by John Askill
Detectives re-checked Michael’s case and were told by expert paediatrician, David Hull, that he was sure Michael had suffered a cardiac arrest. Michael’s mother, Mrs Fay Davidson, said: ‘I was told later the syringe had been passed to the doctor by a nurse.
‘When I went to see him for the afternoon visiting he was fine. I left him sitting in the chair next to his bed at about 4pm. He was still on a drip but otherwise he was great. But by the time I had got home they were ringing from the hospital saying: “Get back up here.” That was about 4.55. My other son and daughter-in-law were with him when he had the attack. So was the woman doctor.
‘When the enquiry began at the hospital into the other children, she said she was not satisfied with what had happened to Michael. That’s when they started an investigation into Michael’s case. We didn’t know about it until the police arrived at the house and told us they had found something that had caused him to collapse.’
Detectives believe the syringe contained potassium chloride, the poison they suspected had killed Claire Peck, though they could never be sure. But they were sure that Michael had been Victim No.13.
There was to be another, far more significant, development, an unexpected twist in the tail of the investigation.
All along, Supt Clifton had patiently probed the events on Ward Four, expecting that the attacks on the children would give him the conclusive evidence to convict Allitt.
But it was the mistreatment of a frail, old lady that was to prove crucial. The vital clue, the last important piece in the jigsaw, was discovered ten miles south-west of Grantham at an old people’s home in the village of Waltham on the Wolds.
Allitt’s former friend, Tracy Jobson, who had long since abandoned her after the events at her mother’s home, told detectives how Allitt had spoken to her about her part-time job at the home. And she could remember how Allitt had told her that one old lady had been taken to hospital with hypoglycemia – a severe lack of body sugar. Could Allitt have turned her attentions from children to an old, helpless woman?
From the day the police arrived at the hospital there had not been another incident on Ward Four.
Now frail, seventy-nine-year-old pensioner Dorothy Lowe was to become the most important person in the long police investigation.
Allitt had only worked four shifts at the home, moonlighting to earn extra pin money. Five days after the death of fifteen-month-old Claire Peck, the last youngster to die on Ward Four, she had worked her third night-shift there. But, the next morning, Dorothy was so ill that a GP had been called at 7am and she had been rushed to the geriatric ward of Grantham and Kesteven Hospital with hypoglycemia.
Detectives began questioning other staff at the home, wondering what could have made the old lady so ill. And they discovered that Allitt had been seen giving her an injection of insulin.
Care assistant Alice Stewart told them she could remember seeing Allitt with a syringe in her hand giving an injection of insulin to Dorothy Lowe at about 5am. She had watched her put the syringe in her apron and walk away.
The old lady was a diabetic but had not been due to have her daily insulin jab until between 8am and 9am. It was a strict routine which was always carefully monitored.
Allitt had not recorded the injection on Dorothy’s charts and there was no reason why it should have been given at least three hours too early.
Her insulin jab should have contained about eight or nine units. But experts at London’s Guy’s Hospital, who examined Dorothy’s clinic notes, concluded that she must have been given about 100 units of insulin. The overdose could have killed her.
Supt Clifton was convinced he had finally found the ‘smoking’ syringe.
Detectives travelled to New Hall Women’s Prison, Wakefield, on Wednesday, 11 March, more than ten months after the start of the investigation. There they read out six new charges to remand prisoner Allitt.
She was charged with attempting to murder Tracy’s brother, Jonathan Jobson, aged fifteen, the boy who had loved her like a sister when she had stayed at his house.
She was accused of attempting to murder pellet-wound boy Michael Davidson, when he was aged just six.
And she was charged with attempting to murder Dorothy Lowe, aged seventy-nine, at the old folks’ home.
Detectives accused her, too, of assaulting all three with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. This took the total number of charges she would face when she appeared before a jury to twenty-six.
On Thursday, 19 March, Allitt was committed, from the tiny Victorian Grantham Magistrates’ Court, to stand trial before a jury at the Crown Court. The parents of the children of Ward Four had waited a long time for this moment. Peter and Sue Phillips, Chris and Joanne Taylor, David Peck, Hazel and Robert Elstone, Stephen and Judith Gibson and Creswen O’Brien were among the fifty or so people who crowded into Number One court on the first floor of the Magistrates’ Court.
Looking on from the back of the courtroom was Ruth Lindsey, the private detective whom Peter and Sue had recruited to help Allitt so many months before.
All the seats were full, snapped up long before Allitt was due to arrive from her cell at New Hall. Supt Clifton, who had stayed at his desk until 10.30pm the previous night to finalise the committal papers, had to stand on one side of the courtroom with colleague Neil Jones standing on the other.
Allitt was delayed en route to court for more than an hour. Finally, wearing blue jeans, a sweat-shirt and a track-suit top, she took her place in front of the bench at 11.10am. She sat between solicitor Mr Kendall and barrister Dudley Bennett; she showed no hint of emotion apart from nodding her head on being told she would stand trial at Nottingham, charged with all twenty-six offences.
Mr Bennett told the magistrates that the nurse, by now looking much leaner than when she’d first appeared in court in November, would be contesting all the charges. It was all over in the space of three minutes, and the families rushed outside to catch a glimpse of Allitt being driven away in a police van.
Sue Phillips managed to smile at the thought that justice was now in sight. ‘We’ve waited so long, now at last she’s got to face what she’s done. I only wish the trial was tomorrow …’
Nurse Allitt was locked up in her Wakefield prison cell as Sue and Peter Phillips carried Katie into the pretty stone church at Manthorpe on Christmas Eve for her christening.
The Rev. Ian Shelton, who accepted the role of godfather, said a prayer for her sister Becky who lay buried a few yards away in the graveyard. Then he spoke of the miracle of little Katie’s survival. She was now nearly eleven months old with a beautiful smile and an attractive tuft of blonde hair. Her survival had given Peter and Sue such joy and comfort after the nightmare of losing Becky.
Sue said: ‘We have always been comforted by the thought that at least we have got Katie. Thank God she didn’t take her too.’
But Sue and Peter had no idea that Katie, too, would also fall a victim to the curse of Nurse Allitt.
Sue began noticing a slight stiffness on Katie’s right side, affecting her leg, hand and arm. She spotted her struggling to pass toys from hand to hand and, when she pushed herself along in her babywalker, she seemed to be using only her left foot. Her health visitor suggested physiotherapy, which would eventually get her muscles working properly. It was nothing to worry about, especially as she had been such a premature baby.
An appointment date arrived for Katie to be taken to Nottingham’s Queen’s Medical Centre for a routine check-up on 31 January – her first birthday. But Sue and Peter couldn’t make the day and put the appointment back another month.
The specialist suggested that Katie be given a brain scan because he wanted to check whether any damage could have been caused by lack of oxygen on the night she’d ‘died’ for thirty-two minutes on Ward Four, even though she had seemingly made such a wonderful recovery.
Peter and Sue watched as their daughter was given medicine to send her off to sleep; then she was wheeled off to the neuro
surgery unit for the scan. They were told it should take about six minutes but it lasted more than twice that long. The results were devastating.
Peter said: ‘The doctor said he didn’t know how to tell us what they had found because he knew we had already been through so much with Becky. But he said he didn’t know how Katie was alive. Her brain was severely damaged. What she had left was barely the size of a walnut.
‘She was virtually blind in one eye, and he told us she would never be able to walk or talk. She had little feeling on her right hand side. She wouldn’t be able to go to the toilet herself.’
Sue said: ‘We had to ask him to repeat it, because I couldn’t understand all the medical terms he was using, but the second time sounded even worse. I just went to pieces. I couldn’t take it. I just couldn’t stand any more. It was just awful.’
She added: ‘I told him there must be some mistake because she’d seemed so happy. She’d always smiled and laughed a lot. She would say “dadda” and she would blow us kisses. She can scoot along in her babywalker. Surely, they must have got it wrong?
‘But he said he was sorry, there was no mistake. Katie might seem to be all right on the outside, but the scan had shown what was happening on the inside. He told us that the brain stem was all right and a small piece above it which controlled her intelligence systems. But the rest of her brain was dead. The cells had decayed and the brain was filling with fluid. It would just be a matter of time before she died.’
Katie, he told them, could live until she was twenty. Or she could die tomorrow. If she survived, she would almost certainly be confined to a wheelchair and if she was able to make sounds, she would never be able to formulate sentences.
There were moments of silence as the Phillips collected their jumbled thoughts, their minds whirring in virtual panic.
Sue and Peter wondered if there was a possibility that Katie might have been born with brain damage, nothing to do with the events on Ward Four. But the doctor told them that both Katie and Becky had been scanned at birth because they were premature twins – and both girls had been found to be perfectly normal.
The damage had occurred when she was aged between six and eight weeks – the time she’d collapsed in the Grantham and Kesteven Hospital. It was caused by the lack of oxygen supplied to her brain.
Peter felt his anger boil inside him to a level he had never felt before. He said: ‘If Bev Allitt had been anywhere near that hospital at that moment, I would have killed her. I have never felt such anger. I just wanted to get my hands on her. How could anyone do this to both our little girls? We thought she was our friend. We did all we could to help her, and now she was taking Katie too.’
Sue cuddled Katie in her arms as she later said: ‘We will give her all the love and help we can for as long as we have got her. She’s so lovely. She looks as beautiful as any normal baby.
‘We will have to take her three times a week to a specialist unit where they can help her to cope, and there are special toys she can get. But what kind of life will she have now?’
Back in Grantham, other parents whose children had survived the chilling events on Ward Four noticed odd things about their children.
Twin Patrick Elstone still wasn’t developing as fast as his brother Anthony who had not suffered the same ordeal. Something seemed to be wrong, although parents Hazel and Robert hoped he would soon ‘catch up’. Patrick had difficulty using one of his hands, was slow crawling and hated being cuddled.
Almost all the parents had instructed solicitors to begin an action for damages against the hospital and the health authority. For most of those whose children were alive, it had seemed a token gesture at first, one of those ‘just in case’ precautions. What they really wanted was for their children to be normal and suffering no long-term effects.
But it could be months, perhaps years, before they would know the extent of any damage their children had suffered.
Back home, Peter received a letter telling him his shotgun licence was about to expire and he would need to apply for a renewal. He had been a full-time soldier, and also a member of the volunteer Territorial Army, and he’d always been keen on guns. He kept up his licence so that he could practise his skills on local clay-pigeon shoots.
He sent in his £11 fee, plus four passport-sized photographs, signed by the Rev. Ian Shelton. The renewal would normally have been a matter of routine but the local police were taking no chances. A few days later a policeman arrived to ask him questions about his application. He wanted to know just what Peter would like to do to the person responsible for what had happened to twins Becky and Katie.
‘I told him I wouldn’t be a good parent if I told him that I would do nothing. I said I would like to watch her die, like I had watched Becky die. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t feel like that.’
Grantham police later suspended his licence – until after the trial of Beverley Allitt.
Peter said: ‘They were right to do it. The truth is I could kill her for what she’s done.’
17. The Trial
As she awaited her trial Beverley Allitt came within a whisker of saving Peter Phillips the trouble of pulling the trigger.
Allitt had long mastered the art of making herself ill in her continuing efforts to attract both attention and sympathy but, while she was in jail in Wakefield, she came perilously close to ending her life. She spent most of her time in the prison’s medical wing or under guard in the local hospital with a string of ailments and, as the weeks ticked by, doctors became increasingly concerned about her dramatic loss of weight. She was not eating and by the time she next appeared in court, this time in Nottingham, she looked a different person. She had slimmed down from more than twelve stones to little more than nine. Parents who travelled to court to see her gasped as she appeared in the dock. Gone was the chubby, overweight young woman they remembered from Ward Four. Instead, Allitt was looking fitter, healthier and happier than they’d ever seen her.
But the truth behind her weight loss became known weeks later. She was still not eating, despite pleas from prison doctors, her parents and her lawyers, and there were signs that she was suffering from the slimmers’ disease, anorexia nervosa. Her worried parents were sent shopping to buy their daughter new clothes because she had wasted away from a size 16 to a size 8.
Finally, she was so ill that she was carefully moved from her hospital bed to Rampton, the high-security psychiatric hospital in north Nottinghamshire.
By now Allitt was painfully thin. Her chubby features had vanished. Instead, she was drawn and gaunt-faced, her eyes deep set and shadowed by black circles. Her weight had plumeted from more than 13 stones to a pitiful 6st 13lbs. She was withering away, barely half the woman she had been on Ward Four.
Lawyer John Kendall was at pains to stress that the move did not mean she was mentally ill or that she would be unfit to stand her trial. She was only going to Rampton because doctors and nurses there had better facilities to treat her.
In Corby Glen Allitt’s grandmother was desperately worried. She realised that the waiting was taking a terrible toll, but she could not understand why Beverley had all but given up eating. ‘They’ve told me how ill she was and she’s lost so much weight. The waiting for the trial is getting to her – it’s getting to all of us.’
She need not have worried. The move to Rampton provided her granddaughter with more luxurious facilities than she could have dreamed of in any women’s prison. This was a hospital, not a jail, and she enjoyed her own room with ensuite bathroom facilities instead of her green cell at Wakefield. She began taking enough liquids – glucose and vitamins – to stop the decline. She would still take no solids but her weight loss stabilized. Allitt settled back to await her trial now fixed for Nottingham Crown Court.
Back at Grantham strenuous efforts were being made by the health authority, doctors and nurses to pick up the pieces after the devastating publicity which followed Allitt’s arrest. Worried about its shattered image and teetering publ
ic confidence in the hospital, the Regional Health Authority appointed a firm of professional public-relations consultants called Westminster Strategy, based in London. Important questions were being asked by parents: Why didn’t the hospital act sooner? Why did it go on for so long? How was Allitt allowed to nurse so many sick children when she was only just out of training? But there would be no answers. The public-relations people put up a stone wall. They had been advised by lawyers representing the hospital to say nothing until the trial was over. And even then they might say nothing in case they prejudiced any appeal.
David Crampton, who had tried to get answers since son Paul’s three mysterious hypoglycemic attacks, was as frustrated as anyone. ‘Until the hospital sits down and tells us precisely what happened to our children, people will speculate with half the facts, and get half the truth,’ he said.
The enquiry team set up to look into the running, staffing and future management of Grantham and Kesteven Hospital reported back after ten months — but even its findings were ordered to be kept secret until the trial was over.
Dr Richard Alderslade, regional medical officer for Trent Regional Health Authority, announced that his hands had been tied by the restraints of his lawyers. He said: Our intention was to publish a summary of the enquiry report and its full recommendations.
‘We have been advised by our lawyers, however, that publication at this stage might interfere with the proper conduct of the trial of Beverley Gail Allitt and therefore could be contempt of court.’
He added: ‘This is a matter of great regret. We cannot disregard the advice given.’
Parents were convinced that too much was being hidden from them. And the lack of openness made them even more frustrated. In the meantime, Martin Gibson, the hospital’s administrator with ultimate responsibility for Ward Four, the man who had first called in the police a week after the death of final victim Claire Peck, was promoted to a new job in Leicester while the enquiry team was still carrying out its investigations.
