Beverly Allitt: the nurse who killed babies
Authors: Vincent Marks, Caroline Richmond
Journal: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2008)

I was in Glasgow on 15 May 1991 when I was called to the telephone to speak to the police. I had no idea what it was about and my anxiety level was high. My caller, who introduced himself as Superintendent Stuart Clifton of Grantham Police, quickly allayed my worst fears. NovoNordisk Ltd, the largest suppliers of insulin in the country, had given him my name as someone who could help him measure insulin in blood and interpret the results. Superintendent Clifton told me that he was investigating the possibility of multiple murders in Grantham Hospital and that insulin might have been used as the murder weapon – but they were still a long way off having a cast-iron case. We arranged to meet a week later in Grantham. I arrived in Grantham as arranged, and at about 6 pm Superintendent Clifton arrived with three other men, part of his team of policemen and women investigating what they believed to be one of the biggest multiple murder cases ever to have arisen in Britain. It emerged that although the police believed there had been serious wrongdoing in the paediatric ward at Grantham Hospital (Ward 4), and that although someone had been suspended on suspicion, the evidence was still far from conclusive. Everything that had happened, they had been advised, could have been due to an unhappy sequence of natural but tragic events. The story they told me was fascinating but incomplete. I gave the assembled group some advice as to what further investigations needed to be carried out to fill in the gaps. These were mainly on specimens of blood plasma that had been collected from the various victims and which were being stored in refrigerators in Grantham and other nearby hospitals. Arrangements were made to deliver them for analysis to Dr Teale at the Guildford laboratory specialising in the investigation of obscure causes of hypoglycaemia, which I had set up some 20 years before. The results when they were obtained were dynamite; Superintendent Clifton was convinced he had a powerful case, but was less certain that all the experts he had consulted until then, mostly pathologists and paediatricians, would go along with him. He arranged to hold a conference to which everyone who had been involved in the case was invited. The conference was attended by 60 or more people – about half of them from the police, with the remainder from various health institutions. There were 10 or so outside experts who were there to address one aspect or another of child health, a number of nurses and doctors who had been involved with the care of one or more of the children, and a phalanx of clerks, managers and administrators. Superintendent Clifton introduced the subject that had first been brought to police attention on Tuesday 30 April 1991. Two events prompted the call to police by the Grantham Hospital authorities. One was a meeting, in late April, of a group of junior doctors at the Queen’s Medical Centre (QMC) in Nottingham who had become concerned at the large number of sick children they had received for specialist care from Grantham Hospital during the previous two months. Whereas previously they had received two or three seriously ill children a year from Grantham, which used QMC Nottingham as its tertiary referral centre, more than twice that number had been referred in just eight weeks. As a result they concluded that something was amiss in Grantham and communicated their fears to Professor, now Sir, David Hull, the Professor of Paediatrics. He informed the managers at Grantham of their concerns and implied that if they did not call the police, he would. Consultant child care at Grantham was provided by two consultants, Dr Frederick Porter and Authors of the RSM Press book Insulin Murders DECLARATIONS