Doctors Who Kill

by Davis, Carol Anne; Davis, Carol Anne

  On 24th January 2000, the jury retired to consider their verdict, returning a week later with a guilty verdict for all fifteen murders. He was also found guilty of forging Kathleen Grundy’s will. Only then was the court told about his previous conviction for forging pethidine prescriptions for his own use.

  Mr Justice Forbes described the doctor’s acts as ‘sheer wickedness’ before passing fifteen life sentences plus four years for forging the will. He recommended that Shipman never be released. The doctor, who could hardly have been surprised by the verdict, showed no emotion. Neither did his wife.

  Life behind bars

  Shipman was initially sent to Strangeways Prison, then moved to Preston, then Walton Jail in Liverpool, before being returned to Strangeways. He lost two stone in weight during his first few weeks of incarceration and aged visibly, but he had the support of Primrose, who visited weekly and would sit, holding his hand and kissing him. His adult children sometimes accompanied her.

  In prison, Shipman continued to show two different sides of himself. He helped some prisoners write letters home and helped others to understand their own medical histories, but he was so arrogant when he took part in the prison’s quiz team that he was told to leave.

  Life was now unspeakably dull for the doctor, so, on 30th April 2001, he agreed to be taken for questioning to Halifax Police Station. There, police asked him about other possible murders he had committed as a GP, but, his natural arrogance reasserting itself, he refused to answer any of their questions, preferring to lean back in his chair, fold his arms and close his eyes. He made it clear that he despised them and their ongoing inquiries. He thought he was totally in control.

  The Shipman Inquiry

  Both the medical fraternity and the general public had been shocked at the fact that the doctor had apparently murdered with impunity since as early as 1970, and the authorities agreed to set up an inquiry. It began in June 2001 in Manchester and looked into 887 deaths.

  Dame Janet Smith, the High Court Judge who chaired the inquiry, concluded that the doctor had killed 215 patients between 1974 and 1998 and that he had possibly killed another 45. In a further 38 cases, there wasn’t enough evidence to make a decision.

  Suicide

  The years passed, and Shipman must have contemplated his life and realised that he had nothing to look forward to. By now, he was resident in Wakefield Prison and was no longer on suicide watch, as the authorities believed he’d come to terms with prison life.

  Just before 6 a.m. on 13th January 2004 – the day before his fifty-eighth birthday – he tore a strip from his bed sheet, wound it around his neck and around the bars of his cell window, and hanged himself. As he had died before his sixtieth birthday, his widow got a lump sum of £100,000, plus £18,000 a year from his pension fund.

  The motive

  So what was the motive for the murders? They weren’t acts of mercy as most of the women were happy and reasonably healthy, with strong links to the community, and it wasn’t sexual, for one woman surprised Shipman moments after he’d killed her friend and the dead woman’s clothing was undisturbed. Interestingly, Shipman was peering into the display cabinet when she walked into the room, and this may tell us something about his motivation. He was like a teenager, left alone to babysit in a stranger’s house. Most of us will remember an occasion like this during our teenage years when we peeked into a friend’s medicine chest in the bathroom or glanced at a letter on a table-top. It’s something that we grow out of as we mature and understand more about a person’s right to their own space and privacy.

  Shipman, however, may well have become emotionally frozen during his teens at the point when his mother became terminally ill. As such, he would have maintained his level of curiosity about the homes of his patients, derived excitement from rifling through every cupboard and drawer. That said, there wasn’t a sadistic element to the doctor’s murders – he didn’t tell his patients that they were about to die or in any way alarm them – and the drug that he used, diamorphine, gave them a feeling of well-being in the two minutes that it took for them to slip into unconsciousness. Shipman often removed their false teeth at this stage, aware that, as the patient relaxed, their teeth could slip back into their throat and cause a reflex choking. He seemed to want their last minutes to be peaceful, as his mother’s had been.

  It’s clear – given his compulsive need to repeat it – that giving a patient a deadly injection gave him some kind of thrill. He probably had a needle fetish, something that is common in drug users. Even those who have kicked the habit have been known to inject themselves with a saline solution, as they’ve grown to enjoy the ritual of drug abuse as much as the high. Shipman may have been acting as a sort of ‘drug addict by proxy’ when he injected his patients, vicariously experiencing their brief, chemically stimulated joy.

  Shortly after administering each fatal injection, however, he experienced a level of depression. As such, he was often brusque with the relatives or neighbours of the deceased when they arrived at the scene. It seems that he had to play down the significance of each murder in order to be able to kill again and again.

  Another Shipman?

  In February 2009, Dame Janet Smith – the judge who investigated Shipman’s murders – said that GPs were still signing death certificates for each other, so a ‘dishonest, malevolent doctor’ could slip through the net. Lessons, apparently, had not been learnt from the most prolific medical killing spree in British history.

  In September of that same year, the media revealed that 65 of Shipman’s letters, sent to two of his former patients and friends, would be auctioned in November. Written during his years in prison, they were said to be arrogant in tone and repeatedly proclaimed his innocence.

  16 Beverly Allitt

  Although Beverly originally exhibited Munchausen’s syndrome tendencies, where the sufferer harms themselves in order to get attention from friends and medical staff, her behaviour morphed into Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy (a diagnosis that some psychologists don’t want applied to her case), whereby she harmed other people – with ultimately fatal results.

  Early hypochondria

  Beverly (later shortened to Bev) Gail Allitt was born on the 4th October 1968 in Corby Glen, a village close to Grantham. Her father, Richard, was a factory worker and her mother, Lillian, had a variety of jobs ranging from seamstress to cleaner. The couple already had a three-year-old daughter when Bev was born and went on to have a third daughter and a son.

  Bev enjoyed a holiday with her family every year as well as quite a few day trips. She helped around the house and sometimes brought one or two friends home for tea. She wasn’t particularly good at anything, being neither sporty nor academic, but was well liked by her peers.

  By her first year at secondary school, she kept complaining of minor illnesses and accidental injuries. One day she’d claim to have stomach cramps, the next day it would be backache. Or she’d breathlessly leave the kitchen holding a bleeding finger, telling her mother that she’d cut it with the bread knife whilst making a sandwich; Lillian was forever having to fetch the bandages and surgical tape. Bev made a great deal of her injuries at school – even the headmaster was aware of her numerous accidents and illnesses. As the year went on, her accounts of what had happened became more grandiose, and she’d claim to have fallen off a horse or her bike, or had been hit a glancing blow by a car.

  It was perhaps this immaturity that made her well-liked by younger children, and she became a popular babysitter in the village. That said, she didn’t respect other people’s boundaries and was guilty of going through their private possessions when left alone in the house.

  She was also a compulsive liar, telling her first boyfriend, Kevin – whom she met when she was sixteen – that her parents were so cruel that she’d had to leave home for her own protection. In reality, she was happily living with them. She also told Kevin about her lung disease, kidney problems and grumbling appendix. It was hardly a Romeo and Juliet sce
nario, so, within a few months, he moved on to a healthier and happier girlfriend.

  Bev left school at sixteen and started a pre-nursing course at Grantham College. Sometimes she turned up on crutches, claiming to have hurt her foot, whilst, on other occasions, she had her arm in a sling. Once, she genuinely broke her wrist by falling down the stairs but she told everyone she met that she’d sustained the injury whilst protecting a friend from a girl gang.

  The course lasted a year, after which Bev did even more babysitting. She also found herself another boyfriend, a road repairman, and they soon got engaged. He found that she didn’t like to be kissed and cuddled and wasn’t very keen on sex.

  He was amazed at how accident-prone she was, and at how often she ended up at Grantham Hospital’s casualty department. By September 1988 she had started her nurse’s training there. She moved into the nursing home and, shortly afterwards, some of the nurses found that their possessions were missing and that a prankster kept hitting the Crash Call button when there wasn’t really a medical emergency. But no one initially suspected twenty-year-old Bev, who would bring some of the nurses back to her parents’ house to enjoy a home-cooked meal.

  Unfortunately her fiancé saw little of her largesse. It was a case of familiarity breeding contempt and she began to cancel dates, and when she did show up, she endlessly found fault with him. In time, the verbal insults were accompanied by physical blows and the relationship came to an end.

  As Bev moved into her second year as a trainee nurse, odd things continued to happen at the nursing home. Someone smeared faeces on a door and put newspaper-wrapped faeces under a grill, almost setting the kitchen on fire. They also superglued a door lock and superglued a car door. The hospital manager found that four girls, including Bev Allitt, were always in the vicinity when these upsetting incidents occurred and he warned them all that it had to stop. One nurse blamed Bev but she had no proof. The bizarre behaviour ceased after the manager’s warning, and, the following spring, Bev moved in with a friend.

  Further traits of Munchausen’s syndrome

  With her fabricated accidents and invented illnesses, Bev had been showing Munchausen’s syndrome traits since her mid-teens, but these escalated markedly in her second year of nurse’s training. She was looking after other people but perhaps really wanted someone to look after her. In 1990, she made fifty visits to her GP and to casualty, claiming that she had kidney problems, appendicitis and abdominal pain. She also presented herself so repeatedly at casualty with supposed bladder problems that they gave her a catheter, thinking that the discomfort this caused would stop her making false complaints for a while. But Bev loved it as it convinced some of her acquaintances that she was genuinely ill.

  Between supposed bouts of illness, the trainee nurse would arrive at casualty with a cut hand, a bruised foot or a bleeding arm – injuries that doctors suspected were self-inflicted. She even managed to persuade a surgeon to remove her supposedly inflamed appendix, but the organ was in perfect condition. A week later, she returned to casualty with the surgical wound bleeding; doctors believed that she had been deliberately pulling at her stitches.

  The jobseeker

  But, despite always claiming to have one foot in the grave, Bev passed her exams and, in early December 1990, went for her first interview. It was at Grantham Hospital, but they were dismayed at her poor attendance record and scruffy appearance and turned her down. She had missed so much of her nurse’s training due to ill health that, though she’d passed her written work, she hadn’t put in a sufficient number of hours on the wards. Now she was allowed to make up the time by working on Ward Four, the children’s ward.

  As her ten weeks of training neared its end, Bev heard of a three-year course for children’s nurses in a nearby town and was given an interview. But, again, she was so vague and lost-looking that they turned her down. She pretended not to care and seemed equally unphased when her flatmate’s kitten was mysteriously found dead, its head caved in. There again, Bev had been jealous of her flatmate’s love for the little creature and now enjoyed having the other woman to herself…

  Meanwhile, Ward Four had failed to find the two experienced registered children’s nurses they were trying to recruit and remained desperately short staffed. Reluctantly they gave newly qualified state enrolled nurse Bev the job, albeit on a six-month contract. She was mothered by some of the older nurses when she told them that she’d been beaten and harassed by her ex-boyfriend, but these same conscientious nurses would have been alarmed to know that Bev was working at a care home in the evenings – additional work that her contract forbade – as she was saving up to buy a car. Such a lack of rest and relaxation would play havoc with a nurse’s energy levels and alertness and could cause her to make mistakes. They’d have been even more shocked if they could have seen into Bev’s mind and realised that she was willing to hurt and even kill patients in order to create drama and become one of the medics who sometimes brought them back to life.

  On 14th February 1991, Bev told her supervisor that the key to the fridge where the insulin was stored had disappeared. Now someone could help themselves to insulin without there being a record kept…

  Liam’s murder

  In the same week in February 1991 that Bev started work on Ward Four, seven-month-old Liam Taylor was admitted, his bad cold having turned into a chest infection. Bev was his nurse. He stabilised and his parents, Joanne and Chris, went home for a meal and a change of clothes. When they returned, Liam’s condition had deteriorated markedly and he was immobile and unnaturally pale. Nurse Allitt said that the child had vomited and defecated all over her, that he would probably have died if he’d been at home. Later, Liam’s father asked Bev if the little boy would be better off at the nearby Nottingham hospital, Queen’s Medical Centre, which had recently opened an intensive care unit for children, but Bev lied that the other hospital was too busy to give their son special care.

  Liam’s colour soon returned and he began kicking his little legs and smiling at his parents, so the medical team were shocked when he went into cardiac arrest. Bev screamed for the crash cart and the team resuscitated him, but two days later, on 21st February, he had another baffling arrest and stopped breathing for fifteen minutes, resulting in massive brain damage. His devastated parents held him until he died.

  Some of the nurses were in tears but, for Bev, it was business as usual. Though some found her cold, others were impressed at her stoicism.

  Autopsy

  The hospital had thought that Liam had pneumonia and possibly septicaemia, but an autopsy showed that the left ventricle of his heart was so badly damaged as to be almost completely destroyed. In short, he’d apparently had a heart attack, which is very rare in babies. Dr Nanayakkara was unconvinced and requested a second post-mortem, but by then the death certificate had been issued so the baby was duly cremated. Liam’s father, Chris, spoke to various doctors and experts in an attempt to find out how such a tiny child could die of cardiac arrest, but they just muttered that they didn’t know.

  Tim’s murder

  Two weeks later, eleven-year-old Tim Hardwick was brought into Grantham having had an epileptic fit. He had cerebral palsy, was almost blind, had never learnt to speak, had little motor control and weighed only two-and-a-half stone. By the time he was admitted to Grantham he had stabilised and was soon sleeping peacefully. Then Bev attended to him and suddenly he became a medical emergency and she called for the crash team, saying that he had gone into cardiac arrest. Despite doctors’ attempts to resuscitate him, he was declared dead within half an hour of Nurse Allitt sounding the alarm.

  The autopsy showed some small bleeds into Tim’s lungs, more usually associated with asphyxia, but the epileptic fits could have caused such bleeding, so the doctor put epilepsy as the cause of death, even though Tim hadn’t had a fit in the four to five hours before his death.

  Kayley’s close call

  Three days later, one-year-old Kayley Desmond was admitted to the ward suf
fering from a chest infection. She seemed stable, but suddenly Bev called another nurse into the room and pointed out that the child had gone a strange colour. Bev phoned for the crash team while the other nurse resuscitated the baby, whose heart had stopped. Once they had resuscitated her, medics did tests on the now-screaming child but could find nothing wrong.

  At four that morning, her heart stopped again for no clear reason. Medics got it started and transferred her to the intensive care unit of the Queen’s Medical Centre. Bev volunteered to go with her in the ambulance.

  By now, the senior nurses at Grantham Hospital were baffled. Most had a decade or two’s worth of experience and had seen only one or two cardiac arrests in children. Yet, suddenly, there had been three in a few days.

  Paul’s lucky escape

  A five-month-old boy called Paul Crampton was the next to suffer unexplained and potentially fatal symptoms. He was admitted to Ward Four on 20th March suffering from a bronchial infection but had improved significantly and was due to go home the following day. To everyone’s consternation, he suddenly went grey and Bev told one of her colleagues that he was ‘having a hypo’. She did a test for hypoglycaemia but the result was low-normal and the other nurses were relieved. But, a few minutes later, the baby went limp and sweaty so they did another test, which now confirmed Bev’s original diagnosis. The team hooked the baby up to a dextrose drip and he recovered within twenty minutes – but without their prompt treatment he would have slipped into a coma with potentially fatal results.