This series sheds light on the serial killers who left their mark on British History.
Beverley Allitt was born on October 4th 1968, and grew up in the village of Corby Glen, near the town of Grantham. She had two sisters and a brother. Her father worked in an off-licence, and her mother as a school cleaner. Allitt attended Charles Read Secondary Modern School, having failed the test to enter Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School.
Allitt often volunteered for babysitting jobs and left school at 16 years, growing up, she exhibited some worrying tendencies. This included the wearing of dressings and casts over wounds. She used this to draw attention to herself without allowing these injuries to be examined. Also, becoming overweight as a teenager, she became increasingly attention-seeking, often showing aggression towards others. She spent considerable time in hospitals seeking medical attention for a string of physical ailments, which resulted in the removal of her perfectly healthy appendix. The healing process was prolonged as she consistently interfered with the surgical scar. She was also known to self-harm and had to resort to ‘doctor-hopping’; as medical practitioners became familiar with her attention-seeking behaviours, she would move to the next doctor.
She went on to train as a nurse and was fancied of rude behaviours, such as staining walls with faeces in the nursing home where she taught. Her absentee level was also exceptionally high, the result of a string of illnesses. Inspire of her history of poor attendance and successive failure of her nursing examinations; she was taken on a temporary six-month contract at the chronically understaffed Grantham and Kesteven Hospital in Lincolnshire in 1991, where she began work in Children’s Ward 4. When she started, there were only two trained nurses on the dayshift and one for nights.
It wasn’t long before she started transferring her aggression to the wards left in her care. On February 21st 1991, Liam Taylor, only seven months when admitted to Ward 4 with a chest infection. Allitt went out of her way to reassure his parents that he was in capable hands and persuaded them to go home to get some rest. When they returned, Allitt advised that Liam had endured a respiratory emergency but that he had recovered. She also volunteered for extra night duty to watch over the boy, and his parents also chose to spend the night at the hospital.
Liam had another respiratory crisis just before midnight, but he felt he had come through it satisfactorily. Allitt was left alone with the boy, and his condition worsened rapidly, becoming deathly light before red blotches appeared on his face. At this point, Allitt summoned an emergency resuscitation team leaving Allitt’s nursing colleagues confused by the absence of alarm monitors, which had failed to sound when he stopped breathing. Despite the best unending effort of the attending team, Liam suffered cardiac arrest and suffered severe brain damage and remained alive only due to the use of life-support machines. On medical advice, his parents made the painful decision to remove their baby from life support. His cause of death was recorded as heart failure, and Allitt was never questioned about her role in baby Liam’s death.
Within a short time, Allitt had attacked thirteen children leaving four dead before she was eventually arrested and charged for her crimes. It was said that she often injected insulin and potassium into her victims. She was also told to cut off her victim’s oxygen either by smothering or tampering with machines and on May 28th 1993, she was found guilty of each charge and sentenced to thirteen synchronous years of life imprisonment.
