Angel of Death (17 page)

Taken in isolation, each event would not have unnerved Mrs Jobson but, as they continued, she became increasingly disturbed by the succession of peculiar happenings.

She recalls: ‘It was as though Bev was trying to create dramas. Things like finding a knife through my pillow, that was quite sinister. It was weird. She knew I would find things that she had done. With half the things, she was practically pointing them out if I didn't notice.

‘On the night the knife was stuck through the pillow, she shouted to me to come and have a look. I just said “Gosh!” Then I said: “I think this is getting bloody ridiculous.”

‘But she said she didn't do it, she never did anything.'

For three weeks Jonathan was away, leaving Mrs Jobson alone in the house with Allitt.

‘It would just be her and me in the house. She tried to tell me it was Tracy who was doing it but she definitely wasn't. What she didn't realise was that, when a lot of the things happened, there were four or five witnesses in the house and still they continued. The more people here, the more things happened. The bigger the audience, the better it was. It was unreal. She was a performer. Things were happening nearly every single day.

‘It was my sister who eventually said: “Enough.” She thought my life was in danger.

‘She could see it because she wasn't so close to it. Bev had got me to a stage where she had me
where she wanted me. You would believe anything rather than believe she was doing those things. She had no reason to do things to me, because I was her friend.

‘In the end I knew it was her but I felt I had to catch her, that I couldn't accuse her without proof. We tried for a long time to catch her, but we didn't. We followed her everywhere around the house but never saw her do anything.

‘It never once occurred to me, even then, that if she was doing these things here then she could have done the things at the hospital. I honestly felt the reason why she was doing it was because of all the pressure she was under. It was her reaction. She hadn't shown any reaction. She convinced me she was innocent.'

Worse was still to come for the trusting Jobsons.

Allitt, still waiting for the Director of Public Prosecutions to decide whether or not she should be charged with the murders and attempted murders on Ward Four, joined Mrs Jobson and her son, Jonathan, on an outing to the Sunday open-air market at Whittlesey, on the edge of the Fens.

Without warning the healthy schoolboy suddenly collapsed in a heap on the floor.

Mrs Jobson said: ‘I thought he was dead. There was no sign of life, not a flicker. I couldn't understand what had happened to him. Bev did absolutely nothing, even though she's a nurse. She was there at the market and I screamed at her to help but she did nothing.

‘I took it that she was in shock. She looked like
she was in a state of shock. She looked sort of detached. She'd flicked a switch off.

‘By the time I got him to the hospital he was all right again. The doctor said he was sure he'd just fainted. But I knew it wasn't just a faint. I had never seen a faint like that.

‘Jonathan and Bev actually made a joke of it afterwards. I remember Jonathan saying something like: “What would the police think of this – you living here and me being taken to hospital?” Jonathan worshipped the ground on which Bev walked. He loved her like a big sister.'

She added: ‘We knew he had had a glass of blackcurrant before we went to the market. At the time, nobody thought anything about it. We weren't suspicious at all. Why should we be? All that we were reading in the papers was that children were having insulin or potassium chloride and, to my mind, you would have to be injected, so it never occurred to anybody.'

Mrs Jobson kept quiet about the weird events that had occurred at her house. The police made several attempts to question her at length but they sensed that she was wary of speaking to them, out of loyalty to her daughter's best friend.

Finally, after a family conference, they decided it was time to summon the police.

Relatives were beginning to fear that Mrs Jobson's life might be in danger and a call was made to Grantham police station at around midnight.

Detective Inspector Neil Jones, the man who had
tracked down the blood samples from Ward Four, was despatched to talk to Mrs Jobson in the early hours. He listened in astonishment. The police had imagined that Allitt was living quietly, keeping a low profile, waiting for the decision of the DPP, but what the detective inspector heard opened up a chilling new chapter in the investigation.

So much was said, so much happened during Allitt's four months at Mrs Jobson's home, that it took the police thirty hours to write down her statement. Allitt, driven out of Grantham, now found herself unwelcome and in need of a new hideaway once more. She turned to her parents, Richard and Lillian, in the village of Corby Glen.

They had never doubted their daughter's innocence and were happy to see her return.

Back in her own home her father's employer, wine merchant Jeremy Marshall-Roberts, offered her a job working in his warehouse. Such was their conviction that she was innocent, he and his wife happily agreed to have Allitt back as babysitter for their young children.

The sinister events at the Jobson house gave detectives further suspicions about the state of Allitt's mind.

Some detectives had long believed they were looking for a ‘nutter' – someone who outwardly looked normal but who was really mad enough to become the worst woman serial killer in British history.

Supt Clifton and his team of investigators had wrestled with the one big question – why?

How could anyone kill babies in a hospital? It had seemed impossible, unreal, unthinkable to imagine that it had happened in a corner of rural Lincolnshire. But now he had proof that the children on Ward Four had been poisoned. Again, he asked himself – what, in the name of God, would have made anyone do such an awful thing?

Nurse Allitt, just twenty-three years old, had always showed such a love of children and seemed to have an overwhelming desire to be a good nurse. But he was convinced that there was a secret, hidden side to her mind that had driven her to the depths of evil.

Hospital paediatrician, Dr Nelson Porter, first told Supt Clifton about a condition called Munchausen Syndrome – a chronic form of attention seeking. He’d mentioned it at their first meeting on 1 May. He recalled that paediatricians had been alerted to the danger of mothers seeking attention for themselves by deliberately making their children so ill that they needed hospital treatment.

Dr Porter wondered whether someone suffering from Munchausen Syndrome was to blame for the chain of events on Ward Four. Research also indicated that nurses suffering from the condition could be driven to attack children in their care.

One detective said: ‘We hadn’t got a clue at the beginning what he was talking about. Some of us asked: “What the hell is Munchausen Syndrome?” It was completely over our heads. It seemed unbelievable that someone in that hospital was so desperate for attention that they were prepared to kill and kill again.

‘Perhaps they didn’t mean to kill anyone and were just trying to make them ill, but it had just gone too far. Perhaps they wanted to be involved in the drama of trying to save them, then get the praise for helping them to survive from the brink of death.’

But Munchausen Syndrome, they discovered, wasn’t a condition of madness defined under the Mental Health Act; it was a personality disorder known to have driven people, almost all of them women, to harm children.

It had been named after an eighteenth-century German baron, Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Munchausen, a mercenary and gifted story-teller, who would entertain his dinner guests by inventing the most amazing fanciful tales. The condition was first identified in 1951 by Richard Asher, father of actress Jane Asher, who gave it the name of Munchausen Syndrome.

Dr Asher, an eminent physician with a keen
interest in psychological medicine, had become fascinated by the bizarre acting abilities of hospital patients who invented illnesses in order to get attention. He examined why some people actually liked to be admitted to hospital and were able to simulate diseases or make up totally fictitious illnesses in order to get admitted, often travelling from one hospital to another telling weird and wonderful stories of make-believe symptoms. They would have their stories absolutely pat and were brilliantly able to concoct complaints that would be guaranteed to get them treatment.

Twenty-five years later, another group of odd-ball people was identified, those who seek attention for themselves by inducing illnesses in others. Their condition became known as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy – getting someone else to be ill for them.

Supt Clifton knew from fiancé Steve Biggs how Allitt had deliberately injured her finger by jamming it into a tap. He also knew that she was a regular patient in hospital with what appeared to be self-inflicted injuries.

Supt Clifton’s enquiries revealed even more strange aspects of Allitt’s past. While she had been living at the nurses’ home across the road from the hospital there had been a series of peculiar incidents in the unit of four bedsits where she was staying. Other nurses found excreta smeared on the communal door leading to the four flatlets. That was odd in itself. But then another door was daubed in the kitchen Allitt shared with the other
nurses. More was left in their bath. Worse still, the disgusted nurses opened their fridge to find even more excreta lying on a shelf.

Several days later the fire brigade was called when smoke filled the flatlets. The firemen found that a further deposit had been placed under the grill of the cooker which had been switched on and left to burst into flames. Allitt, still in the middle of her training, was never suspected of being the culprit. The police were alerted and an official hospital enquiry undertaken. Everyone agreed that it was a particularly distasteful chain of events but, with no clues, the enquiries led nowhere. The whole matter was finally forgotten.

But when Supt Clifton and his team began to take a close look at Allitt’s life they discovered other strange details about her medical history. As a child she had been prone to limb fractures or sprains. School friends remembered Allitt ‘always being in bandages’. During her training as a nurse she had been off sick so often her period as a student had to be extended. At one point she had ‘injured’ her wrist and, when she had ignored medical advice to undergo continuous physiotherapy, the physiotherapist penned a note complaining that Allitt, in her view, was not fit to be a nurse.

It didn’t end there. While on police bail Allitt again returned to hospital. She was fitted with a catheter when she apparently developed a urinary problem, but it broke. Allitt was detained in hospital in Peterborough where staff noticed that, during the day, she always appeared well. At night her
temperature rose and she became ill. Her breasts were also painful. Later it was suspected that she had deliberately injected her breasts with water using a syringe, probably taken from the nursing station near her bed. It seemed she was trying to focus attention on herself.

The police were told that, with her medical knowledge, Allitt would know that injecting her breasts with water would have the effect of sending her temperature soaring and causing her to be ill. Supt Clifton needed to know if Allitt was suffering from Munchausen Syndrome. Could this be what had driven her to attack the children? He had to understand this rare condition better if it was to stand as a real motive for murder.

Turning to one of Britain’s top experts on the condition, Supt Clifton contacted Professor Roy Meadow, head of the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health at St James’s University Hospital, Leeds. Professor Meadow had written an article in the
British Medical Journal
, in July 1989, in which he chronicled the symptoms of Munchausen. He had also warned that, among sufferers, were mothers who had targeted their own children.

In many cases, women with Munchausen Syndrome had had some medical training, usually in nursing. They might not have been fully trained to the top level and were likely to be nursing auxiliaries; they could even have left the training before completing the course. All were capable of doing horrific things to children in their care.

Professor Meadow told how sufferers resorted
to ‘cunning and dexterity’ and were usually ‘medically sophisticated’. In Sheffield a mother had been convicted of deliberately feeding her child slug pellets over a period of weeks so that the child ended up fighting for its life in the hospital’s intensive care unit.

Experts who examined the bizarre attacks in detail found that a mother often became the life and soul of the hospital ward where her child was being treated. She would look after other children, become friends with other mothers and see herself as an expert on medical matters, often challenging nurses and doctors over the type of treatment.

Professor Meadow wrote: ‘For most mothers there is personal gain in terms of status, contacts with helpful nurses, doctors and social workers, financial benefits, contact with other mothers, and a different society in hospital, escape from an unhappy marriage or the capture of an absent husband to share a problem.’

He concluded: ‘After talking with many of these mothers my main impression is of their immense selfishness; they are able to do horrific things to children because of their own unhappiness, and to satisfy their own needs. In a minority, particularly those who indulge in suffocation or poisoning, there commonly is envy of, and violence and hatred towards, the abused child.’

The professor gave a simple set of checks for doctors to use when they were suspicious. He suggested that they should secure and verify charts and records, retain and analyse samples – such as
blood and urine – for toxicology, increase surveillance, involve the social services and exclude the mother, through legal force if necessary. But his warnings and guidance had been targeted on parents whose children repeatedly suffered from unexplained illness.