Angel of Death (15 page)

‘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 because 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.

‘But Sue said Bev didn't seem to care. She said she had to work there for the money. You could have knocked us down with a feather. There had been absolutely no intention on Bev's part to tell us that she'd got another job.

‘Then, on 15 June, there was a story in the
Sun
about the hospital and the enquiry. We heard it on the radio as well. Bev and Tracy upped and left
and we got a call to say they would let us know where she was staying.'

Ruth and David began tramping the streets of Grantham and surrounding villages, knocking on doors, visiting nurses at home and asking them what they knew about Allitt and the case of Paul Crampton.

David said: The police questioned another girl – an eighteen-year-old student nurse. We wanted to talk to her, too, but we were told to leave her alone because the police had hammered her to such a degree she was having problems. They accused her of being an accomplice.'

Detective Superintendent Clifton's reaction after questioning Nurse Beverley Allitt was to double the size of his enquiry team to twenty-four. This gave him the manpower to examine every other death and suspicious illness in great detail. He was totally convinced that he was on to something, but he still didn't know quite what it was.

Officers were paired together and allocated individual cases to investigate. Each pair began to identify with a particular family and to look at what it could say. They also looked at what various nurses could remember. Each of these pairs investigated its own child and used a police computer system called Holmes to store and evaluate the information that was gathered.

Supt Clifton considered that the answer to many of his questions might be hidden in blood samples taken from the children. The problem was that, by
a strange quirk of the National Health Service, they had been sent to eight different laboratories all over the Midlands and the north of England for different analysis. Without the samples, the whole investigation would flounder.

Detective Inspector Neil Jones, who had joined the team, began tracking down the samples. He found the sample of Becky Phillips's blood tucked away in the basement of the City Hospital at Nottingham. He found other crucial samples stored in a fridge in a public health laboratory in Leeds; there were samples still totally unchecked in Sheffield and Boston. Soon he had a small blood bank of his own to send for analysis; then he anxiously awaited the results.

The first to come back was that of twin Becky Phillips who had died at her home just twelve hours after being discharged from hospital; she had been recorded as a ‘cot death' victim. The tests on her blood revealed that she, too, had been given an enormous overdose of insulin. Her level, which was not as high as that of Paul Crampton, was recorded as 9660, compared with a normal level of just 4.

The discovery explained Becky's symptoms of the night she'd died. Those twisted contortions on her face, those rolling eyes and piercing screams had been the fits and convulsions caused by a hypoglycemic attack. The massive insulin overdose had sent her body sugar levels plummeting, eventually to kill her.

Each time she'd been fed, she had improved
briefly as her body extracted sugar from the milk. But the relief could only have been temporary, and death inevitable, without a huge input of glucose like the one that had saved Paul Crampton.

Supt Clifton now had the evidence that at least two children, neither of them diabetics, had been poisoned, both with huge amounts of insulin.

After Becky Phillips the detectives began to take an even closer look at the deaths of Claire Peck, Liam Taylor and Timothy Hardwick, all of whom had died on Ward Four in the space of sixty days. They wanted to know whether they, too, had been poisoned, possibly with insulin like Becky Phillips and Paul Crampton.

There was no problem finding a blood sample from Claire, the last to die, because one had been taken during the course of the marathon one-and-a-half-hour unsuccessful attempt to save her. The blood had been sent away for testing.

The result produced a real shock. There was no trace of insulin in Claire's blood. Instead, it was found to contain in excess of 16 millimoles per litre of potassium chloride, more than twice the amount needed to kill her.

Potassium chloride, one of the most lethal poisons known to man, is naturally present in everyone's blood. The average level is about three or four millimoles per litre of blood; this rises dramatically after death. It is readily available in solution in hospitals all over the world, including Ward Four at the Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, for the routine treatment of patients whose potassium
chloride level drops, producing symptoms of vomiting and gastro-enteritis. Too much potassium chloride causes the heart to relax and then simply stop beating.

To Supt Clifton and his team of detectives in Grantham it was becoming clear that they were on the trail of a determined killer. He was convinced that Claire must have been injected with the drug.

But how many more children had suffered like Claire, Paul and Becky?

And although he was gathering a mass of medical evidence he had still not found anyone who had seen the killer at work on Ward Four. What Supt Clifton needed was a witness, possibly a parent, relative or, better still, a nurse who had seen a child being given a fatal injection; someone who had seen the killer, if there was one, still holding the ‘smoking syringe' like a gun after a shooting.

Every nurse, doctor, ward orderly, porter – anyone who might have had access to Ward Four – had been questioned, often several times, without success. Supt Clifton and his team of medical advisers, sifting through the records of every patient on Ward Four, turned the clock back to the death of Liam Taylor, the first to die.

A detective said: ‘We knew that he suffered an infarction of the heart which we were told is unknown in babies. An infarction is where the muscles of the heart die, but you just don't hear of infarctions in infants, it's absolutely unknown.

‘We were told it could have been caused by a
variety of things, either by asphyxiation, or by insulin or potassium, nobody could tell us which one for certain.'

The police knew that there had been controversy about the cause of his death right from the beginning when his father had expressed his concern and paediatrician Dr Nanayakkara had written to the coroner challenging the cause of his death. The doctor had disagreed with the result of the post mortem. He did not suggest that death was deliberate; he simply disputed the given cause.

The police team, however, was now convinced that Liam's death had been such an unexpected occurrence that something
must
have happened, but they still didn't know what.

Tests in the case of handicapped Timothy Hardwick, the second to die, revealed an abnormally high potassium reading, well above the fatal level. The cause of his death had been recorded as ‘cerebral palsy and epilepsy' but, when children die of an epileptic fit, it causes a brain reaction. Further tests showed no signs of this in Timothy's case. Supt Clifton was again convinced that the post-mortem result was wrong.

He decided to call a meeting of minds – a gathering of all the experts from the police and medical teams – to decide his next move. Appropriately, the chosen venue was a conference room across the road from the hospital.

Those who gathered were eminent insulin experts, Professor Marks and Dr David Teal, from the University of Surrey; distinguished paediatric
pathologist and ‘cot death' specialist Professor John Emery from Sheffield Children's Hospital; paediatric consultant Derek Johnstone and paediatric pathologist Dr David Fagin; and Professor David Hull from the Queen's Medical Centre, Nottingham.

They were joined by representatives of the Area Health Authority, together with the Grantham Hospital paediatricians, Dr Porter and Dr Nanayakkara, and representatives of the hospital management.

Several senior police officers, including Assistant Chief Constable Alan Goldsmith, were there, together with representatives of the Crown Prosecution Service. Barrister John Goldrick, who would ultimately consider the evidence, also attended.

The story was by now becoming a big news item. The conference room was besieged by reporters, photographers and five TV camera crews long before the meeting was due to begin on the afternoon of Tuesday, 2 July.

Meanwhile, a drama was taking place a hundred miles away in the air above Guildford.

Professor Marks, a vitally important participant, had warned Supt Clifton that he would be late for the 2pm start because he had another meeting to attend which would not finish until midday.

Professor Marks was to be flown to Grantham in a hired Cessna.

It should have been a simple exercise but it almost ended in disaster.

As he took off from Guildford, the professor's door flew open, terrifying the valued specialist who, fortunately, was strapped in with his seatbelt. It also horrified Detective Inspector Neil Jones, sitting in the back seat, who feared the prosecution case was about to go literally out of the door. They managed to slam the flapping door shut in mid-air and carried on in time to make the meeting.

The discussions were expected to go on for three hours, but it was five and a half hours later before they ended. Supt Clifton started by delivering a presentation to the gathering, explaining his findings so far. He was followed by the experts. As the meeting continued there was growing realisation amongst them all that the epidemic of sudden collapses and deaths on Ward Four was no accident. Allitt spent the afternoon waiting for news in her solicitor's office a mile away, fearing that the conference would end with her arrest. Her solicitor went to the police station to be ready for possible charges.