial of a young nurse who had been convicted of murdering a fifteen-month-old toddler called Chelsea McClellan with a fatal injection of the drug succinylcholine at a children’s clinic on the other side of the Atlantic, in the Texan town of Kerrville in 1981. Nurse Genene Jones was also suspected of poisoning up to fifteen other children when she worked the night shift in the paediatric intensive care unit of a hospital in the nearby city of San Antonio, Texas. All the children had fallen ill on the 3–11pm shift while Jones was on duty; so many youngsters were involved that it became known as the ‘Death Shift’.
An internal investigation revealed that one of the nurses was almost certainly attacking the children but, frightened of bad publicity and potential lawsuits, the hospital didn’t call in the police to investigate. They removed Jones from the staff and allowed her to start a new job at another clinic with a good recommendation.
Once she’d arrived there, the awful pattern began again; healthy children collapsed with fits, seizures and heart attacks.
Police exhumed Chelsea’s body to obtain the vital evidence that she had been poisoned, and Jones was jailed for ninety-nine years in 1984 in the ‘Texas Baby Murders’ trial.
These events might have passed unnoticed to the team of detectives investigating the attacks on Ward Four had the story of Genene Jones not been recorded in a paperback book called The Death Shift which sold all over the world – including Grantham. Detectives discovered that there was a copy of the book in Grantham town library. Two others had been sold in the town.
Could it be, they began to wonder, that this was a copycat killing? Had someone read the book and decided to repeat the Texas Baby Murders in England? After all, Claire Peck was fifteen months old, just like Chelsea McClellan when she died, and one of the other victims who survived was a severely handicapped boy, like Timothy Hardwick. Many others were tiny babies.
A detective was despatched by Supt Clifton with a mission to track down every copy of the book known to be in Grantham and to check out every person who had borrowed it from the library since its publication in 1990. There were rumours that the 448-page red-backed book had been seen on Ward Four. One parent claimed she saw a nurse with a book she thought could be The Death Shift under her arm. The police could never establish whether or not that was true, though the book would later become a bestseller in Grantham.
Copies were ordered at the bookshop called Limelight, opposite the Angel and Royal Hotel, by medical staff, policemen and many of the families whose children were at the centre of the investigation. Those involved in the case were fascinated and sickened by the similarities between the Texas case and their own in Grantham. When Chelsea’s father, Reed McClellan, heard that the families in Grantham were going through the same ordeal, he sent them a message of support, saying: ‘My heart goes out to you. I can only advise you to keep going, keep fighting, because you will get justice in the end.’
What particularly interested the Grantham detectives was the theory that Genene Jones had been driven to kill and attack children because she was suffering from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.
The outside world was now taking notice of the events in Grantham and media interest was beginning to snowball.
The police investigation had first reached the ears of the Sun at a time when Supt Clifton was still unsure what he was investigating. All he would say was that routine tests had discovered ‘excess amounts’ of insulin in the bloodstream of an unnamed boy, but it could mean anything, perhaps just a medical muddle or a clinical condition.
The Lincolnshire force issued a statement saying there was a ‘possibility of discrepancies in the use of some prescribed drugs within the hospital’. It was still a ‘sensitive enquiry in its early stages’. Hospital manager Mr Gibson revealed that he had called in the police as a ‘precau
tion to look into a possible misuse’.
As the days ticked by, Supt Clifton continued to describe the deaths at the hospital as ‘unnatural but not necessarily malicious’.
He explained: ‘From the outset of the enquiry we have attempted to tread the difficult path of carrying out the investigation, keeping the parents aware of what we are doing and not causing unnecessary suffering. It is extremely technical in nature because of the medical aspects involved. These aspects require much interpretation by experts in different fields.’
The cautious statements reflected police uncertainty in the early stages when they were still interviewing nurses, doctors and experts.
But word began to spread like wildfire as Supt Clifton’s team of detectives began knocking on doors, talking to families about the treatment of their children on the ward and asking questions about the nurses. The town began to buzz with rumours about the scale of the police enquiry. There was no holding back the gathering tide of speculation in the close-knit market town and, in mid-June, the Sun broke the story that a nurse, so far unnamed, had been interviewed over the deaths of four children on the ward and given extended leave from her job. She was later named in the newspaper as Nurse Beverley Allitt.
The media descended on Grantham en masse, realising for the first time the sensational implications of the case. It was the first time that a nurse had been suspected of a serial killing in a British hospital.
The Angel and Royal was packed with journalists, radio reporters and photographers; TV camera crews lined up one after another outside the hospital to film the scene. Supt Clifton tried to stem the tide by telling reporters: ‘We won’t know if there is anything sinister until we meet the experts.’
At the hospital, administrator Mr Gibson was worried about the effects of the growing publicity, conscious that it could damage the confidence of his patients. He announced that a thorough review of internal security at the hospital, nursing systems and procedures had been carried out. He issued a statement in which he said the enquiry showed that they were ‘all in order’ and gave an assurance that there had been no further cause for alarm since the start of the police enquiry.
Most of the parents whose children had suffered on Ward Four were unaware of the real suspicion behind the police investigation.
Claire Peck’s parents, David and Sue, learned more about the police enquiry from the pages of the Sun.
Sue had flown off on holiday with her parents to Yugoslavia, and husband David had stayed behind to start a new job, happy that his wife could make the trip. The change of scenery would do her good and perhaps help heal the wounds. Two months had passed since Claire had died from asthma, and Sue needed a break.
David, alone at home, read his morning newspaper which revealed that the police were investigating four deaths of children at the hospital. But there were no names of the dead children and he thought nothing of it. He didn’t even save the report to show Sue when she returned.
But friends who met her at the airport, when she flew home five days later, told her about the revelations in the newspaper as they drove her home. Sue recalls: ‘It just clicked with me and my parents straight away that it involved Claire. I had always suspected right from the day Claire died that something wasn’t right. David had accepted the cause of her death was asthma but I couldn’t forget Dr Porter saying to us: “Claire should never have died.”
‘When an experienced doctor tells you that, then you know something is very wrong.’
They decided to call the police the next day to ask if Claire was involved in the investigation.
They were asked to visit the police station; this wasn’t something that could be talked about over the phone. They drove the fifteen miles down the A1 to Grantham wondering, but also fearing, what they were going to be told. It came as no surprise to be told that Claire’s death was one of the four under investigation. Her death had been so unexpected, the detective told them, that it had to be examined. The police said they were treating it as suspicious.
Three days later, on 27 June, the day of Sue’s twenty-sixth birthday, the police rang from Grantham with the news they had dreaded. The police officer said they were now sure that the postmortem result had been wrong, that Claire hadn’t died from asthma or other natural causes. They had blood samples and test results to prove it.
Her baffled parents wanted to know what, then, had killed her? David and Sue, in a state of shock, were told that their daughter had been given a ‘fatal injection’. Sue didn’t have to be told which of the nurses was being questioned by the police. ‘I didn’t need to be told it was Beverley Allitt. When I read the piece in the Sun it was her face that sprang into my mind. I knew it wouldn’t be any of the other nurses.’
Sue’s emotions were in turmoil. She had gone on holiday half suspecting that she was pregnant and now she was almost certain that she was expecting again. They had decided to have another baby even before Claire had died, and losing her had made them all the more determined. Their doctor had warned, however, that the trauma of the tragedy might make it difficult for Sue to conceive.
The day after the police phone call, just a little over two months since Claire’s death, Sue rang the chemist to find out the result of her pregnancy test and was told: It’s positive.’
Sue said: ‘Claire had been our first child and had been very, very special to us. We felt we had been deprived of her lifetime but at least we had had her for fifteen months and we were grateful. Suddenly now we had something that gave us hope, to keep going and carry on.’
Still anxious to know what had killed their daughter, Sue and David went to the hospital where they were told that Claire had died from an overdose of potassium, detected in samples of blood taken on the night she died. They wanted to know why the samples had been taken. Did it mean that somebody had been suspicious about the reason for her relapse? They were stunned by the explanation.
Sue remembers: ‘We were told that a doctor can tell when a child is going to die, but there had been no warning signs in Claire’s case, that’s why the blood had been taken. We realised that, if it hadn’t been kept, there might have been nothing to test and nobody would have been any the wiser. Claire’s death would have always been treated as natural.’
They made the decision soon afterwards that their new baby would not be born at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital. Sue said: ‘The staff in the maternity ward had been wonderful when Claire was born but, after all we had been through, all we were being told about Claire’s death, we knew we couldn’t go back there. There were too many memories.’
Sue and David were delighted when a friend announced that he was organising a fund-raising dance to buy nebulisers for asthma sufferers. They threw themselves into the project, drawing comfort from the good that would come from Claire’s tragic death.
In Grantham, and in the neighbouring towns and villages, other parents were hearing the same awful news about their children.
Timothy Hardwick’s parents had read the story in the Sun with a sense of astonishment. By now three months had passed since Timothy’s sudden, unexpected death on Ward Four. Robert and Helen Hardwick still found it hard to accept that their son was no more, but the coroner’s officer had told them that he had died from cerebral palsy and epilepsy, and they had never once doubted the fact.
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 d
oor.
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.’
