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.
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 scenario, 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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
Three days later, one-year-old Kayley Desmond was admitted to the ward suffering 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.
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.
The following day, Paul went grey and unresponsive again, his eyes rolling back in his head. Doctors reattached him to the drip but he remained seriously unwell. It would later be alleged that Nurse Allitt gave him three separate overdoses of insulin that day. Concerned staff transferred him to the Queen’s Medical Centre – accompanied by Bev and the paramedics – and he lived. But, back home, he cried a lot as though reliving a frightening ordeal.
The following day, Bev called another nurse and pointed out that five-year-old Bradley Gibson, recovering from pneumonia, had suddenly lost consciousness. Medics found that he had high levels of potassium in his bloodstream, but that didn’t explain why he had gone into cardiac arrest. Indeed, his symptoms were so odd that the doctors wondered if he’d mistakenly been given the wrong drug. A nurse gave him mouth to mouth resuscitation, after which – still in a coma – he was swiftly transferred to the Nottingham intensive care unit, where he regained consciousness but was a very ill boy. He crawled now rather than walked and cried because his legs hurt so much.
Bradley refused to speak to the nurses, and would turn his head to the wall if one approached him, whereas before he had been a talkative and happy child. Fortunately, he began to get his mobility back and was discharged, though he had terrible nightmares and drew pictures of himself in bed with someone looming menacingly above.
A few days later, on 28th March, two-year-old Yik Hung Chan was admitted with a fractured skull after falling from his first floor bedroom. He made a speedy recovery and, by the end of the month, was racing around the ward. So everyone was surprised when Bev told one of her Chinese colleagues that he was crying and asked her to speak to him in his native tongue. The nurse hurried to the little boy, only to find that he’d turned blue. Bev helped the other nurses to administer oxygen, and the child revived. At her happiest in the midst of a crisis, Bev travelled with him in the ambulance to the Queen’s Medical Centre, where he made a full recovery.
Allitt’s next patient, two-month-old Becky Phillips, wasn’t so fortunate. The baby girl, who had been born three months prematurely, was admitted to Ward Four because she was vomiting up her feed. She stabilised, so a nurse was surprised when Bev said that the baby had gone cold and clammy. To the more experienced medic, the child seemed fine. Bev voiced her concerns again the following day as nurses prepared to discharge the baby, but again she was overruled.
Becky’s overjoyed parents took her home and reunited her with her twin, Katie. But, by the evening, Becky’s eyes were rolling about and she screamed as if in pain. The couple called the doctor out but he said it was probably just a touch of colic; by now, the little girl appeared to be more peaceful. When the family woke the following morning, however, they found that Becky had stopped breathing. They raced her to Grantham Hospital’s casualty department where she was pronounced dead. Staff attributed the fatality to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), more commonly known as cot death. In other words, she had died of unknown causes.
The subsequent autopsy would show that her heart had blistered, unusual for such a young baby, but the cause of death remained SIDS. Ironically, Bev was so nice to Becky’s parents, Sue and Peter Phillips, that they made her godmother to Katie, their surviving twin.
As a precaution, the hospital admitted Katie and hooked her up to an apnoea monitor to keep a check on her breathing. She was perfectly fine and eventually her parents went home to start planning for her sister’s funeral, leaving Katie in Nurse Allitt’s supposedly capable hands.
Shortly afterwards, Bev alerted the other nurses that Katie had turned blue. They revived her and kept watch by her bedside. The night sister, Jean Savill, started her shift early and stayed with the baby, refusing Bev’s repeated offers to give her a break. The following day, her parents took turns by her bedside, even sleeping there overnight.
By the next morning, when Katie hadn’t had a repeated attack, everyone relaxed, convinced that the crisis was over, and Katie was left alone for a couple of minutes. Medics heard the baby crying, then Bev came racing out of the ward holding her – to everyone’s alarm, the infant was bright red and breathless. Despite their best efforts, the crash team thought that she had died, then her heart restarted. However, she went into convulsions and the worried medics transferred her to the Queen’s Medical Centre, where she was immediately hooked up to a life support machine.
It was found that the nine-week-old had suffered permanent brain damage due to oxygen deprivation, damage that left her partially paralysed and partially blind. Much later, when her X-rays were examined, they would show that someone had squeezed her so hard that her bones had fractured and her ribs had broken.
By now, the staff at Grantham Hospital, particularly those associated with Ward Four, knew that there was something very wrong on the ward but there were so many variables that it was hard to pinpoint what was happening. Was there an infection in the hospital or were the babies being admitted already suffering from some unrecognised virus? Had they been given a bad batch of drugs or was something wrong with the food or the water supply? The night sister, Jean Savill, asked for extra staff and for swabs and tests but, due to funding cutbacks, her requests remained unfulfilled.
Jean Savill then wrote to her superiors, pointing out that there had been an unprecedented seven cardiac arrests in the past three months. She again asked for additional staff and was given temporary access to a couple of nurses from the adult wards. She also asked for a defibrillator to be based in the ward – they were using the one based in casualty – but, as this cost £6,000, she had to settle for a few child-sized paddles instead. Jean Savill was a hero in all of this, making herself unpopular with management in order to get the best care for her patients.
The patients’ suffering continued. Six-year-old Michael Davidson was admitted on 7th April suffering from an accidental airgun wound that had caused a little bleeding. Surgeons removed the pellet from his chest and, two days later, he was recovering well, sitting up and playing games. Bev Allitt prepared a dose of what should have been antibiotics and handed it to another nurse to give to him – but the syringe actually contained a potassium overdose, causing the child to suddenly arch his back, go rigid, turn blue and have a cardiac arrest. Fortunately, he had made a spontaneous recovery by the time the crash team arrived.
By now, one of the head doctors was sufficiently alarmed that he asked the Phillipses to delay the funeral of nine-week-old Becky in order that the pathologist could do a second post-mortem. Meanwhile, tests at the pathology lab had shown that Paul Crampton’s blood, taken during his seizures at Grantham Hospital, contained more than 30 times the normal level of insulin, but another doctor decided that the lab had made a mistake and the police were not called.
The next child to suffer a cardiac arrest was eight-week-old Chris Peasgood, admitted with a chest infection. Bev told his mother to go outside and have a smoke – and, when she came back, the child was fighting for his life.
The medics revived him and his nurse, Clare Winser, took up a vigil by his bed. Bev Allitt offered to take over to let Clare go to the ladies’ room and, when she returned, the baby was so close to death that a priest was called in to perform a baptism.
Clare begged his mother to ask for him to be transferred to the Queen’s Medical Centre, warning her that he would be dead before morning if he stayed on Ward Four. Despite the fact that he wasn’t her patient, Bev insisted on accompanying him in the ambulance.
That same month, another Christopher – with the surname of King – was also fighting for his life. He had been recovering well from his operation but deteriorated markedly after Bev Allitt fed him, giving him milk when he was on a post-operative diet of water. Something added to the milk caused him to have a heart attack but he was transferred to Nottingham’s intensive care unit and survived.
In the same time frame, one of Grantham Hospital’s doctors attended a symposium about Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy. The lecturer, top paediatrician David Southall, explained that, if a series of unexpected respiratory arrests occurred and were always in the presence of one person, the doctors should consider MBP and install surveillance cameras. He added that doctors in Chelsea had done so over a five-year period and had observed fourteen MBP mothers secretly suffocating their children. During this time, Grantham’s night sister, Jean Savill, wrote to the management noting that Bev Allitt had been present at more than 20 cardiac arrests in the last two months.
Other nurses began to kid Bev that she must be carrying some mysterious virus that she was passing on to the children. Bev laughed and seemed to enjoy being the centre of attention, but one or two of the nurses also noticed that she enjoyed the excitement of a cardiac arrest, was always at the very core of the action when they were reviving a child and insisted on being the one to escort the child to the Queen’s Medical Centre in the ambulance.
The following day – 18th April – seven-week-old Patrick Elstone was admitted to the ward suffering from gastro-enteritis. That afternoon, Bev alerted the other nurses that he looked ill and, when they checked, they found that he was barely breathing. Fortunately, he revived in the treatment room, but a few hours later, Bev again raised the alarm to say that he was blue and breathless. Someone had mysteriously disconnected his apnoea monitor, which would have given off a telltale shriek the moment his breathing stopped.
The crash team revived him and he was transferred to the Queen’s Medical Centre. A doctor from Grantham, suspecting that the child had met with foul play, phoned the Centre and asked them to check his insulin levels. Some of the senior staff had a meeting to voice their concerns but still no one phoned the police and this left the killer free to strike for a final time.
On 22nd April, fifteen-month-old Claire Peck’s parents brought her into Grantham as she had suffered a serious asthma attack. Left alone with Bev for a few minutes, she turned blue, went rigid and stopped breathing. A doctor stabilised her and went into the corridor to speak to her parents, telling them that they were going to transfer her to Nottingham, but Bev appeared at his side, shrieking, ‘She’s gone blue again’ and, this time, despite Herculean efforts from the hospital’s medics, the baby died.
Tests taken half an hour after she expired showed that her potassium levels were off the scale, but, as potassium leaks from the red blood cells several hours after death, the pathologist decided that she had died of natural causes – specifically, an asthma attack.
Four days later, an empty cot in Ward Four was found ablaze and the hospital fire officer found that it was deliberate. Shortly afterwards, doctors phoned the police. They told detectives about the suspiciously high number of deaths and near-fatal episodes in the past two months, about their fears that a Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy killer was stalking the ward.
That April, at Grantham Hospital, someone stole the allocation book, without which it was difficult to ascertain which nurses had been responsible for which children. One of the senior nursing staff had written the shifts in her work diary but found that the relevant pages had been torn out.
Fortunately, determined police reassembled the information by careful questioning of nurses and the children’s relatives, ascertaining that only Nurse Allitt had been in attendance during all twenty cardiac arrests.
On Tuesday 21st May 1991, police woke Bev Allitt up at 7 a.m. and arrested her for stealing the key to the insulin safe and for the attempted murder of Paul Crampton. Though they repeatedly questioned her at the station for the next 24 hours, she denied everything. Out on bail, she told everyone that she was innocent, that the police didn’t know what they were talking about.
The detectives continued their inquiries, finding samples of some of the children’s blood and tissues. Often the X-rays and samples had mysteriously gone missing, but they collected several that showed foul play. Paul Crampton had astronomically high levels of insulin in his blood and Liam Taylor’s heart had stopped because he’d been asphyxiated or poisoned. Becky Phillips had also been murdered, as a huge dose of insulin had been injected into her bloodstream.
Three weeks after her release from custody, Bev took her god-daughter, little Katie Phillips, out in her pram despite the little girl’s mother, Sue, protesting that it was raining. Sue had heard about Bev’s arrest but believed that it must be a case of mistaken identity as Bev had been so nice to them. The couple even offered to help pay her lawyers’ fees.
A few minutes later Bev returned, shrieking, ‘Call the doctor – she’s about to have a convulsion.’ The child seemed fine but, having already lost Katie’s twin, Sue was taking no chances. As she dialled her GP, she saw her daughter break out into a heavy sweat then start to moan.
Bev left and the child was admitted to Ward Four, where she continued to have strange choking fits and loss of appetite. When detectives heard that the illness had only come on after she was left alone with Bev Allitt, they seized all medications in the Phillipses’ house in case she had tampered with them.
Suspended from duty, Bev was perpetually bored. A motherly woman called Eileen Jobson – who lived with her teenage son Jonathan – took her in, but soon found that money was going missing from her purse and that, later, the purse itself disappeared. Someone left the plug in the sink with the water turned on and someone scorched an area of carpet with a cigarette lighter. Bev tried to blame all of this on poltergeist activity and said that she often saw ghosts.
Bev shouted for them one day and showed them a knife that was stuck deep into Jonathan’s pillow. She said that a poltergeist must have done it. The teenager was so afraid that they all moved into his grandmother’s house for the night. There, Bev allegedly discovered a knife stuck into the pillow she was about to use.
Police continued to amass evidence against the deadly nurse. They found that Liam Taylor, Tim Hardwick, Bradley Gibson and Claire Peck had probably been poisoned with potassium chloride, as their blood showed unnaturally high levels and such an overdose perfectly explained their symptoms. And only Bev had been in attendance at all 23 cardiac arrests.
Meanwhile, Eileen Jobson’s son, Jonathan, became ill with shooting pains in his legs, though he got better when Bev was admitted to hospital suffering from what appeared to be a breast infection. Doctors found that she was faking her symptoms by heating up the thermometer and injecting water into her own breast.
They sent her back to Eileen’s and she gave Jonathan a glass of juice. Shortly afterwards his vision faded, he went grey and clammy and lost consciousness, but Jonathan revived quickly and doctors believed that he’d fainted due to the hot sun.
Bev also continued to self-harm, breaking her catheter on two occasions so that part of it remained inside her bladder and had to be removed at the hospital. She was readmitted after describing symptoms that suggested she had a brain tumour, but a scan showed no abnormalities and doctors realised that there was nothing wrong with her.
Bev’s malice continued to wreak havoc, even though she was no longer working on Ward Four. The night sister, Jean Savill, was so upset to hear about the murders that she took a paracetamol overdose and was found dead at the home she shared with her husband, and some of the bereaved parents found that their marriages were breaking down due to depression and stress.
The former nurse also gave tablets to her landlady’s dog and it collapsed, foaming at the mouth, but survived after coughing up two tablets. On another occasion, her landlady saw Bev tormenting a cat.
On Tuesday, 3rd September, police arrested Bev Allitt and charged her with Becky Phillips’s murder. She remained cool under questioning and, after eight hours, they let her go. Later that month, she hit her flatmate during a row and the other girl left, went to the police and told them about the violence. Detectives also found out about a suspicious death at the care home where Bev had worked.
On 20th November they rearrested her and charged her with murdering four children, attempting to murder nine children and causing grievous bodily harm to the latter. She refused to answer their questions and soon went to sleep in her cell.
In New Hall Women’s Prison in Wakefield, awaiting trial, Bev regularly arrived at the prison doctor’s with what appeared to be self-inflicted minor injuries. When these failed to get her the attention she needed, she told the authorities that she could no longer face food. In early January 1992 she claimed to have stopped eating and, by June, she had lost four stone. After this, she began to vomit in front of the prison officers, who were understandably baffled – if she wasn’t eating, how could she be vomiting? Concerned, they transferred her to the local hospital, posting a guard outside her door.
There, doctors discovered that she was swallowing her own faeces – though, as she still wasn’t eating, they were surprised that she could produce so much excrement. She was moved to Rampton, the high security hospital for mentally ill prisoners, where she continued to self-harm.
Her trial began at Nottingham on 15th February 1993. The prosecution had wanted to tell the jury about a possible motive, Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy. They could produce two psychiatric reports testifying that Bev was suffering from this, but the judge ruled that these would suggest that Bev was crazy and might encourage the jury to convict her regardless of the other evidence.
There was no shortage of witnesses at the trial, as nurses and bereaved parents took the stand, each testifying to the fact that Bev had always been present when the children developed life-threatening symptoms and illnesses.
Back in her room at Rampton one night, Bev collapsed through lack of food and was taken to the nearest hospital, where she was fed via a tube.
The court case continued without her, the prosecution producing witnesses for eleven weeks. In contrast, the defence could only fill three days with paid-for testimony from scientists.
On 11th May, the jury retired. Twelve days later, on the 23rd, they returned and, over the next four days, declared her guilty of murdering Liam Taylor, Tim Hardwick, Becky Phillips and Claire Peck. She was also found guilty of nine counts of grievous bodily harm.
When she was told about the outcome of the trial by her lawyer, Bev Allitt wept briefly in her hospital bed, then demanded that doctors remove the tube that was keeping her alive. She said that she wanted to die, but soon began to eat again. She was subsequently sentenced to thirteen concurrent life sentences, with the judge recommending that she serve a minimum of 40 years.
An inquiry into the deaths led to the Treasury providing £500,000 to give compensation to the parents of children who were killed or injured.
Bev Allitt is still serving her life sentence at Rampton, which, being a hospital, is less austere than a prison. Several years ago, she appeared briefly in a televised documentary, looking slightly stocky but healthy. She answered the reporter’s questions about her daily routine but left the room as soon as she was asked about her crimes. She had previously announced that she had become engaged to a male patient at the hospital and hoped to marry him.
In 2006, Allitt caused controversy when she launched an appeal for a reduced sentence. Crime writers pointed out that, if she were released, she would be young enough to have children and could essentially grow her own victims. Also, one of her surviving patients, Michael Davidson, gave an interview to a women’s magazine about his ordeal and said that life should definitely mean life.
In December 2007, the High Court ruled that she would have to serve at least 30 years in prison, so she will be 54 (and statistically postmenopausal) before she can apply for parole.
Intrigued by the many different opinions held by both crime writers and the public about Allitt’s mental health and motivation, I contacted forensic psychologist Dr David A Holmes, author of Abnormal, Clinical and Forensic Psychology and The Essence of Abnormal Psychology. Dr Holmes, whose specialist areas include Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy, also featured in an ITV documentary about Beverly Allitt and her crimes. The interview took place in September 2009 and Dr Holmes’s replies are italicised.
CAD: Beverly Allitt’s childhood, as far as we know, was unexceptional, yet she became a remorseless killer. Was she born with a personality disorder? What, in your opinion, informed her callous acts?
Dr H: I think she was born with a personality distortion – this usually entails the development of more than one disorder from formative traits in childhood. She clearly had the ability to lie almost pathologically, easily convincing others of various stories that gained her attention. This is a warning sign of fledgling psychopathy. She also set fires and was reported to have killed a flatmate’s pet, which are two of the predictive signs of a serial killer. Psychopaths, sadists and killers often report harsh, inconsistent punishment in childhood. This may brutalise and teach violence as a means to an end. However, it is equally as often a reaction to the antisocial, uncaring and provocative behaviour of the developing deviant by parents, who will share the same unempathic, reactive genetic traits. In Allitt’s case, her feigning illness probably acted to avert punishment or harsh treatment as she would retreat into her ‘sick’ role. She was also poor academically and barely qualified to nurse but compensated by being very focused on patients and manipulating relatives, which is another sign of how psychopaths may ‘charm and disarm’ others.
Allitt’s repeatedly feigned illness from an early age is a sign of factitious or Munchausen’s disorder, which is often a precursor to, and accompanies, MBP. This continued throughout her development and adulthood. Allitt had 100 days off during her nursing training, probably feigned illness.
CAD: I’ve always believed her to be a classic case of Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy but some true crime writers reject this classification for her. Any thoughts?
Dr H: Allitt had all the signs of MBP with Munchausen’s syndrome from childhood: pathological lying, psychopathic lack of empathy or consequences for others. Even when caught and held she still feigned illness, portrayed herself as a victim and showed no remorse or feelings as she distanced herself from the acts whilst focusing on her own plight. She competed with doctors and portrayed herself as an emergency angel of mercy rather than the Pied Piper of childcare.
MBP is not a popular disorder and a substantial movement exists in most countries who deny a mother or female carer could hurt children, despite unambiguous video footage of them doing just that. Those who report cases are often attacked publicly and privately. This becomes more of an issue with a nurse employed in the health system. Allitt’s case had to be vetted by the Home Secretary because of the political implications of a health service employing potential killers (such as her and Colin Norris). She was the first UK nurse to face child-harm charges.
CAD: At Rampton, she starved herself and also ingested faeces. Do you see this as a form of self-hatred or was it an attempt to prove to the public that she was mad, therefore ensuring that she wouldn’t be moved from a hospital environment?
Dr H: These acts of starvation and eating faeces are extensions of her Munchausen behaviour and manipulation of the situation she was in. This serves the purpose of getting her attention, sympathy and special privileges. It also helped her towards pleading insanity as mitigation, and feigning insanity placed her in the relative comfort of a special hospital not prison. She was clearly forensically aware of such issues in the fearless, dispassionate way she reacted to arrest and simply slept in the holding cell without agitation or concern.
CAD: Do you view her as mad, bad, sad or a combination of these?
Dr H: I think she is personality-disordered and this lies between mad and bad. Her ‘condition’, having psychopathic and MBP traits should not reduce the ‘bad’ or punishment aspect of her crimes but should only be an issue in the length of sentence, which should be indefinite until she poses no risk. Her traits are aggravating, not mitigating. The fact she has no empathy simply makes her dangerous, not mad or sad.