Was doctor hellbent on armed revenge failed during his mystifying fall from grace?
Once a happily married A&E consultant, he’s been jailed for amassing a cache of weapons and a hitlist of enemies. But a serious illness had a deeply troubling effect on Martin Watt...
ADECADE ago, Dr Martin Watt seemed to have it all. An established consultant at one of Scotland’s busiest A&E departments and a prominent campaigner for patients’ rights, he enjoyed the respect of his peers and a comfortable family life with his wife and two sons.
But from such lofty heights Watt has tumbled into ignominy in a manner as spectacular as it has been rapid. Gone is his exalted status as a surgeon – gone, too, his marriage and with it the smart sandstone house in Glasgow’s West End.
Finally this week, his fall from grace reached its nadir when Watt was sentenced to a minimum of 12 years in prison after he was found guilty of a hair-raising plot to assassinate former colleagues he held responsible for destroying his career.
The High Court in Glasgow heard that police officers raided Watt’s shabby former council house and found a terrifying cache of firearms purchased over the internet along with an envelope containing a hitlist of ‘bad guys’. Among the names, the court heard, were senior health board members who had ruled Watt was no longer fit for service.
Watt’s reaction to his dismissal appears extreme, even for those not unfamiliar with criminality. For a doctor, however, it is utterly confounding. At the age of 62, and facing the prospect of 12 long years behind bars, he will have plenty of time to contemplate just how a man who once swore an oath to uphold the strictest standards of medical ethics could have sunk so low.
A deeper examination of the case throws up troubling concerns over the state of Watt’s mental and physical health during the critical period immediately before and during his run-ins with authority. While nothing can excuse his extreme reaction to the pressures he found himself under, his Jekyll-and-Hyde behaviour might go some way to explaining how a doctor who served the NHS without blemish for 32 years should suddenly have gone so badly off the rails.
While A&E is widely regarded as among the most stressful jobs in frontline medicine, Martin Watt loved his work. In the early 2000s, when there was talk of cuts to emergency services across NHS Lanarkshire, he led the successful campaign to save the A&E unit at Monklands General Hospital in Airdrie, where he worked as a consultant for 12 years.
He voiced his disquiet about the pressures on overstressed staff, telling one conference: ‘It is an unpalatable fact that people are dying in our hospitals because doctors and nurses are stretched beyond the limit. They are simply unable to give patients the attention to detail that is required and as a result, unfortunately, people are dying needlessly.’
Yet by August 2009, Watt had developed his own serious health problem which required a quadruple heart bypass. Recovery took seven months, but soon after he returned to work in March 2010 his relationship with colleagues and managers began to break down.
According to tribunal papers, Watt accused managers of unfairly questioning his work after colleagues raised a number of concerns about his temper, notetaking and patient care.
As the dispute escalated, Watt was placed on special leave and later sacked after he refused to return to work under supervision. He lodged an appeal but an industrial tribunal backed NHS Lanarkshire’s decision. The tribunal’s report details a litany of official complaints, inquiries and disciplinary hearings that led to his eventual dismissal in August 2012.
The report states that in May 2010 – only two months after his return to work – he referred an elderly patient who had come to A&E with a chest infection and broken hip to the wrong ward. The patient ended up in high dependency and died, although it is unclear if a different assessment would have saved him.
The following month, Watt had a run-in with a junior colleague, who subsequently accused him of bullying.
A statement from a consultant, presented to the tribunal, said the junior colleague had claimed: ‘Dr Watt shouted down the phone in an aggressive manner for a prolonged period of time from the nurses’ station in casualty, in full view of those around him.
‘When the other doctor tried to walk away from that phone call, Dr Watt phoned him back and continued the conversation in an aggressive and abusive way.’
Other colleagues working alongside Watt described him as ‘awkward and fractious’. One said: ‘Let’s say he never went out of his way to help anyone and he was often on a short fuse. Those who heard him bawling at the junior thought he had completely lost the plot. But no one was brave enough to take him to task for it, least of all his own juniors. They worried about their lives being made a misery.’
MORE fears about Watt’s competence arose after he noted wrongly that a teenager, who had recovered and been sent home, had died. Watt was then placed on special leave, on full pay, and told not to come to Monklands or contact any member of staff involved in disputes with him.
Managers were so concerned by his behaviour that they twice ordered him to undergo medical assessments, amid concerns that his heart surgery could have inflicted brain damage and affected Watt’s ability to handle stress, while causing concentration problems and mood swings.
The tribunal papers revealed that Watt’s boss, A&E consultant Dr David Litherland, had asked for the tests before allowing him to return to work – and again before beginning disciplinary action over the complaints.
The report states: ‘Dr Litherland was seeking clarification whether there were any problems caused by the surgery in the claimant’s higher functions of the brain such as cognition, memory, attention and mood. Dr Litherland wanted to ensure that the claimant was fit to see patients.’
Dr Christopher Ide, a consultant in occupational medicine, carried out a ‘mini mental-state examination’ and found no medical reason why Watt could not continue to work in A&E. Some former col-
leagues insisted reports of Watt’s short temper seemed out of character.
One, who asked not to be named, said: ‘I worked with him in the early 1990s and I liked him a lot. Some of the doctors acted like no one mattered but them, but Martin seemed to get on well with everyone and had a good sense of humour.
‘I was shocked when I heard what had happened. I couldn’t relate it to the man I knew.’
Fair or not, the complaints were added to Watt’s records after a hearing and he was invited to return to work under supervision at the neighbouring Wishaw A&E unit. But he flatly refused, despite receiving a warning that to do so would be deemed gross misconduct.
Watt was suspended and in May 2012 sacked, after being off work for more than 18 months. He lost a subsequent appeal when a tribunal panel concluded that NHS Lanarkshire’s decision to dismiss him was reasonable ‘in the circumstances’.
It would prove to be the end of his career – but not the end of the affair. By this stage, work pressures had taken their toll on Watt’s private life, too. Having studied medicine at Glasgow University, the former Bearsden Academy pupil with a passion for rock-climbing had married a nurse, Liz McNish, with whom he had two sons – Neil, now aged 28, and Keir, 25.
But by 2012, as Watt’s professional life was collapsing, his marriage buckled under the strain and ended in divorce in the same year he was sacked. The semi-detached villa the couple had occupied for most of their married life was sold and Watt moved in with a friend, Heather Makar, at her former council house in Condorrat, Lanarkshire. He continued to pay his General Medical Council fees for another three years – hoping, perhaps, to return to working in a hospital one day – but eventually let his membership lapse.
Increasingly isolated and left to brood on the circumstances of his sacking, Watt developed a thirst for revenge which grew unchecked. His trial heard that by May last year, when police raided his home, he had an arsenal of weapons bought illegally over the internet from sites in Eastern Europe.
HE had spent time and money amassing them. They included three Skorpion machine guns, two Valtro pistols, two replica assault rifles, 1,508 bullets and quantities of homemade gunpowder and ketamine, a powerful anaesthetic often used by vets to tranquillise horses.
Watt had reactivated the decommissioned guns in a workshop at his home – which is only 50 yards from a primary school – after watching ‘how-to’ videos online. He adapted blank cartridges to make live rounds and modified bullets into dumdum rounds, designed to inflict maximum damage.
A list of names, addresses and car registrations was found in an envelope marked ‘bad guys’ and routes to some of his targets had been worked out. Many of those on the list were former colleagues from Monklands. Watt told detectives that they were involved in his ‘bullying, harassment and eventual dismissal’, adding: ‘They were not allowing me to clear my name.’
Watt told his trial that the ‘template’ for the attacks was the plot of a 2011 film named Killer Elite starring Robert De Niro about mercenaries hired to kill, but he insisted he never intended to carry them out.
‘No,’ he told the court. ‘Playing out the retribution game on paper gave me some sort of comfort.’
He also carried out target practice with a Skorpion machine gun at a forest area by a motorway near his home, but claimed he just wanted to improve his aim.
The court heard from a close friend of Watt, Desmond Herkes, 51, who described him as a support and comfort when his late mother was in hospital for ten months. Watt also helped to compose a letter of complaint about her treatment. Mr Herkes said he had been ‘very shocked’ to learn of the cache of weapons.
PROSECUTOR Alex Prentice, QC, told the court that everything had been done ‘in preparation for an awful event’. He said: ‘There was an intention to endanger life, it was more than mere thinking about it.
‘Dr Watt was harbouring a grudge and he sought out the home addresses of the key players in the disciplinary process. He collected a significant arsenal of lethal weapons and felt he had been unfairly treated.’
The first-offender had earlier admitted illegally possessing weapons and ammunition and a jury took only 75 minutes to find him guilty of a separate charge of intent to endanger life.
After he was found guilty, Miss Makar insisted he was not dangerous and vowed to stand by him. She said: ‘He is not capable of hurting anyone. He is not the type. We are not abandoning Martin.’
The trial judge took a different view, imposing a Serious Crime Prevention Order that will restrict his use of the internet and courier firms, and ban him from entering any NHS establishment except in a medical emergency for five years after his release.
Lady Stacey told Watt the order was necessary ‘to keep an eye on you’, adding: ‘This order is not about punishing you, but about protecting the public.’
And there it is. More than three decades of unstinting public service washed down the drain by his own foolish hand. Martin Watt is now a social pariah, just a common criminal. And that must be the bitterest pill of all to swallow.