The jury acquitted her of murder but returned a verdict of manslaughter, for which she was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. Whilst she was serving out this sentence, her disabled daughter died.
11 Noreen O’Conner
This largely forgotten murder, and its genteel murderess, must be one of the strangest in living memory.
A dedicated carer
Noreen was a staff nurse at the London Clinic but later went into private nursing care in Somerset, looking after a wealthy elderly gentleman. She accompanied him to cricket matches and equestrian events, though her own first love was the Church. As a thank you for providing him with such excellent care, he bought her a beautiful detached limestone house, called Gardeen, in the Somerset village of Loxton.
After his death, 44-year-old Noreen offered a room in the house to a then 75-year-old woman, Marie Buls, who’d had a live-in position as a maid but now required both accommodation and nursing care. The two spinsters lived happily together and became good friends.
Noreen’s life continued to centre around religion and she often raised funds for the local church. She sang religious songs and studied the Bible and began to encourage her friends to sing hymns when they went out on trips.
On 31st August 1954, she told an acquaintance that her dead employer was guiding her from a supposed afterlife. She added, ‘the evil spirit is dead for ever,’ and concluded, ‘if we trust in God, all will be well.’ She also sang the first line of a hymn. He was alarmed by her zealousness and concluded that she was mentally ill.
As 31st August moved into the 1st September, the nurse’s religious fervour reached its peak. She thought that she felt evil vibrations emanating from the wireless and believed that she heard doors opening and closing. Concerned for her patient, she hurried upstairs and went into Marie’s bedroom, took a seat at her bedside and began to hold her hand and pray. She would later say that she prayed for a long time, doubtless to Marie’s increasing terror, but she believed that evil had entered her patient’s eyes and determined that she must pluck the offending orbs out of the woman’s head.
Noreen attempted to do so and a terrible struggle followed, in which Maria rolled out of bed and onto the floor. Her right hand was badly bruised and she lost a tooth as she tried to fight off the younger woman. Her attacker also tore at her lip and at her nostrils before tearing her eyelids and gouging out her eyeballs. Shortly afterwards, the 77-year-old died of blood loss and shock.
Afterwards, the 46-year-old nurse would have no memory of the rest of the night, but, in the morning, she concluded that the evil had left the building. She phoned a friend of the family and said that Marie had become possessed, that he must come to Gardeen immediately. Meanwhile, the housekeeper approached the house and was surprised to see that the upstairs curtains were still closed as Noreen was such an early riser. She let herself into the kitchen and began to prepare breakfast for the two women, but before she could go upstairs, the nurse entered the room, still in her dressing gown, and said that something terrible had happened. She refused to elaborate and the housekeeper assumed that the older woman had had another stroke.
When the family friend, Peter Tiarks, arrived at the house, he found Noreen O’Conner in a trancelike state. She said that she’d seen evil in Marie’s eyes, an evil that had become so malevolent she’d plucked both orbs out. Peter asked if she had killed Marie and she replied, ‘Well, I suppose she is dead but I did not kill her.’ The horrified man called a doctor, who entered the blood spattered bedroom and confirmed that Marie Buls had been murdered in the early hours.
Taken to Weston-super-Mare Police Station and charged, Noreen began to spout religious cant and continued to do so for several hours, becoming violent when officers tried to put her in one of the cells. By the following morning, when she appeared at the local magistrates court, she was calm and polite, entering a not guilty plea.
At the hearing, held at Somerset Assizes, Noreen’s solicitor suggested that Marie could have fallen out of bed and died of a stroke and that her eyes were removed by the nurse post-mortem, but magistrates decided they had enough evidence to go to trial and Noreen appeared at Wells Assizes on 15th October that year. Psychiatrists who had assessed her whilst she was in Holloway Prison said that Noreen was in a state of ‘acute mania’ and didn’t know right from wrong. She was found ‘guilty but insane’ and sentenced to remain at Broadmoor for an indefinite period.
The nurse bowed to the judge before she was taken to the mental health prison, where she remained for the next 29 years before dying of natural causes.
PART TWO
KILLER ON THE WARD
The ward-based killer, especially if he or she works with seriously ill or elderly patients, can claim numerous victims before falling under suspicion. Such killers are often superficially confident but this hides deep feelings of inadequacy and an inability to maintain a lasting, loving relationship. These killers have often been violent towards their significant others and have also been cruel to their pets. Most homicidal nurses deny their crimes: only Charles Cullen, a man who had spent years in therapy and felt comfortable in a confessional capacity, admitted to being a healthcare serial killer.
12 Colin Norris
This Scottish nurse apparently murdered his elderly female patients because he hated them, but it’s unclear why he took such drastic action rather than retrain for a different career.
Divorce
Colin Norris was born in Glasgow on the 12th February 1976 to June and Colin Norris. June was a typist, whilst Colin senior worked as a painter and decorator. The nuclear family lived in Partick and little Colin was a happy and lively child. He joined the boy scouts and, as one of his projects, helped learning-disabled people. He also loved amateur dramatics or anything else that put him centre stage.
His mother and father separated when he was seven and his mother won custody. By the time he was nine, the divorce was finalised. He then became even closer to his maternal grandmother, who doted on him and who lived in the next street. At thirteen, his mother remarried. His father, who he saw infrequently, also married again.
Colin wasn’t particularly gifted academically but left school with six standard examinations (the equivalent of six GCSEs) and began to study Travel at college. After a year of this, he left to become a travel agent. In the same time frame, when he was around seventeen, he allegedly stole money from his elderly relatives at a family funeral and his father was so disgusted by this behaviour that he broke off contact with him. Later, when the older man got back in touch, Colin demanded £18,000 compensation for being the child of a broken home. His father was shocked at this request and they became estranged for a second time.
After six years working in the travel industry, Colin Norris decided to retrain as a nurse, telling friends that this would allow him to ‘make a difference’ to society. He began studying for a Higher Nursing Diploma at Dundee University in September 1998, and was given a placement at the School of Nursing and Midwifery, but he clashed with his personal tutor as he always thought he knew best and hated being told what to do. He would later quip to police that, ‘It was a personality clash. I had a personality and she didn’t.’ But the truth was very different, as he fought with everyone in authority. He would later be described by the judge and by the press as ‘lazy’ but he had two part-time jobs to support himself during his student years and had never been unemployed.
Colin was gay and sometimes brought men back to his student accommodation to spend the night. He appeared to be comfortable with his sexuality. He was also supremely confident at work, bordering on being smug.
In January 1999, he attended a lecture on diabetes and, that May, he did some of his nurse’s training at Dundee’s well-regarded Ninewells Hospital and learnt more about diabetes care. His placement ended in July, after which he moved to the Royal Victoria Hospital, also in Dundee, to continue his training. He worked on the geriatric ward and hated it. He told his tutor that he loathed elderly people,
and he often took unauthorised days off.
In September, he attended another lecture about diabetic management, which included information about using insulin and, in January 2001, he went to a lecture about a female nurse who had been accused of murdering elderly patients by injecting them with the drug. Later that year, he did part of his nurse’s training at a nursing home in Dundee but hated changing sheets and dirty clothing and admitted to a friend that he loathed working with geriatric patients. He fulfilled only a few days of his four-week placement then phoned in and claimed to have a sore throat for the rest of the month.
In June 2001, Norris graduated with a Higher Nursing Diploma and, that autumn, began working as a staff nurse at Leeds General Infirmary. He also worked at St James Hospital in the city, assisting in the orthopaedic ward.
Colin Norris now thought of himself as an authority figure and a medical specialist and was enraged at being expected to do basic patient care, so when an octogenarian asked him to empty his catheter, Norris refused and told him to do it himself. The 87-year-old man attempted to follow his instructions but fell and was deeply distressed. When another patient fell out of bed, two elderly women called to Norris for assistance and he told one of them, ‘I hope you suffer,’ and said to the other, ‘Rot in hell.’ As a result of this and similar incidents, his dislike of senior citizens, especially females, was well known on the ward.
Ironically, one of his allotted tasks was to wash the vaginas of elderly women, some of whom had bladder infections and were incontinent. He found the smell intolerable. Most people would have reassured themselves that they’d soon be able to move out of geriatric nursing and into a specialism that held more appeal for them, or else they would have left the profession altogether. However, according to the police, Colin Norris decided to eliminate the most difficult patients rather than change his job…
Attempted murder
On 2nd May 2001, at Leeds General Hospital, Colin nursed ninety-year-old Vera Wilby, who had been left with a broken hip after a fall. Surgeons set her hip, but her condition deteriorated. That May, police would later allege, Colin Norris administered morphine to make her sleepy, followed by further drugs. His shift ended and he left the hospital, whereupon other nurses found her semi-conscious and suffering from hypoglycaemia. They stabilised her and she survived. (She died in a nursing home a year later from natural causes.)
Four murders
The following month, eighty-year-old Doris Ludlam arrived on Norris’s ward, also suffering from a broken hip. Thirteen days later, according to the police, Colin gave her double the recommended dose of diamorphine to make her sleepy, followed by insulin to reduce her blood sugar levels. Forty-five minutes after his shift ended, she was discovered in a coma and, two days later, she died.
Another of Colin’s patients, Bridget Bourke, aged 88, had numerous health problems including complications following a stroke and a chronic bacterial infection. On 21st July, he raised the alarm, saying that he’d found her unconscious. Tests showed that she was hypoglycaemic despite not suffering from diabetes. The following day she died and the cause of death was recorded as a stroke.
In October, Colin worked the night shift at a different Leeds hospital, St James’s, and nursed 79-year-old Irene Crookes, who had been admitted with a fractured hip and breathing difficulties. Nine days after being admitted, she was found unconscious and hypoglycaemic. She died the next day.
The following month, Colin’s patients included Ethel Hall, aged 86, who was admitted to Leeds General Hospital for a fractured hip. Five days later, she was making good progress and had been walking about the ward, so a nurse was surprised when Colin Norris said that he didn’t like the look of her. He added that people always died when he was on night shift and said that things most often went wrong at about 5.15 a.m.
At 5 a.m., a nurse found Ethel choking and slumped down in her bed. She called for another nurse and they lifted her up, cleaned her airways and checked her blood sugar, finding that her glucose levels were so low that her brain had shut down. Tests revealed that her insulin levels were twelve times the normal limit, a dose too high to have ever been given accidentally. She remained in a coma. Belatedly aware that they had a potential killer on the ward, the hospital called the police.
West Yorkshire Police began their investigation on 6th December 2002. On the 11th, Ethel Hall died without ever having regained consciousness and her husband of fifty years was so distraught that he had a heart attack three weeks after her death, after which he remained in a weakened state. Norris was interviewed, as were all of the other doctors and nurses, and told police that he’d been unlucky for the past twelve months. He was arrested and suspended from work. However, even though they interviewed him at length, the police didn’t have enough to charge him, and he was released, moving back to Glasgow and taking a job with an events company – work that included foreign travel.
The following September, detectives arranged for Mrs Bourke’s body to be exhumed and tested. The pathologist reported that she had died from an insulin-induced coma – in other words, the killer had claimed another victim. Critics later wondered why the hospital’s insulin stocks weren’t more carefully managed, why no one noticed that phials of the medicine had disappeared.
Meanwhile, Colin Norris went on a cruise as part of his job and began a relationship with another traveller. The man would later allege that Colin had thrown a bottle at him during one argument, and hit him on the head during another row.
Whilst the former nurse sailed the Seven Seas, West Yorkshire Police continued their investigations. They found that Colin Norris had worked at two hospitals in the city and that there had been seventy-two deaths during that time, eighteen of which were suspicious. By poring over the record books, they were able to ascertain which nurses had been working with which patients and who had had the opportunity to be alone with these patients before they died. Colin Norris had worked the night shift or weekend shifts when eight of the patients became hypoglycaemic, shifts when senior staff weren’t on duty. He admitted that he was the last medic to see them before they took a turn for the worse. Detectives decided to charge him with the murders of Ethel Hall, Doris Ludlam, Bridget Bourke and Irene Crookes and with the attempted murder of Vera Wilby.
Arrest
Norris was convinced that the police would not proceed whilst they had purely circumstantial evidence, so he was visibly shocked on 12th October 2005 when they charged him with four counts of murder and one of attempted murder. He said that patients always made a noise or asked what was going on when a nurse injected them, so how had he managed to do so without drawing attention to himself? The police, however, believe that he had given them drugs to make them drowsy first. Colin admitted telling another nurse that patients’ conditions always worsened at about 5.15 a.m. and that Ethel Hall had deteriorated at 5 a.m., but now said to detectives, ‘I’m no Mystic Meg.’
The motive
Police noted that Colin could be charismatic and quite funny on occasion but, at other times, he was overwhelmingly arrogant and aggressive. They were convinced that he’d murdered the women simply because they irritated him.
Psychiatrist Dr Richard Badcock came to the same conclusion after studying the case, stating that Norris appeared to be a psychopath who killed patients who got in his way. The ones who were murdered had needed their clothing or bedding changed, tasks that he abhorred.
Trial
On 16th October 2005, he went on trial at Newcastle Crown Court, charged with four murders and one attempted murder. He was convinced that he would be found innocent. The media would later report that he attacked the press, but it was a minor act of aggression where he lightly pushed a press photographer out of the way.
The jury returned on 3rd March 2008 and he was convicted by an eleven-to-one majority. He showed no emotion at the verdict, though his mother later said that he was shell-shocked and that, if he’d been tried in his native Scotland, the jury would surely have returned w
ith a Not Proven verdict. Given a thirty-year minimum sentence, he was sent to Durham Prison where the other prisoners nicknamed him Dr Death. Later that year, lawyers announced his plans to appeal.
Struck off
In April 2009, the Nursing and Midwifery Council held a hearing at which Colin Norris appeared via a web link from prison. He claimed that he was innocent of all of the charges but the council took just five minutes to ban him from ever working in a nursing capacity again.
13 Kristen Gilbert
With her love of medical emergencies and Munchausen’s syndrome tendencies, this American nurse shared some personality traits with Britain’s Beverly Allitt. With Munchausen’s, the sufferer hurts him or herself (or pretends to) in order to elicit sympathy from friends, family and medical practitioners. With Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy, the person harms others, often children, in order to become the centre of attention, sometimes with lethal results.
A desperate need for attention
Kristen was born on the 15th November 1967 to Claudia and Richard Strickland. Her father was in the services at the time of her birth but later pursued a career as an electronics engineer and her mother was a teacher. When she was six months old the family relocated to Fall River, Massachusetts.
When Kristen was three they enrolled her in a strict day care centre and, when she was seven, her parents had a second girl. Kristen resented the newcomer and now spent more time with her maternal grandmother and grandfather. She seemed desperate for attention and often invented stories, sometimes of a dramatic nature. She also told her school friends that she was related to Lizzie Borden, who’d been acquitted in Fall River in 1892 of murdering her parents with an axe.
Doctors Who Kill Page 7