The police came to the hospital in late April 1991 because the staff on Ward 4, the children’s ward, were terrified. In just eight weeks, four children had died and nine more had suddenly collapsed. The doctors in Nottingham who received the transferred babies said the same thing: too many children, too many unexplained attacks. I was a detective on the inquiry.
My boss told me this would be a three-day job. It turned into one of the longest, darkest investigations of my career. We started with one little boy. Paul Crampton was five months old, admitted with a wheezy chest.
He was due to go home. Then he went cold, clammy, lifeless. A nurse said he was hypo. Low blood sugar.
They gave him glucose and he recovered. His father told me he walked back onto the ward and saw his son lying in a nurse’s arms, gray and still. Another father told me he stepped out for a cigarette while his son was being cared for, and when his wife came back early, she found a nurse putting medication back into their child that should have been finished. His wife pulled it out.
The nurse stamped her foot, threw something on the bed, and stormed off. That nurse was Beverly Allitt. At first we had nothing. We thought maybe a bug or a medical condition was responsible.
We interviewed dozens of nurses and doctors. One name kept coming up at every single incident. We made a chart: all the children on one side, all the nurses on the other. After every attack, I looked at that chart and Beverly Allitt’s column was complete.
She was the only one present for all 23 incidents. I met her before the arrest. She was a 22-year-old nurse, quiet, pleasant, willing to talk. She offered to help with the inquiry.
She told us she had never been in trouble with the police. She came across as naive, innocent even. But the evidence finally caught up with us. Professor Vincent Marks, a world-renowned insulin expert, tested Paul’s blood.
The insulin level was over 500 units. There was no C-peptide, which meant the insulin did not come from the body. It came from a bottle. Someone had injected that baby with a massive dose of insulin.
If he hadn’t been on a glucose drip, he would have died. We also found insulin in Becky Phillips, one of the twins Allitt had been caring for. Becky had died. She had also been given potassium.
The experts found another case too, a little girl named Claire Peek, who died from potassium poisoning. On the 21st of May 1991, we went to Beverly Allitt’s house. We arrested her for theft of a hospital key and the attempted murder of Paul Crampton. In the interview room, she was small, composed, calm.
She looked us in the eye and said hello. She had an explanation for everything. When we asked about the missing fridge key, she remembered tiny details weeks later that she hadn’t known beforehand. She described walking to the fridge, taking the key off the bunch, noticing it wasn’t there.
It was too detailed, too rehearsed. Nobody remembers that much about a key going missing. I noticed she referred to a child as “it. ” I’d never heard a nurse talk about a patient that way.
She said, “If it was given insulin, that would make his sugar go down. ” Not “he. ” Not “him. ” Just “it.
” Callous. Cold. The interviews stretched on for hours. She remained calm, but there was one moment when her mask slipped.
She was tired, angry, and she snapped, “Having me in here all this time, pissing about. ” That single word, “me,” showed the real Beverly Allitt. Dead children, and her concern was herself. She was arrested, bailed, and went to stay with a friend’s family in Peterborough.
Strange things started happening there. A toilet fire. Cut mattresses. The dog was poisoned, lying on the lawn frothing at the mouth.
The grandson collapsed on a shopping trip after being given hypoglycemic tablets. The family came to us. We also discovered that Allitt had injected an 80-year-old diabetic woman, Dorothy Low, with insulin at a nursing home where she worked nights. A cleaner saw her standing over Dorothy at three in the morning with a syringe in her hand.
Dorothy survived because she was given glucose. We charged Beverly Allitt with four murders, nine attempted murders, and nine counts of grievous bodily harm with intent. I read the charges out to her. She stood there as if I was reading a train timetable.
No emotion. No reaction. The next morning, I went to her cell. She was asleep, lying on a thin mattress, well-rested.
When I told her we were taking her to court, she smiled, looked out of the police van windows, waving at the press. She was enjoying the moment. At trial, her defense was that she suffered from a condition called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. She was a nurse, they said, driven by an illness, not malice.
The jury deliberated for six nights. They came back with unanimous guilty verdicts. A woman in the public gallery shouted, “Lock her in a cage. ”
She was sentenced to life with a minimum term of 30 years.
Years later, when I reviewed her sentence, I saw new psychiatric reports that pointed to something different: she derived pleasure from what she did. She wasn’t just mentally ill. She enjoyed it. Even now, every year on the 4th of October, her birthday, I think of her.
The nurses on that ward were good, kind people. They cried, they panicked, they didn’t trust each other. And all the while, one of their own was killing the children they were meant to protect. Beverly Allitt is in Rampton, a secure hospital.
She has her own room. She does her knitting. She admitted the offenses after her conviction. Some might say that admission was just another way to control the situation, to stay in the spotlight.
Her victims were the most vulnerable people imaginable. Babies and children. She destroyed their families. A brother carried the scar for the rest of his life.
Her own goddaughter, Katie Phillips, whose twin sister Becky she had already killed, was attacked too. She squeezed her, broke her ribs. The parents believed Allitt was a saint. They made her a godmother.
That is the worst part. Those parents placed their children in her hands, believing she was saving them. And she was killing them. She was just a girl from Corby Glen.
Perfectly normal, everyone said. She feigned illness as a child, hurt herself, injected water into her own breast. She was good at playing the victim. And while she played that game, four children died.
I don’t think she will ever come out. I don’t think she should. Where I sit now, I can’t quite accept it. I look at the files, the children’s faces, and I think about how easily it all could have been prevented.
But it wasn’t. And nothing will bring them back.
