In the UK, all medical staff have an oath where they vow to
do no harm to their patients, but Nurse Beverly Allet betrayed
that earth in the most diabolical of ways, making her
one of the most notorious serial killers in British history.
Outlaw. Hello and welcome to Outlaw
Podcast. I'm Eleanor Neil and today we're
serving you up a true crime case from the vault.
This episode was originally posted to my YouTube channel
years ago, before we existed as Outlaw Podcast, but I think it's
time we add it to the Outlaw catalog.
So now I will hand back to me from the past to take it away
with today's Vault case. Oh, and by the way, today's case
has multiple parts. This is Part 1 and we'll see you
next week for Part 2. So today's video is going to be
another true crime case. Today we're going to be talking
about Nurse Beverly Allit, AKA the Angel of Death.
Now, before we get into it, I do just want to give my usual
disclaimer that I mean absolutely no disrespect to
anyone that I talk about in this video.
This video is for educational purposes and everything that I'm
about to say is just information that I have found on the
Internet and I'm compiling into one video.
There are a lot of content warnings for this case, so I'm
just going to list them all off. Now.
Listen closely and if any of them are topics that you don't
want to listen until right now, I completely understand.
Click out of the video here. Throughout this case, there's
going to be a lot of discussion of mental illnesses and things
relating to that, including personality disorders, self
harm, anorexia, Munchausen syndrome, and Munchausen
syndrome by proxy. There's also brief mentions of
animal abuse, domestic violence, and rape.
So if any of the above are things that you don't want to
hear about, like I said, click out now.
Hopefully I'll get to catch you a different time with a
different case, but look after yourself.
All that being said, let's let's just get into Part 1 of the
Angel of Death. So today's case begins in
Grantham in Lincolnshire, which is in the East Midlands of
England. And that is where Beverly Gayle
Allit was born on October 4th, 1968.
She was the second of four children in her family and she
very much had middle child syndrome.
You know how they say that the middle child never really gets
enough attention from their parents, whether that's
intentional or not, it just kind of like seems to happen.
And she always craved a closer relationship with her parents
all the way through her childhood.
And I mean, it's not like she was being neglected.
I really don't think she was from like the way it's spoken
about in sources and stuff. I don't think she was neglected.
I think it was just she wanted more attention than what she was
getting. But her parents had to split
their attention between four children.
So it just wasn't enough for Beverly as she was growing up.
And when she joined primary school for the first time and
she was like mingling with other kids her age, making friends,
and they were talking about their mums and dads, that was
when it kind of really hit home for Beverly about like how
different her situation was to the other kids.
They would talk about like all the things that they would do
with their mum and dad on a weekend, all the places they
would go, all the fun things they would do.
And Beverly just couldn't relate because she just didn't spend as
much time with her parents as other kids did.
It made her feel really jealous and she subconsciously started
to resent her parents for not being there for her the way that
other kids parents seem to be for their kids.
As she grew up and became a teenager, Beverly Allett gained
a significant amount of weight which made her feel very
insecure just in herself. Her confidence just went like
that and I think that was less to do with the way that she
looked, but more to do with the bullying that came with this
weight gain. You know what kids are like.
They will pick on anyone for anything that makes them
different and for Beverly that was her weight.
Her weight was what made her different to all the other kids.
The kids at school were just awful to her about her size and
she felt so left out. She was always the butt of the
joke. She was never like in on things
with other people. She was never really treated as
an equal to the other kids. She was always the one that
everyone laughed at. So she'd gone from having no
attention on her all her life to now having a lot of attention.
But the bad kind, you know, it was negative attention that she
was getting. It was bullying.
All she ever wanted was for people to be nice to her and to
spend time with her and, you know, to just to just be friends
with her. Positive kind of attention from
her peers. That's all she ever wanted.
But she just wasn't getting it. And so she came up with a plan
on how she was going to get this attention.
She turned up to school one day with a bandage on.
And every time she passed someone in the hallway, they
would see this bandage and be like, Oh my God, like what
happened? Are you OK?
Is everything all right? You know, they would say like
nice caring things about this injury that Beverly had.
Little did they know she didn't have an injury.
She'd just put that bandage on on a non existent wound for this
exact reason. So that people would come up to
her and and care about her and ask her questions and give her
attention. And clearly it worked.
And so from this point on, Beverly started doing this a lot
more often. She would do bandages, she would
put plasters on. She even like made herself a
fake cast, which like, this is a child in primary school.
So I don't know how she did that, but she did.
But as time went by and Beverly keeps showing up to school with
all these different bandages, plasters, it stops getting her
the attention that it once did because people are just getting
used to Beverly being injured at this point.
She realized that in order to still get this attention that
she once got, she was going to have to step up these injuries.
It wasn't enough to just have a bandage on her arm anymore.
She needed to show people that she was hurt and this is when
Beverly allit began self harming.
She would go home and break things like glasses or plates so
that she could then use a Shard of glass or a Shard of this
crockery and cut herself with it.
So then she would be able to go into school and have these
visible injuries on her that people could see and then people
would care again. And it was around this time that
she started becoming obsessed with anything medical.
Obviously it started out with like the bandages and stuff, but
now it was, it was becoming an obsession, just anything
medical. She was obsessed with different
medications, different treatments, different chemicals,
all this kind of stuff. She loved learning about it.
She loved hearing about it. And although it went undetected
at the time, it's easy to see, looking back, that at this point
in her life, Beverly Allit was developing Munchausen's
syndrome. Munchausen's syndrome is a
mental health condition in which the person will purposefully
make themselves ill or harm themselves in some kind of way
in order to get attention or sympathy.
And the thing that separates Munchausen's syndrome as a
mental health condition with like other similar things, like
people doing similar things, is that someone with Munchausen's
syndrome knows that they are doing it.
They know that they are not sick.
They know that they are not ill, but they want that attention so
bad that they will fake it in order to get it.
That's what separates that like it being a condition rather than
just being like odd behaviour. They know that they're
manipulating people. That is why they're doing it.
It is a manipulation tactic as well as a mental health
condition, and it can take many different forms.
Of course, like Beverly, they can resort to physically harming
themselves, like cutting themselves or using fake
bandages to make it look like they've got an injury.
Or people will do other things like tampering with medical
equipment, like heating up a thermometer to make it look like
they've got a fever. Some people will even poison
themselves with like different medications so that they will
actually get sick, but they've done it to themselves for the
attention. It can even be like faking
psychological illnesses like depression or anxiety or like
schizophrenia. People will fake hearing voices
in their head, stuff like that. It can take so many different
forms. And Beverly was still very, very
young as she was developing this.
And I think that's one of the reasons why it went so unnoticed
because she'd just always been like that because she developed
it so young. She was still in primary school,
so she was like, what, 10 years old, possibly even younger when
she starts faking these injuries, putting bandages on to
go to school. But anyway, aside from all of
that that was going on, Beverly did live a normal life, a normal
childhood. In fact, her family was very
nice, if you can say that. I know she didn't get enough
attention growing up, but that was like the only problem they
had. She had nice parents, She had
nice siblings. Like her parents really wanted
all of their children to go to this prestigious grammar school
in the area because it gave them the best chances in life.
But this grammar school that they were all trying to get into
after primary school, it was one of those where you have to take
a test to be able to get in. There's an entry test, and if
you don't pass that test, you don't go to that school.
Beverly's older sister took that test.
She passed it. She got into this prestigious
grammar school. Her parents were so chuffed.
But then Beverly's turn came. She took the test and she
failed. She didn't get into that grammar
school that her parents wanted her to go to.
And this really disappointed Beverly.
I don't think her parents, like had an issue with this.
Obviously, they would have preferred for their children to
go to a better school, but it wasn't the end of the world that
Beverly was just going to have to go to a normal school.
But Beverly herself was just like really hard on herself
about this. And I think it was the sum of a
lot of different emotions in her life because Beverly had never
been extraordinary at anything. She was always just a very
average girl in her looks, in her intelligence, in her
sporting ability, in her talents.
You know, there was nothing that ever made her feel stand out.
And I know that kind of sounds awful, me sitting here saying
she was average in all of these different categories.
But that's just what everyone said.
She never really put the effort into any part of her life to be
able to excel, and so she did. She was just always average at
everything and she always looked at her older sister who was
above average at everything. Intelligence, sports, she was
very popular in school, all this kind of stuff.
And Beverly saw her sister as a version of herself that she
could never be. And I think this rejection from
her sister's school only made her feel even more inferior to
her siblings. It was just perpetuating this
attention seeking cycle that Beverly Allit was stuck in.
So anyway, Beverly starts her own secondary school, this other
school, and as soon as she starts, she is always I'll.
She is always either off school or she's coming home from school
early for anything. She would have backache, neck
ache, a sore throat, a cold stomach ache, you name it, she
had it at one point and she was off school for it.
So she had very poor attendance for that exact reason.
She was barely ever at school. And that mixed with the fact
that at the best of times, she, she was not a very personable
person. She was not very friendly or
outgoing. She didn't put herself out
there. And because she was barely in
school anyway, this all stopped her from making friends.
The other girls in Beverly School apparently thought she
was quite weird and they didn't want to involve her in different
things. And so this made Beverly Allen's
teenage years very, very lonely. Like, she's not getting the
attention from home, she's not getting the attention at school.
She's just not really got any. And don't take that the wrong
way, it's not like people didn't like her, it's just that she
didn't have anyone close to her. But her parents loved her, her
siblings loved her. She didn't have it bad is what
I'm trying to say. She just didn't have it great
either. And everyone around her at this
point, her friends, her family, any like anyone teaches, they
were all very unaware of her Munchausen syndrome.
Everyone just believed her. Every time that she said she was
ill, everyone always believed her.
In fact, the only people that didn't believe her were doctors.
But Beverly had a plan on how she was going to get around this
because every time she would go and see a doctor and they would
doubt her, she would never go to that doctor again.
So she was just constantly going to different doctors, telling
them all these issues, and as soon as one of them would get
suspicious, she'd leave. She didn't want to risk them
exposing her lies because then that would push her even further
away from the attention that she's so craved.
So already as a teenager, she is very crafty about this.
She knows how to get what she wants.
In fact, one of the maddest things that she ever faked with
her Munchausen syndrome, she actually convinced the doctors
that she had appendicitis and that she needed her appendix
removing. I actually can't believe it got
to surgery. Like she had her appendix taken
out. Do they not do scans?
Do they not like have a look at it before they removed it?
Because actually the surgeon that removed it as soon as he
like took it out of her human body, he looked at it and he was
like why are we taking this out? This is not inflamed.
It doesn't look like it should be causing Beverly problems.
Like why are we here doing this surgery?
It looks fine. She never had appendicitis.
Never. She'd somehow managed to fluke
all these different appointments and scans.
Well, did she ever have a scan? I don't know.
But she managed to fluke them all and get herself all the way
to the operating table. And she didn't even stop there.
She was going to try and milk this appendicitis thing for all
it was worth because after the surgery she would Even so like
the wounds that she had from her incisions.
She would pick up those wounds and intentionally try to fault
the healing of them or even infect them, make them worse so
that she would have to keep going back to the doctors to get
like, medication or to get them looked at to get them cleaned up
because it was just prolonging the attention that this
appendicitis gave her. These wounds that should have
taken probably a matter of weeks to heal actually ended up taking
months because Beverly was juicing them for all they were,
you know, juicing them. Not literally juicing them
obviously, but like juicing all the attention that she could out
of this. Anyway, when Beverly Allip
finally finished high school, she actually left with very few
qualifications overall. She got one O level, which is
the equivalent of a modern day GCSE.
That's like the qualification that you get at the end of high
school in the UK and that was in food and nutrition.
So she got one O level in food and nutrition and then she got a
few Cses, which is like a step below an O level, step below a
GCSE. It's kind of for people that
probably not going to pass their GCSE, so they put them through
this kind of foundation level just so that they'll get at
least something, you know? And she got 4 Cses in English,
maths, French and Biology, whereas her older sister had
passed all of her own levels. She got every single
qualification that she possibly could out of high school,
whereas Beverly got one and like 4 halves.
So she was still constantly comparing herself to her sister.
She was constantly feeling inferior.
And after leaving school, Beverly Allit couldn't really do
much with the few qualifications that she did have.
Like you do kind of need your own levels to be able to go on
and get the good jobs. And so she she needed some other
kind of qualification to back her up in life.
So she started looking into some special courses for people that
have less qualifications, for people that maybe only have Cses
and stuff like that. And that was when she found a
vocational course to become a nurse.
And because no one had really caught on to her Munchausen
syndrome at this point, no one realized just how disastrous
this career path could be. And disastrous it was.
So anyway, she enrolls herself on this nursing course and at
one point she actually ends up befriending an older woman that
worked at the Grantham and Kirsteven hospital.
And this woman acted as like a slight mentor for her.
It wasn't full on but like she was there for Beverly to ask
questions and stuff whenever she needed.
And this woman actually lent her a bunch of textbooks, her old
textbooks about like nursing theory and medicine and all
these different things. So Beverly was studying for her
nursing course and at the same time she actually picked up a
part time job at her local pub. And it was at this pub in this
job where she actually started to develop socially a lot
actually. She was finally forced to learn
some people skills. Up until this point, she hadn't
really been like pushed in the deep end like that.
But when you're doing a social job, literally pouring pints,
you need to be able to hold a conversation with the customer.
She ended up befriending a lot of the regulars that would come
in the pub often. A lot of them were like
middle-aged men and they loved Beverly.
She was like one of their favorite bartenders.
They thought she was attractive and she would always tell them
all these like, fun, interesting stories.
And it actually earned her the nickname the fable because a
fable is like a fictional tale. And the men could always tell
that she was lying about these stories.
She always had the most crazy, most interesting stories, which
were obviously lies, but none of the men ever like called her out
on it too much. It was just kind of a joking,
like underlying thing saying that she was always lying in
these stories. Everyone knew that, but no one
ever really liked. Do you know what I'm trying to
say? It was never an issue, but like,
they all knew she was lying. But they were such like little
random stories that it didn't really matter.
But yeah, like I said, a lot of the men were attracted to
Beverly and this was like the first time in her life that she
was ever getting male attention in this way.
It wasn't just like middle-aged men that were attracted to her
by the way. There were boys her age that
would come in the pub and she actually got talking to a lot of
the boys her age and she ended up dating a few of them.
She got into her first ever relationship when she was like
1718 and it didn't last very long.
She was in like a string of different short term
relationships until she met a man named Steven Briggs when she
was 19 years old. He was the first one of these
boyfriends to stick around longer than like a month or two
and actually he was with her for a full year and then he
proposed. So the two of them were going to
be married. Unfortunately, though, not long
after the two of them got engaged, their relationship
turned sour and Stephen actually ended up leaving Beverly.
And he was very vocal about this at the pub, because he would
still go in that local pub and everyone knew Beverly there.
And he did not shy away from telling everyone there that it
was all Beverly's fault that they'd split up.
Because Beverly allit was supposedly a rather abusive
partner, physically and emotionally.
She would hit him, she would manipulate him.
She was very aggressive, very violent, and also very
deceptive. She would lie to him all the
time. And actually that was the thing
that made him leave her. Not the physical abuse, not the
emotional abuse. It was the lying.
Because it got to a point where Stephen was just like, I don't
know what is real and what is not in my relationship, in my
whole life. He didn't know who the real
Beverly was. He didn't know what their
relationship was. He just like it was really
messing up his head and it was that that actually made him
leave her. But in fact, the one lie that
was the final straw in this relationship was when Beverly
Allen lied to Stephen Briggs that she'd been raped.
And she even said that she was pregnant with her rapist's baby.
Of course, it didn't take long for Steve to find out that this
was all a lie. And that was it for him.
He could not stay with a woman that was that could lie about
something like that. So Beverly is now about 20 years
old. She's single again.
She's still in this nursing course.
And actually, it's no surprise that being in the medical field,
being around, you know, other nurses, training nurses, it was
all making her money. Chausen's syndrome, a million
times worse. She was actually training on
site at a hospital. So she was working in a hospital
day in, day out. And for the first year of her
course, she had 160 sick days. Just to put that into
perspective, that is the equivalent of 1 1/2 days a week
every week or six days every month.
That is an insanely high absence rate.
And she was sick, like off work for things like a sore throat or
a cold or like backache, you know, things that a lot of
people would just work through. At first it was fine.
You know, people believed her. But then after, you know, 100
sick days, people were starting to doubt the authenticity of
this. And in fact, a few of her Co
workers caught her a few times trying to fake a high
temperature on a thermometer. She would boil water in the
kettle and then put it in her mouth like when it's nearly
still boiling. She would have been like hurting
herself for this, and then she would put the thermometer in, so
then the temperature would go whoosh and she'd look like she
had a fever. But Beverly wasn't just doing
all of this like just to get out of work.
I think that's what her course thought.
They thought that she was just faking sick because she couldn't
be bothered, like doing her work.
But actually this was just who Beverly was at this point.
Like all of these fake illnesses and stuff that she would have.
She would go to the doctors for it as well because it was all
about attention and sympathy. It wasn't to get out of doing
things that she didn't want to do.
It was because she wanted people to like, ask how she was and
stuff like that. So she would go to the doctor
160 * a year with like fake illnesses.
In 1990, the year 1990 alone, Beverly Allit visited the
doctors over 50 times. That works out at like nearly
one a week. If you were Beverly's doctor,
you would be sick of seeing that face.
So anyway, when Beverly Allit was 20 years old, she graduated
her nursing course and she would was offered to stay on at that
hospital and she was given like just another trainee nurse, like
just another further training position.
So she wasn't like fully qualified.
She didn't have a job there yet. She was just going on to like
the next stage. And in this next stage, all of
the trainee nurses got to live together in dormitories on the
hospital grounds. So Beverly was about to move in
with a bunch of other nurses, and this ended up going probably
even worse than what you're imagining in your ahead right
now. Because as soon as Beverly Allen
moved into these dormitories, a lot of weird, unexplained things
started happening. Curtains were set on fire.
Smoke alarms were set off for no reason.
Locks in the doors were filled with super glue so that no one
could get in or out. But one of the worst things that
happened by far in these dormitories was one day one of
the nurses actually came back from a really long shift that
she'd been working. She went and put the oven on to
to go and make herself some dinner and all of a sudden the
room as this oven heated up, the room filled with the smell of
human feces. And when this nurse went and
took a look inside that oven, there was human feces smeared
all over the inside of it. And not just the oven, it was in
the fridge, it was on the walls. Human feces smeared all over the
dormitories. It was actually horrifying.
And everyone suspected Beverly of this.
Of course, it all started happening as soon as she moved
in. People were already suspicious
of her just in general with like all the time that she would have
off of work. People just didn't, you know,
her Co workers just didn't really like her or respect her
because she seemed like a weird, weird nurse.
But yeah, she moved into the dormitories and it just so
happened that in the same week all this weird unexplained shit
starts happening. Annoyingly though, Beverly Allit
was never caught in the act and there were no cameras in the
dormitories. This is like the 1990s.
So security cameras weren't everywhere at the time.
So whenever anyone accused her, she could just deny it and be
like, no, I wasn't even there when when that happened.
But everyone knew she was. Everyone knew she was like, she
was always home whenever these weird things would happen in the
dormitories. These weird things would never
happen when she was out on shift.
So yeah, everyone kind of knew it was Beverly, but no one could
really prove it. And it actually got so bad that
the hospital had to put out a statement to all of these nurses
saying if these weird things don't stop happening, we're
going to have to kick you all out.
We're going to have to take you all off this training program,
kick you out of the dormitories because we can't be facilitating
this. So yeah, the hospital threatened
to remove them all from the course if these things didn't
stop. And what do you know, they
stopped immediately. Actually, nothing ever happened
again after that. And they never officially
figured out who it was, so no one was ever punished.
But you know, everyone always thought or knew it was Beverly
Allit. But anyway, now that she is
literally living on hospital grounds, her Munchausen's
syndrome gets even worse. It's just progressively getting
worse and worse and worse through her whole life.
And one of her most dangerous stunts that she did as she was
working in that hospital, because bear in mind, now she's
got access to loads of medical equipment, which for someone
with Munchausen syndrome, that is terrifying.
And she took full advantage of this.
Her most dangerous stunt was when she went and filled a
syringe with water and then injected one of her breasts with
this water, making it comically larger than the other one.
And then she was going up to all the friends being like, Oh my
God, I'm so worried about my, my large breast.
And all her friends were just like looking at her.
And they just did not know what to say at this point because
they knew she'd done it to herself.
No one had seen her do it. But like they just knew.
And like, what do you say to that?
They were just baffled with how unprofessional and dangerous
this woman was on the job. But no one ever really said
anything to her because no one ever wants to be that Co worker
that's got a problem with another Co worker.
You know what I mean? It's just uncomfortable.
So no one ever said anything, but they definitely should have.
Nurses did however, start to distance themselves from Beverly
Allit. They never like told her off or
like got her into trouble, but they didn't want to be a friend.
They started leaving her out, they started going for lunch
without her. And once again Beverly found
herself very lonely in life. She was stuck in this cycle all
her life of not getting enough attention.
So she'd do all this crazy weird stuff in order to get attention,
but that would just end up pushing people even further away
because now they, they think she's really weird for doing
those things. She just made it so much harder
for herself to be able to make friends because she just kept
putting people off her. So anyway, by the end of her
further training course, the course that she was on at the
moment, she was actually the only nurse out of all of them
that wasn't offered a permanent position at that hospital.
She was the only one. The main reason being her
attendance. She'd had so much time off that
the hospital just didn't see her as a reliable staff member.
They couldn't count on her to be a good nurse.
And also because she'd had so much time off, that meant she'd
missed so much of A training that she just wasn't that good
of a nurse. Like, obviously if everyone else
is practicing day in, day out, learning day in, day out, but
you're taking 160 days off a year, you're not going to know
as much as the rest of the people on your course.
So they wanted to give all these women jobs, but they just
couldn't. They just couldn't give one to
Beverly instead because the hospital did see potential in
her. You know, she'd done all this
different training through the years and they wanted to be able
to give her a job, but they couldn't right now.
So in the meantime, they decided to give her a six month
temporary contract on the children's ward because the
children's ward at Grantham Hospital anyway was deemed the
more like easy ward to work on. Because the children's ward at
Grantham and Kesteven Hospital was very small compared to
normal children's wards and they didn't deal with very severe
things. They only dealt with like broken
bones or infections and stuff like that.
If it was anything worse that needed like more serious
attention, they would just refer the child to a different
hospital, normally Nottingham Hospital, they would send the
kid to her. So yeah, these were all kind of
less serious, easier things to treat and they were confident
that Beverly could do these things.
But to be honest, I don't think they would have even given her
this six month temporary job on the children's ward had that
that hospital not being so terribly understaffed.
They were so desperate for any nurse that they were willing to
give a job to this woman that they know is not a good nurse.
But they just didn't have enough people working at the hospital
that, you know, they had to take on anyone that they could get.
They hoped that putting her on this six month temporary
contract would give her enough time to build up her skills,
build up, you know, her confidence in this job that by
the end of this six months they could review it and maybe give
her a more permanent position in a different wing of the
hospital. So she's now working on the
children's ward. And the shift pattern on the
children's ward was there would be two fully trained, fully
qualified nurses on during the day and 1:00 during the night.
And these fully trained qualified nurses would be
supported by trainee nurses. I think there was usually about
two or three on each shift. And Beverly was always one of
these like trainee girls. And the children's ward at
Grantham Hospital was a really, really nice ward to work on.
From what I read, they were a very like, because it was a very
small ward, all of the nurses that worked there were very,
very close. It was like a little tight knit
family they called themselves. And they were more than
welcoming to Beverly Allen. They were very excited to have
her in the the children's ward family.
So Beverly Allen's first shift was on February 18th, 1991.
She was 22 years old when she started this job, and she was
very right and eager to learn. She was very excited to be in
this position. And actually, she came just at
the right time because this was about to be one of the busiest
periods that the children's ward ever had.
Nurses actually described this as their busiest winter yet
because so many kids were falling.
I'll with, you know, very typical winter illnesses like
colds, flus, viruses, chest infections, but there was just
such a huge number of them that the hospital really needed this
extra pair of hands. And that actually brings us to 1
of Beverly's first ever patients, A7 week old baby named
Liam James Taylor. Liam had a really nasty chest
infection that ended up developing into pneumonia, which
is why he had to be hospitalized, sent to the
Grantham Children's ward. And his parents were so worried,
I think as any parent would be in that situation.
They were losing sleep. They were so stressed they could
barely eat. And nurse Beverly Allen sat them
down and she reassured, showed them that their son was in good
hands. They were going to do everything
they could to help him. And in fact, she actually
suggested that they go home and get some rest because their son
was in good Care now. And his parents were just so
grateful for all the help from the staff.
And so, yeah, they went home. They rested.
They, you know, got some sleep for the first time in days.
However, when they returned to the hospital the next morning,
they were greeted with some bad news that Liam had actually
taken a turn for the worse during the night.
At one point he'd actually stopped breathing completely.
He had some sort of respiratory attack and they managed to bring
him around. They managed to resuscitate him
and he was breathing again now the next morning.
But they wanted to keep an eye on him because they didn't know
where this attack had come from, why it had happened, and they
wanted to make sure that another one wasn't going to happen as
well. So he was going to be kept in
for a second night now. And Nurse Beverly Allit wasn't
actually supposed to be working that second night, but she
actually volunteered to go in and work that shift unpaid just
so that she could look after Liam Taylor.
And everyone was so grateful for her offering this.
The hospital, because they were so understaffed, they really
needed that extra pair of hands. And of course, Liam's parents,
they thanked Beverly Allett so many times because that was such
dedication to their son. So yeah, he's staying in for
another night. But just before midnight that
night, he had a second respiratory attack.
He stopped breathing again. They managed to resuscitate him,
but this time he didn't bounce back quite as well as he did the
first time. The first time he pretty much
fully recovered, whereas this time he was very weak.
And then within a few hours of his last attack, Liam had a
third respiratory attack. He stopped breathing for a third
time in what, like 24 hours? Obviously, at this point, he was
hooked up to all these different machines and monitors that were
checking his heart rate and his breathing and stuff like that.
And if he was to stop breathing, these monitors are all supposed
to go off, sound alarms to alert the staff who can come in and
help him. But this third time that he
stopped breathing, the monitors didn't go off.
They didn't alert to him stopping breathing.
It was actually Beverly Allit that noticed that he'd stopped
breathing. She went into his little
hospital room and she saw him laid there in the bed.
He was so pale. His lips were blue.
He had like red splotches all over his face.
It turned out that Liam Taylor had suffered a huge cardiac
arrest. This is a 7 week old baby and
during this cardiac arrest his heart just completely stopped
and his brain was starved of oxygen for so long that it meant
that he would be permanently disabled and brain dead.
Following this attack, doctors put Liam Taylor on a life
support machine and they contacted his parents who rushed
straight to the hospital. But as soon as they were
informed just how severe their son's condition was, his parents
made the decision to take him off of life support.
Liam James Taylor died in his parents arms at just seven weeks
old. His recorded cause of death was
cardiac arrest. In a little message on his
gravestone, Liam's parents refer to him as Pudding Pants, which
was like a cute little nickname that they'd given him in the
short yet sweet time that they'd had with him.
And following this, the hospital were just devastated that
something like this had happened, that they lost a child
like this. And, you know, it is all part of
the job. You know, not every case can be
a miracle case where you save someone's life.
You know, in this industry, you do watch people die.
And it's heartbreaking every single time.
Yet these nurses knew that they had a job to do for all the
other children on that ward. And so they pick themselves up
and they got back to work. Little did they know that the
death of Liam Taylor would be the start of a string of
unexpected child deaths there at Grantham Hospital. 2 weeks
later, on March 5th 1991, eleven year old Timothy Hardwick was
admitted to the children's ward. Timothy had cerebral palsy and
he suffered epileptic fits, one of which had actually been so
severe while he was at school that his school had to phone for
an ambulance which then transported him to Grantham
Hospital. He was originally only supposed
to be kept in for one night just because of this severe epileptic
fit and they just wanted to keep an eye on him.
They just wanted to make sure that he recovered properly after
the fit. However, the longer he spent in
hospital it seemed the worse he was getting.
And then later that night, just as Liam Taylor had done two
weeks prior, Timothy Hardwick went into cardiac arrest and he
stopped breathing. A huge team of doctors rushed to
his bedside and they did absolutely everything in their
power to resuscitate him, but they just couldn't save him.
And so at 6:15 PM that night, 11 year old Timothy Hardwick was
pronounced dead just hours after arriving at the hospital.
His death was so unexpected. I mean, Liam Taylor's had been
as well, but Timothy was literally only there just for
observations. They really thought that he was
going to be fine to go home the next morning.
They were literally just watching him to make sure he was
fine. They never expected to lose him.
So for that exact reason, an autopsy was carried out on
Timothy Hardwick because they wanted to figure out how he'd
just randomly gone into cardiac arrest and died.
But during this autopsy pathology, this just could not
figure out his cause of death. There was nothing unusual,
nothing out of the ordinary. They just, they genuinely did
not know. And so for that reason, they
just assumed that his cause of death had been something to do
with his epilepsy. And it was recorded as such.
Following his death, Timothy's mother wrote a poem for him that
I believe was read at his funeral.
And I have it here for you now. Oh Timothy, my special boy, how
I'd love to see you more, to see you laugh and walk and talk
perhaps. Is that too much for a mum to
ask? My heart cries out for you my
lad, and so does the heart of your poor dad.
In Grantham Hospital at the same time as Timothy Hardwick, was a
15 month old baby named Kaylee Desmond.
She'd been admitted about a week prior with quite a nasty chest
infection and so they were keeping a close eye on her and
it seemed that she was recovering quite well and that
she was going to be able to go home soon.
So doctors started signing all these discharge forms.
They were really getting ready to say goodbye to her and let
her go home. Nurse Beverly Alec went in and
she was helping her prepare all the things and as she did,
Kaylee Desmond went into cardiac arrest twice.
Both times she was able to be resuscitated.
But because this had happened twice in such a short space of
time, Grantham and Kesteven Hospital didn't feel equipped to
take care of this girl and so they very quickly transferred
her to Nottingham Hospital for monitoring there.
This is a baby, just over a year old and she's just had two
cardiac arrests in what, like an hour, less than an hour.
So they were really, really worried about her at this point
in time. She got to Nottingham Hospital
and they carried out a thorough physical examination of her.
This was an otherwise healthy child.
I mean, yes, she did have a chest infection, but she was
pretty much at the end of that. She was pretty much recovered.
So how and why could she have possibly gone into cardiac
arrest twice in an hour out of nowhere?
So yeah, like I said, they carried out this physical
examination to see if they could find anything wrong with her,
and they couldn't. There was really nothing.
I mean, there was one note on the file they'd found, like a
puncture mark and an air bubble in her armpit.
But they just kind of put that down to, like, an accidental
injection or something from the other hospital.
It didn't seem like it caused cardiac arrest anywhere.
Following her ordeal, Kaylee Desmond was actually left
permanently disabled because her brain had been starved of oxygen
for so long. Doctors initially told her
parents that she would never be able to walk again.
She would never be able to talk again.
And you'll be happy to hear that she's actually proved them wrong
on both counts. But yeah, eventually Kaylee was
released from Nottingham Hospital.
She didn't go into cardiac arrest again.
They had no idea why she had twice in a row but she never did
ever again. So But anyway, back to the
Grantham and Kirsteven hospital. Just two weeks after the last
child death, a 5 month old boy named Paul Crampton was admitted
to the children's ward and this was purely A precaution, just
like Timothy Hardwick had been. He had this bad epileptic fit,
but they just wanted him in hospital just to care for him.
Paul Crampton was kind of the same in that he'd had a really
bad chest infection but it was on its way out.
But he was wheezing really badly and they just wanted to keep an
eye on his breathing and stuff. So he was in hospital maybe for
a couple of days. It was literally just to be on
the safe side. They really thought that he was
fine and he pretty much recovered and that he was
probably going to go home within the next couple of days.
But within hours of this five month old baby arriving at the
hospital, his parents got a Paul in the early hours of the
morning, telling them to get to the hospital ASAP because their
son had taken a turn for the worse.
Paul Crampton had gone into sudden cardiac arrest just like
all those other children had. And doctors rushed to his
bedside and they managed to resuscitate him.
They managed to get him back, but again, they couldn't figure
out how and why this had happened.
So yeah, they're doing all these exams, all these tests on him to
try and figure it out. And then within a few hours of
the last one, he goes and into cardiac arrest again, a second
time. Again they managed to
resuscitate him, but this time he's just so weak.
He's gone pale. His lips are blue, red splotches
on his face, just like the other boy.
They treated him with glucose, which actually helped to perk
him up completely because a lot of cardiac arrests are all
cardiac arrests. I mean, I'm not a doctor, but a
lot of them are caused by like hypoglycemia, which is not
enough glucose in your body, I think.
But they treated him with glucose and it worked.
And actually, once they gave him this glucose, he bounced back to
pretty much a completely healthy, happy baby.
And doctors were just so confused how he had suddenly
gone into cardiac arrest and then suddenly snapped out of it
as soon as they gave him this glucose.
None of this seemed natural. But, yeah, like I said, they
were just so confused at how this young boy had just suddenly
gone into cardiac arrest. And so they decided to keep him
on the ward again for a few more days so that they could monitor
him. And he was recovering well.
Seemed like he was going to be going home soon.
So the nurses start getting him ready to leave, there's a sign
in the discharge forms, all that kind of stuff, and his parents
decided to go down to the Hospital Cafe for some lunch
while they were getting their son sorted.
However, when they returned to the children's ward, all the
nurses were running around panicking.
It turned out that Paul Crampton had gone into cardiac arrest for
1/3 time and now the nurses at the Grantham Hospital just could
not deal with this. Like I said, it was a small
ward, understaffed, they don't deal with severe cases and so
straight away they wanted to transport Paul to Nottingham
Hospital where they were a lot better equipped to deal with it.
I think they'd managed to resuscitate him by now from this
third cardiac arrest. And so they put this five month
old baby in the back of an ambulance to transport into
Nottingham Hospital. And Nurse Beverly Allet, you
know, the Angel that she was, she offered to go free of
charge, volunteer her time to sit in the back of that
ambulance with this baby to make sure that he got to the next
hospital safe. And everyone again was so
grateful for her doing this. So yeah, anyway, Paul Crampton
reaches Nottingham Hospital and they are just so confused at all
these different cases they're getting from the Grantham
Hospital. They're just seemingly very
healthy young, very young babies that just keep having cardiac
arrests out of nowhere. And so this time they really
wanted to test this boy and see what was going on.
They did physical exams, blood tests, all different kinds of
analysis tests, swabs, everything.
Also at the Nottingham hospital, they treated him with glucose
just like they had at Grantham. And again, he perked up
completely, which was weird. Like that people can perk up
from sudden cardiac arrest 1/3 in like the space of a few days
and just be completely back to their normal selves.
That doesn't happen. So they took all these samples,
sent them off to the lab for analysis and when they got the
results back, doctors could not believe their eyes.
Paul Crampton blood insulin level was at 500.
And just for context, the level of a child his age should be
anywhere between 10 and 15. His was 500.
Doctors just knew that this was not natural, especially because
he'd gone into cardiac arrest so suddenly and recovered so
suddenly. Nothing about this was natural.
And so they put this really mad insulin result down to two
possible reasons. The first reason could have been
faulty equipment, faulty, you know, testers, something.
It could have been just like an anomaly, fluke result, because
sometimes that happens. Sometimes you do get false
results. That's why they do multiple
tests of things to make sure that it's not an anomaly.
But like here, they only had one or option #2 that doctors put
this down to. And the one that they believed
more so was that Paul Crampton was suffering with an
insulinoma. An insulinoma is basically a
little tumor in the pancreas that releases a lot of insulin
all in one go, causing an attack like this.
And they couldn't find this insulinoma on his pancreas
because they did look for it, thinking that this was the cause
and there wasn't one there. So they thought, well, maybe it
had like, released all this insulin and then fixed itself.
It like, gotten rid of itself. That was the only explanation
that they could think of anyway. There was no proof that there
ever was an insulinoma. But like, that's all they could
think could have happened. And so they kept Paul Crampton
in the Nottingham hospital for a few more days, checked him over,
and he was fine. He recovered really well,
actually rather quickly. Five month old Paul Crampton was
discharged from the hospital and he never suffered A cardiac
arrest or a respiratory attack or any kind of insulin related
problems ever again. For the rest of his life.
He never had another problem like that.
He was lucky to survive this medical anomaly.
However, other children from the Grantham Hospital wouldn't be so
lucky. And that is all for Part 1 of
this case. We'll see you next week for Part
2. And thank you so much for tuning
in to Outlaw Podcast. Please make sure to follow us
and rate the pod and I will see you in the next one.