Original subtitles

(suspenseful music)

I'm David Wilson, emeritus professor of criminology.

And for over 30 years, I've investigated

the phenomenon of murder and what it is that might

motivate someone to kill.

Every murder case is different.

But time and again, a deadly pattern emerges

of warning signs and red flags.

In this new series, I investigate some of the UK's most

harrowing murder cases to understand how and why

these terrible crimes occur.

This is Murder UK.

(projector whirring)

(suspenseful music)

Grantham is quite a small community.

And rumours about worrying goings-on

at the hospital were swirling around the town.

Most people working in the hospital knew

the police had been coming and going and taking files

away and taking statements from people

and looking at patients' records.

By early May, the local media had picked up

and were asking questions.

(David Wilson) The rumours start on Ward 4, the children's ward

at Grantham & Kesteven Hospital.

(Donna Youngs) So there's lots of really frightening

incidences going on, four very young children dying,

lots of other examples

of the children becoming suddenly very, very unexpectedly,

inexplicably, seriously ill.

(Sarah Jarvis) Within a general children's ward,

nine needs for resuscitation?

That's completely unprecedented.

I worked in a very similar children's ward for six months,

and we never had a single sudden death that wasn't expected.

(David) Hospitals are places where there are sick people,

and sometimes those sick people will die.

It's also an obvious point to make that health care

professionals want to help people.

They don't want to kill them.

And therefore, when there are a sudden increase

in the numbers of health care crises,

or, indeed, deaths on a unit or within a hospital, the last thing

that people will think... oh, there must be a killer

on the loose within the ward.

The hospital were clearly confused.

The staff did not know how to respond to our answers.

And that was really, really worrying.

They were probably worried about a lot of things

at the time, a lot of unexplained events.

And they were searching for answers, and they didn't have any.

(Jeff Edwards) Somebody very senior within the clinical side

was put in touch with the CID in Lincolnshire and said,

we think we need you to come in and have a look at things.

(Stuart Clifton) The police were contacted.

They were contacted by a telephone call to a detective sergeant

at Grantham, who got in touch with me.

And I went to the hospital the following day on the 1st of May.

I was met with two...

two paediatricians, Dr Porter and Dr Nanayakkara.

They both took different positions.

Dr Nanayakkara thought that whilst there were a high number

of collapses, a much higher number than is normal,

he felt that it was just a blip on the graph.

(Charith Nanayakkara) The medical services,

the hospital services were purely on trust.

And we believe everybody is good, unless proved otherwise.

And our training is such that we always

consider any medical condition to be medically explained.

(David) DSI Stuart Clifton begins looking into the file

of a baby called Liam Taylor.

(Stuart) Liam Taylor was a little boy

of about seven weeks old.

He went into hospital.

There were concerned parents, Chris and Joanne Taylor.

And they'd had the doctor out a couple of times at home.

Liam Taylor was brought to the hospital by his parents

because he was having breathing difficulties.

(David) On Ward 4, Liam is looked after by Dr Nanayakkara.

(Charith) Liam Taylor was admitted under my care.

And I agreed that he was ill,

needing very close monitoring

and specific treatment,

even though we did not know specifically

what was wrong with him. On the whole, of course,

chest infections, children recover from them.

They get them all the time, and they recover from them.

His was unusually serious,

but he did seem to be on the mend.

(Charith) I used to come and see him quite often

and assist him with the help of the nursing staff.

We showed very slight improvement.

(pensive music)

(David) Liam's parents are reassured

a nurse will remain by his side.

At about 5 o'clock, two nurses

told them that they were going to feed

the little boy, who had to be fed through a tube, because he

couldn't take food normally.

They decided that they would go home for tea.

(Jeff) He was immediately tended to

by Beverley Allitt, who reassured

his worried parents that he was

going to be fine, that he was in a really good

place, that they shouldn't worry.

They returned a short time later and could

immediately see that something was not quite right.

(suspenseful music)

The child was unclothed, apart from a nappy.

And one of the nurses, Beverley Allitt,

said that while she'd been feeding him, the little boy had vomited,

and she'd had to go home to change her uniform.

(David) Speaking to Detective Inspector Neil Jones,

nurse Beverley Allitt claims she has concerns about Liam Taylor.

(Beverley) He was really... he

was ill, very ill, very ill baby.

And he had very severe bronchiolitis,

pneumonia sort of thing.

(Neil) She was identifying the occasions when

these children were dying or were seriously ill.

She brought medical help to them straightaway.

(Beverley) It looked like red blotches on his skin.

And so I stayed with Wile, the charge nurse, and looked at him.

And David came and says, can you get a doctor?

She was always in the right place at the right time

and was saying the right things.

So these parents had to believe in her and trust her.

And they did.

(grim music, monitor beeping steadily)

(Jeff) The child was left with Beverley,

and things went very quickly downhill,

and in fact, so seriously that he suffered a, you know,

massive breathing problem, oxygen starvation.

I could not quite explain why he suddenly collapsed.

(David) Neither could Beverley Allitt.

(Interviewer) What had happened to him to make him

have a cardiac arrest?

(Beverley) I don't know.

(Interviewer) And nor does anybody else?

(David) After a while, it becomes

impossible to ignore what would be seen as a professional anomaly.

There's always one particular nurse who's

there when there's a crisis, or who draws attention to the fact

that there's been a crisis, or who is

attempting to intervene to prevent the crisis from becoming worse.

And that professional anomaly in this case is Beverley Allitt.

To many people, she must have seemed like a dedicated caregiver.

But then you begin to notice the pattern.

These sudden splurges, these sudden increases in health care crisis

always occur when she's on duty.

In February 1991, Dr Nanayakkara fights to save

the life of seven-week-old Liam Taylor, the first

of the collapsing children.

(Charith) I connected him onto a ventilator,

gave the necessary intensive care and support.

But unfortunately, we could not resuscitate him.

(Stuart) The boy, who was now suffering convulsions,

had got brain damage.

Throughout that morning, the Saturday morning,

then they decide

that they want life support withdrawn.

And they nurse the child until it dies in their arms

on the Saturday morning.

(David) Dr Nanayakkara requests a post-mortem

and meets with his nursing team while he awaits the results,

searching for answers.

(mysterious music)

(Charith) And I was quite surprised.

And I shared my continuing concerns about this

and tried to get more information about

any possible causes of death.

I sat down with all the nurses

and went through with each of them,

right from the beginning to the end, what happened,

what were the changes?

(David) Nurse Beverley Allitt

has been by Liam Taylor's side

throughout his stay on Ward 4.

(Interviewer) Could you have gotten mixed up or neglected to do?

Did you forget to do?

(Beverley) Well, if I did, I would find it on the drug chart.

I had it all wrote down on a bit of paper

what I had to do during the night.

(David) Age 22, Beverley Allitt has been on Ward 4

just three weeks when Liam Taylor dies.

(Stuart) They felt sorry for her

because she was a young nurse new to the job and was,

in the early stages, well-liked by the remainder of the staff

on that ward.

(suspenseful music)

Beverley Allitt grew up in the Lincolnshire village

of Corby Glen.

She was one of four children, working-class family.

She, right from an early age, apparently, always

expressed an interest in nursing.

(David) Local pub landlord Ray Mercer

remembers Beverley as a youngster.

(Ray Mercer) When it came to holiday times, you're all meeting up.

You're playing.

Well, down by the Croft Road, there was a little green.

Beverley was a quiet, quiet one, yeah.

Would actually... when things were happening, when we were deciding

what we were going to do, she would be at the back,

watching what was going on.

(David) She has a reputation for being good with younger

children in the village.

(Ray) She had the opportunity

to start babysitting from families who were looking for...

for young girls or boys to actually babysit

for their children.

To my knowledge, there was nobody

who actually who came out and said,

oh, well, don't use Beverley because they're

not very good with the children.

(David) There are, however, some concerns.

(Donna) She's faking illnesses, putting

bandages on herself, and not letting anybody

examine what's underneath.

And then she progresses on to a rather more extreme

manifestation of this desperation.

(David) Beverley's history suggests

deep-seated psychological issues.

She convinces doctors she needs a healthy appendix removed.

(pensive music)

(Sarah) If you say that you're in pain then,

it's very difficult to be absolutely certain

that the appendix is normal,

and you can end up having your appendix

taken out, just in case.

And it soon got to the stage, in fact, where some GP surgeries

refused to take her anymore as a patient,

and she was being passed, if you like, from surgery to surgery,

all around the Lincolnshire area.

Suspicion started to grow with her own parents

that there was, in fact, nothing wrong with her at all.

She just was... had a kind of attention-seeking syndrome.

(suspenseful music)

(David) Beverley Allitt has what

we now call factitious illness disorder.

She claims to be sick when, in fact, she's not.

She demands surgical procedures, such as having

her appendix removed, when her appendix is totally healthy.

By having factitious illness disorder, what she is seeking

is attention.

What she's seeking is sympathy.

What she wants is to be the centre of everyone's attention.

When the person with factitious illness disorder

can no longer legitimately claim that they are sick, what they will

sometimes do is they move away from having an illness themselves

to saying that some of the people that they're caring for

have that illness.

And that's when things become really dangerous.

(grim music)

As an 18-year-old, Beverley applies for a nursing course.

(Stuart) She was befriended by a local nurse who

talked her into nurse training.

She did that nurse training at Grantham

and lived within the accommodation

provided on the hospital.

(David) It was in this nurse's accommodation

that a pattern of bizarre and disturbing incidents

began to emerge.

(Stuart) There were a number

of what I can only describe as bizarre

incidents within the nurses' home.

There's a particularly nasty incident where faeces

is discovered smeared on the wall and then

some faeces left in the fridge.

Nobody could show that she was directly responsible.

She was certainly central to what was

going on within that nursing home.

(David) On the ward, Beverley Allitt's performance

was just as concerning.

She was a strange girl anyway.

She'd been 48 days sick in one year.

(Sarah) She may not have been a very good trained nurse,

but she was a trained nurse.

(David) For Beverley Allitt, the ward,

the unit is the ultimate stage on which she can perform.

It gives her everything that she's seeking.

It gives her status as a caregiver, but also, crucially, it

gives her access to vulnerable people

that she can manipulate so as to gain even more attention.

And remember, I always say, chronologically, even if we ignore

the motivation, when you are dealing with a murder,

you have to look at two things...

access and opportunity.

And Beverley Allitt has the access to these children

and the opportunity to use that access to kill them.

Beverley applies for work at Boston Hospital in Lincolnshire.

But her application is rejected.

Beverley tries to find work at other hospitals.

(Jeff) Her local hospital was the Grantham & Kesteven

District Hospital, and they were, you know, very short of staff.

Even though there were question marks about her ability

to perform the tasks that she was required to do,

essentially, nobody else was interested in the job.

(suspenseful music)

(David) Finally securing a nursing role working

in Grantham & Kesteven Hospital, Beverley Allitt

is desperate to prove herself.

(Jeff) She was much more outgoing and willing to engage

and, in fact, almost ingratiating herself with those people

to try and reassure them, actually, that their child

was in the best possible care.

(Donna) She comes across as straightforward.

I think her lack of sophistication is easily

interpreted as a good heart.

She started in February 1991,

and within a few days,

the first of numerous collapses.

Very, very quickly, children began to get ill and collapse.

Straight after Liam's death, there

were other patients coming in.

But within a fortnight, in fact, almost exactly two weeks later,

at the beginning of March 1991, there

was another incident that was very upsetting and unexplained.

(Stuart) Timothy Hardwick, who was an 11-year-old boy,

he suffered from epilepsy.

And he was in the care of Nottinghamshire County Council

at a special school at Newark.

He suffered a fit at school,

followed by four more.

Cerebral palsy is linked with a higher risk of having epilepsy.

We know that Timothy Hardwick had epilepsy.

We know that's why he was admitted to hospital.

(David) Whilst in hospital, Timothy is

under the care of Beverley Allitt.

At 5 o'clock, he was heard coughing.

And Allitt was told to go and look at him.

And she called a doctor.

(Charith) I suggested that do some basic blood

tests and observe him closely

and give him some oxygen and watch.

There was no other major concern at the time.

(Jeff) Timothy is left alone

with Beverley as his only carer.

And contrary to expectations, after a little while,

she suddenly hits the... you know, the panic button.

(alarm blaring, tense music)

She calls the emergency resuscitation team

and says he appears to be unconscious.

(Stuart) He was going to be fine.

Very shortly after the boy stopped breathing,

the resuscitation team were called, but

sadly, they couldn't resuscitate.

(monitor beeping steadily)

Timothy Hardwick suffering from severe cerebral palsy,

but by no means expected to be lost,

and yet, just three hours after being admitted to Ward 4,

he's dead.

(sombre music)

(grim music)

When interviewed, Allitt tells police

there's nothing unusual about Timothy Hardwick's death.

(Interviewer) What about, then, Hardwick?

(Beverley Allitt) He was a cerebral palsy boy.

And he came in fitting nothing.

(Jeff) Because the hospital staff said to the police,

we were very unlucky if we had even

one death on the ward every year.

(David) The death of Timothy Hardwick so soon

after the death of Liam Taylor on a unit

that's used to having one death per year,

is clearly going to raise the temperature,

raise a number of red flags for her colleagues,

for hospital administrators, and for any of the child

consultants working on that unit.

And so people are now beginning to change their focus from looking

at a medical cause for these health care crises, these deaths,

into something far more sinister.

DSI Stuart Clifton and his team uncover more files,

which suggest the Children's Ward

isn't just experiencing misfortune.

(Interviewer) Paul Crampton, Bradley Gibson,

Henry Chan, Becky and Kate Phillips.

You look at Claire Peck.

(Beverley) I don't know.

It can't be no fault I'm making.

When David Crampton takes his six-year-old son Paul to hospital,

there are initially no major concerns.

Paul was taken to hospital with bronchiolitis chest infection.

And when it came towards the weekend,

we were told that he was likely to be

released within a couple of days,

so either the Sunday or the Monday.

(Sarah) This was the middle of winter.

And by all accounts, it was a particularly harsh winter.

So there would have been a lot of children coming

in with these sort of infections.

(Charith) So I did see him on Saturday morning,

and I felt he was really doing quite well.

And I didn't feel that there was any great danger.

(David) On the 28th of March, there's bad news.

Walked in the hospital, clearly feeling quite happy.

Child was on the mend and going to be released

within the next couple of days.

And I walked into the hospital to find a scene of mayhem,

people rushing everywhere.

(monitor beeping)

Paul in the arms of a nurse, I believe at that stage,

cold, grey, clammy, so clearly in some distress.

(Charith) I did give some glucose,

just as a temporary measure.

And I then subsequently found that the blood taken

showed evidence of low sugar.

(David) The discovery of acute low blood sugar levels,

hypoglycaemia, accompanied by high levels of insulin,

is rare in healthy children.

And it's therefore a medical anomaly that would be picked

up by an experienced clinician.

And it's the first time, therefore, that people working on the ward

have to start to consider the unthinkable,

that these children aren't becoming ill because of natural causes,

but because somebody is deliberately targeting

them to have a medical crisis.

Beverley Allitt, who was in the room,

said that Paul, this child's hypo, or words to that effect,

which I later found out meant she decided

she thought he was hypoglycaemic.

(tape player clicking)

(Interviewer) So did you see Paul that day alone?

(Beverley) No, not alone.

There was... the physio was with him.

There was always somebody in there.

And apart... unless, like, if one went for a cup of coffee.

(Neil) She went forward, identified

the problem very quickly.

And so the medical staff could respond.

And that was the only reason he survived.

(Sarah) One of the doctors in the hospital

saw babies with very low blood sugar,

very high levels of insulin,

and wondered whether it might be due to a medical condition.

This medical condition is rare,

and it usually only affects children.

It's called nesidioblastosis.

And what happens is your body naturally just produces

lashings, far too much, insulin.

(David) Other possible explanations are deeply troubling.

(Charith) One of the causes for unexplained low sugar

was what we call intentional administration

of insulin.

But no one ever suspected that that was the case.

I checked with the GP, the nursing staff, the parents.

None of them had any suspicion.

(pensive music)

(Jeff) You could say that the people there were so busy

dealing with the constant influx of new young patients

coming in, they didn't have time

to forensically analyse the sequence of events that

had led up to two deaths and a near-death, all within

the space of three or four weeks.

(dramatic music)

Transferred to another hospital, Paul Crampton survives.

But now there are more files for DSI Stuart

Clifton's team to consider about what's

happening at Grantham & Kesteven.

In April 1991, two-month-old twin Becky

Phillips is admitted to Ward 4.

Becky Phillips had been taken into hospital

for projectile vomiting.

(Neil) She was taken home by her parents.

She'd become listless, lethargic.

(monitor beeping steadily)

(Charith) And then, in the night,

I was called to the casualty.

The parents had rushed her to hospital.

And all attempts at resuscitation had failed.

(David) Tragically, Becky Phillips dies.

Dr Nanayakkara believes it could be a case of SIDS,

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

(Sarah) Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

used to be called cot death.

It mostly affects babies in the first sort of six months of life.

Two to three months old is a classic time for it to happen.

It most often happens when babies are asleep.

(David) Following the sudden death

of Becky Phillips, her twin sister, Katie,

is brought in for observation.

(Stuart) Now, there was absolutely nothing

wrong with Katie, and she was taken into hospital

purely as a precaution.

Allitt is allocated the care of Katie.

That afternoon, Katie suffers the first of her collapses.

(Charith) And then call for help from Queen's Medical

Centre, who actually came to collect her,

and they took her over to Queen's Medical Centre.

(David) Katie Phillips survives,

and her parents think Beverley Allitt

is responsible for her recovery.

They ask her to be Katie's godmother.

She was so supportive of them

and competent and capable that they made her the godmother

to the surviving twin.

(suspenseful music)

She's a godmother as well as a nurse now.

I mean, it's exactly what she's been craving.

(Charith) And that's the extent of trust, perhaps,

the parents had on Beverley.

So there would have been something to suggest that even the parents

were convinced that Beverley, at the time,

was equivalent to godmother.

(David) I think Allitt becoming Katie Phillips's godmother

is very significant for a number of different reasons.

But if I just think about that from the perspective

of Allitt herself and how she must have interpreted that,

it would have confirmed to her that her behaviour

within this dreadful scenario,

where children are having health care crises and some

children are dying, it would have confirmed

her belief that that would make her the centre of attention.

That would give her what she craves.

Her narcissism is being satisfied.

It would have given her some control over the process.

And it would have reinforced her behaviour.

It would have said to her, you chose

to do the right thing when you started to attack these children.

(Beverley) I didn't really want to be close to them.

So that can be very funny about who you let look after

your daughter.

And at times, he said, I don't want

so-and-so touching my daughter.

(Interviewer) Is that because the twin sister died?

(Beverley) I don't know.

(David) Beverley is developing

a strong trust with patients, parents, and colleagues alike.

People felt sorry for her.

People... particularly as the collapses of children

began to occur.

Because they recognised that she was a new nurse and was not

used to seeing children collapse.

She didn't come over as anything that you would...

other than you would expect from a nurse...

caring, obviously, meticulous.

She knew things inside out. She wrote things down.

She was fairly softly spoken.

(monitor beeping steadily)

(David) Claire Peck, Bradley Gibson,

Yik Hung Chan, Kayley Desmond, and many more children

collapse on Ward 4.

(Jeff) Claire Peck, Claire was

a lovely 15-month-old little girl that

had had asthma almost from birth.

She was left in the treatment room in this period of time

with Nurse Allitt.

And within a couple of three minutes,

the cry went up again that she'd stopped breathing.

(monitors beeping)

A one-year-old girl called Kayley Desmond, who had already

been admitted to the ward with chest problems, suddenly

and unexpectedly had a heart attack.

(monitors beeping)

Beverley Allitt had been at the bedside of this little girl

when she collapsed.

(David) Only those children transferred to a different hospital

survive.

Because so many of the children who became ill,

they were being transferred on to Nottingham Hospital, staff

there were starting to talk to their colleagues at Grantham

and saying, what on earth is going on here?

This is not normal. This is not right.

It took a professor from Nottingham Hospital

becoming aware, alert to the fact that so many cases, so

many inexplicable cases were being transferred to him at Nottingham.

It took this external party, the professor,

to say directly to Grantham, something's going on.

If you don't contact the police, I will.

(David) The doctors on Ward 4 confront their superiors.

We wrote a letter to the general manager...

..highlighting these episodes

and our concerns, continuing concerns,

and saying, we do need your help.

(monitors beeping)

(grim music)

DSI Stuart Clifton is dispatched to Ward 4.

Could the staff rota provide any clues?

(suspenseful music)

(Stuart) I instructed the team

to prepare a chart which showed

which nurses were on duty

for each and every one of the collapses.

And when that chart was completed, it

showed that the only nurse that had been there

for all of the collapses

was Nurse Beverley Allitt.

(Donna) Beverley Allitt is always at the centre of all this,

of all this that's going on.

But I don't think she will have been

perceiving herself as being the force of evil

that's making all this happen.

(David) Allitt's presence at every collapse on Ward 4

since her arrival forces DSI Stuart Clifton to act.

I then took the decision that we would have her arrested

and see what she had to say about the events.

(Interviewer) Within 42 of your working days,

all those children had that many attacks between them.

(Beverley) Hard to.

(Interviewer) Astounding, isn't it?

(Beverley) No reply.

(Interviewer) Absolutely unbelievable.

(Beverley) No reply.

(projector whirring)

Following the arrest of Beverley Allitt,

the police conduct a search of her accommodation.

(Stuart) During the search, we found a hospital pillowcase.

We found a used syringe.

And we found a school-type notebook,

on the cover of which was

written "Ward Allocations Book."

The police can prove she was present at every collapse

since her arrival on Ward 4.

But the attendance evidence alone is

not enough to secure a conviction.

(Interviewer) I understand that you were left alone for some time

in the treatment room.

Is that correct?

(Beverley) No reply. (Interviewer) What were you doing?

(Beverley) No reply.

She did not leave any tell-tale signs,

nor did she have any eyewitnesses.

(David) Police take another look at the file of Paul Crampton.

(Interviewer) Now, if you start looking at the other days when

he has attacks...

(Beverley) Yeah.

(Interviewer) ... one of the most common factors

is the fact that you're there.

The police zeroed in on this case because toxicology

tests are done on this boy.

Samples that had been taken from him at the time, when they went

to the police laboratories, showed an extraordinarily high level

of insulin in his bloodstream.

Now, they had done a blood test,

and they found something like 500 millimoles of insulin

in this child's body.

That level is a whole syringe, if you like, for being injected.

(David) 15-month-old Claire Peck's blood sample also

reveals high rates of insulin.

(Stuart) Was found to contain 9,660

milli-units per litre of insulin.

Now, in a child of that age, there should

be something in the order of 10 to 15 milli-units

per litre of insulin in the blood.

(monitor beeping steadily)

So this is insulin that has been injected into this child.

So we looked at hospital insulin, and we discovered

insulin is kept in locked fridges.

Three days before the first collapse of Liam Taylor,

who was the very first in the series,

the key to the fridge on the children's ward, Ward 4,

had gone missing.

Nurse Beverley Allitt was the last person to have had it.

And it started to look very much as if it

hadn't really gone missing at all.

(grim music)

(David) Allitt claims somebody else

took the keys to the fridge containing the insulin.

(Beverley) The staff nurse took them home with her.

And that was the thing when they cleaned.

I thought of that, the whole bunch.

Because a staff nurse took them home around one shift.

(Interviewer) By mistake?

(Beverley) By mistake, yeah.

(Stuart) She distanced herself from all of the events,

saying things like, I wouldn't do that.

I wasn't even on duty that day.

That was my day off.

I was in the canteen when that occurred.

(David) The police initially believed

they have only circumstantial evidence to take

a case against Allitt to court.

DSI Clifton, however, feels confident they

have the right person.

(tense music)

(Stuart) She was released without charge.

But I felt at that time that we'd got the right person.

So I approached the hospital authorities with a view to

having her removed from the ward.

(David) DSI Stuart Clifton reaches out to the families,

revealing that a nurse is now under investigation.

And then he told me that he had reason to believe

or the police had reason to believe that Paul's attacks

were the result of the maladministration of drugs.

And I remember my words nearly perfectly.

Because I think I said something like that would explain a lot,

wouldn't it?

He met me on regular occasions.

And as much as he could, with the confidentiality

of a case of such a serious nature, he

kept me informed about how their enquiries were going.

(David) DSI Clifton's investigation

uncovers a terrifying truth.

The children on Ward 4

haven't been harmed by insulin alone.

(grim music)

(Stuart) I got renowned experts

to look at.

And then on this little girl, Kayley Desmond,

they found needle tracking under the arm

and concluded that this little girl had been injected with air.

The problem is that air is not supposed to be in your system.

If it's injected... and it's very easy to inject it with a needle

simply by pulling up some air, putting that needle into the vein,

and injecting it in... as little as 1/2 a teaspoon,

when injected into your brain, can result in a stroke.

(Interviewer) Did you give it to her?

(Beverley) No reply.

Allitt refused to talk, but for the Crown Prosecution Service,

that didn't matter.

They now had enough evidence to prosecute.

(tense music)

(Stuart) There was a huge amount of anticipation around it.

People were queuing up to get into the public gallery.

All of the victims' families attended trial,

and they were there every day, as were many of the nurses

that worked on that ward.

She sat through the evidence initially.

And then towards the middle to end of the trial,

she didn't appear.

And we were told that she was in hospital with some illness.

(Donna) She focuses only on what she wants to remember

and what she wants to feel again,

the time when she was heroic or the time

when she was the centre of attention for whatever reason,

not the times when her actions

led to the death of a baby or child.

(Charith) All the information

was collated through

large number of experts, police,

forensic pathologists, expert witnesses,

from United Kingdom and outside,

who collected all the information.

(Stuart) As the evidence unfolded,

I think that there was some astonishment

that we were able to pinpoint in detail

what had actually occurred.

The verdicts were dribbled out, if that makes sense.

They didn't all come at once.

But the jury convicted her of 13 offences.

(grim music)

Beverley Allitt is found guilty of four murders,

three attempted murders, and six counts of GBH.

The defence then put forward that she was suffering

from Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

(Donna) What Munchausen's is,

essentially, is an absolute desperate plea,

yes, for attention,

but more than that, it's for somebody to care.

So the Munchausen's that we see, even in the very early stages

of her childhood, the faking of illnesses,

of all kinds of different injuries, et cetera,

part of the distorted, bizarre, disturbed thinking process

is that the doing of harm is something

good because it generates the care and attention that is needed.

(David) Allitt is sentenced to a minimum term

of 30 years in prison.

It was later reviewed.

And Munchausen syndrome by proxy

is now an explanation for crime,

but not a cause of crime...

slight, but subtle difference in the two.

Beverley Allitt's never shown any remorse at all.

And when I asked her why she'd done it,

she got up and walked away from me.

(David) She is the first British nursing serial killer.

Allitt serves her sentence in a high-security hospital.

(Sarah) It just had huge repercussions for the whole

of the medical profession.

Because we knew how much it would affect patient trust.

The thought of someone who's trained

and is paid to care for children,

defenceless children,

the thought of them betraying that trust

and harming that child is something most of us

can't comprehend and come to terms with.

(Stuart) I think it's a shock

to the system when we discover that not

everybody that works within that environment

is there for the right reason.

(theme music)