by John Askill
Sue and Peter decided to consult their vicar, the Rev. Ian Shelton, who had given them so much comfort previously. Becky was buried in his churchyard and he had conducted her funeral service. Sue told him she wasn’t frightened and she didn’t want anything done that would force Becky out of her home. She certainly didn’t want an exorcism to drive out her spirit.
It was in February 1993 that Ian Shelton arrived at their home to carry out a service of Blessing with Sue and Peter. Sue said: ‘We prayed that Becky would always be welcome, whenever she wanted to come home.’
Beverley Allitt spent the remainder of the trial in the relative comfort of her room at Rampton complete with television and en-suite bathroom. She was effectively ‘off sick’ as she had been for so much of her training as a nurse.
During her two years as a student at Grantham, Allitt had missed a total of 191 days through sickness, 94 of them in 1990, although this had not kept her away from hospitals. She admitted herself so many times to accident and emergency departments with cuts, sprains and illnesses that staff became convinced that she was deliberately inflicting the misery on herself. In all, she was treated twenty-nine times at hospitals in Grantham, Boston, Great Yarmouth and Peterborough.
She complained fictitiously she was pregnant or suffering from a brain tumour or ulcers. Several times she made repeat visits as her wounds strangely became re-infected or stitches ripped open. A hospital physio was so concerned about the volume of her visits that she warned the authorities in Grantham that she suspected Allitt was suffering from Munchausen syndrome but nothing was done. Owing to strict rules on the confidentiality of patient’s records, none of the information about her hospital visits could ever be passed on and Allitt was allowed to carry on nursing.
The judge, Mr Justice Latham, would not allow evidence of Munchausen syndrome to be given to the jury fearing it would make it impossible for Allitt to have a fair trial. The jury finally retired to consider their verdicts at lunchtime on the forty-fifth day of the trial. The parents, now packed into the public gallery, drew comfort from one another. They were bound together in their suffering.
The verdicts took almost a week to deliver. Each one in turn brought tears and cheers from the waiting families: guilty to the murder of ‘Little Pudding Pants’ Liam Taylor, guilty to the murder of twin Becky Phillips, guilty to the murder of Claire Peck, guilty to the murder of ‘My Special Boy’ Timothy Hardwick.
The jury found her guilty too of attempting to murder Paul Crampton, Katie Phillips and Bradley Gibson. They also found her guilty of attacking Kayley Desmond, Henry Chan, Patrick Elstone, Christopher King, Michael Davidson and Christopher Peasgood, causing them grievous bodily harm with intent. But the jury cleared her of charges of attempting to murder and causing grievous bodily harm to Jonathan Jobson and Dorothy Lowe.
The judge ordered that Allitt should be brought from Rampton to the dock at Nottingham Crown Court to be sentenced. The law dictated only one punishment – life imprisonment. The parents too faced their own life sentence, each family scarred forever by the dreadful memories of what happened in sixty days on Ward Four.