Found guilty of four murders and branded the Angel of Death... but is this Scot innocent?
As he faces a 7th Christmas behind bars, disturbing questions are being raised about Colin Norris’s conviction...
IN the early hours of June 25, 2002, pensioner Doris Ludlum was found to have slipped quietly into a coma at a Leeds hospital. The frail 80-year-old, who was being treated for a hip operation, never regained consciousness and died two days later.
It was a sad end but, at her venerable age, scarcely unheard of. A month later, Bridget Bourke, 88, died in similar circumstances after undergoing hip surgery, followed by Irene Crookes, 79, that October.
They, too, were in a poor state of health both before and after their operations and their deaths were put down to natural causes.
By the time ethel Hall, 86, was found comatose after routine surgery to fix her broken hip in November 2002, however, alarm bells were beginning to ring. Mrs Hall was suffering from severe hypoglycaemia – extreme low blood sugar, which causes the brain and other organs to cease functioning – and she was given glucose injections to stabilise her condition.
Her blood sugar level returned to normal but she failed to recover, dying three weeks later.
A Scottish agency nurse, Colin Norris, who was covering the night shift on ward 36 at Leeds General Infirmary, sounded the alert. He told a colleague ‘someone always dies’ when he was on the night shift and was said to have predicted Mrs Hall’s sudden decline to within 15 minutes. After the retired shopkeeper collapsed in a coma, Norris pointed to his watch and said to a staff nurse: ‘I told you so.’
Meanwhile, a sample of Mrs Hall’s blood contained an abnormally high level of insulin which, it was argued, could not have happened naturally. That raised the unpalatable prospect that someone must have deliberately poisoned Mrs Hall with insulin.
The police began an inquiry and soon the finger of suspicion pointed at Norris. Detectives trawled through deaths at two Leeds hospitals where Norris had worked and identified similar cases within a six-month period which caught their eye.
The common denominator in the deaths of Ludlum, Bourke, Crookes and Hall seemed to be that Colin Norris had been working on the ward at the time they fell ill. Officers uncovered a further incident in May, 2002, when a 90-year- old patient, Vera Wilby, fell into a hypoglycaemic coma but survived before dying later of an unrelated cause.
Critically, the investigation played out against the aftershock of the trial of Harold Shipman, the GP feared to have murdered 215 patients, and detectives suspected they had another serial killer on their hands.
NONe of the women was diabetic and prosecutors argued that spontaneously occurring hypoglycaemia in non- diabetics was so rare that a cluster of five cases must mean foul play.
Six years later, Norris was convicted of murdering four elderly patients – and almost killing a fifth – by injecting them with insulin.
For his cold-blooded crimes, the man dubbed ‘the Angel of Death’ was sentenced to a minimum of 30 years in jail. He is serving his term in the maximum- security jail HMP Frankland, near Durham, alongside Soham murderer Ian Huntley.
A hand-wringing NHS report followed, detailing the ‘organisational, systems and cultural’ failures which allowed Norris to go freely about his murderous plan.
‘A determined killer like Colin Norris would be difficult to spot in any NHS organisation,’ said Dr Peter Belfield, medical director of Leeds Teaching Hospitals, adding: ‘This is a highly unusual case. We employ 13,500 staff. This was one nurse who was a criminal.’
It is, indeed, a highly unusual case. It is also, now, a deeply troubling one, for compelling expert evidence has emerged which casts doubt on the safety of those verdicts, suggesting not only that Colin Norris is innocent but that his ‘ victims’ were not murdered.
Recent scientific studies show that hypoglycaemia often arises in elderly patients admitted to hospital for other reasons – in as many as 10 per cent of cases. experts have also questioned whether or not ethel Hall’s blood test result, which formed the cornerstone of the Crown case, was reliable.
At the same time, campaigners against miscarriages of justice have discovered that at least six women who were never looked after by Norris died from hypoglycaemia in the hospitals where he worked in the same period. Yet Operation Bevel, the West Yorkshire police inquiry into the events at Leeds General Infirmary and St James’s Hospital, Leeds, took no account of these further deaths.
The new evidence is being ‘actively pursued’ by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which can refer the case for appeal. Norris, now 38, who lost an earlier appeal on narrow l egal technicalities, has always protested his innocence.
His mother, June Morrison, 58, a secretary who lives in an immaculately tended ex- council home in Milton, Glasgow, travels every month by train to see her son at the category A prison where he languishes, a respectable career in tatters.
She can recall the shock overwhelming her as the guilty verdict was read out at Newcastle Crown Court. ‘I felt as if my world was collapsing in,’ she told a BBC Scotland Investigates programme, which aired this week. ‘I couldn’t believe what I had heard.’
But she insists she never doubted he was innocent: ‘ Never, never, because I know my son. And I have to keep going until people know there has been a miscarriage of justice.’
She said her son decided to train as a nurse when he completed a first aid course while working as a travel agent: ‘When he was a teenager, he used to take kids in wheelchairs to watch football. This image of him as a heartless person who hated the elderly bears no relation to the truth.’
A close friend, Sarah Lovick, told the programme: ‘I believe he hasn’t done anything wrong. I love Colin with all my heart, he’s one of my best friends – always has been and always will be. And I miss him.’
Norris studied nursing at Dundee University before moving to Leeds to work. There he bought a house and began to take extra agency shifts to help pay his mortgage.
But in November 2002 his nursing career effectively ended when Mrs Hall was found unconscious. She had a long history of losing consciousness and had suffered from pernicious anaemia for 20 years.
This time there was no reviving her and, despite glucose injections, she died three weeks later. When a lab in Guildford, Surrey, found inexplicable levels of insulin in her blood, the police were called in.
The inquiry was led by Detective Chief Superintendent Chris Gregg, who had recently reviewed the 22 West Yorkshire deaths associated with Dr Shipman. The Shipman case had made police sensitive to possible murders by medical personnel and they seized on remarks Norris made to colleagues on the night Mrs Hall fell ill, claiming they were ‘sinister’.
On December 11, Norris was arrested and questioned. Suspended from nursing, it would be nearly six years before he would face trial.
Seventy-two deaths were looked into by police as part of the investigation, and 18 were classified as high priority, before he was eventually charged with the four murders and attempted murder.
The Guildford lab test was to be a mainstay of the case against Norris. Mrs Hall, it suggested, did have a high level of insulin in her blood. In some people this happens naturally, but when it does, there is normally a high l evel of an enzyme called
C-peptide – which was not present in the sample from Mrs Hall.
Normally two tests should be done on separate samples to confirm such a result, but the lab had apparently breached its own protocols by conducting its single test on a sample taken from Mrs Hall after she had been given glucose – which, say experts, can distort the results.
Professor Terry Wilkin, an endocrinologist specialising in diabetes at the University of Exeter, concluded that Norris would have needed to inject just over one litre of insulin to produce the result found in Ethel Hall. That is the equivalent of 50 injections using a 20ml syringe, an amount he considers ‘unrealistic’.
BoTH he and retired clinical biochemist Dr Adel Ismail believe there may be a less sinister explanation for the blood result – a rare condition called insulin auto immune syndrome (IAS), which causes insulin levels to rise dramatically without C-peptide. A chemical test is available which establishes whether this syndrome is present, but it was not carried out.
Dr Ismail said he tried to raise awareness of IAS with the defence three weeks after the trial had started, but added: ‘It was really hard work at that stage to raise a completely new issue.’
The problem for the defence was they had already accepted the argument that the blood test was proof she had been poisoned. Their strategy was to argue that someone other than Norris had carried out the fatal injection.
When IAS was finally raised late on in the five-month trial, it was challenged by no fewer than seven prosecution experts. one, consultant geriatrician, Dr Peter Kroker, said the prospect of a patient con- tracting IAS is ‘probably less than winning the lottery’.
Nevertheless, Professor Wilkin remains convinced the lab data was perfectly consistent with IAS. He said: ‘If you’re asking me the question, does insulin auto immune syndrome fit with the facts of the case as reported, then yes it does.’
Ex-colleague Emily Cox dismissed suggestions Norris’s language at the time of Mrs Hall’s death was sinister, saying it was ‘just normal nursing lingo’ to hear a colleague’s concerns about the chances of a patient surviving the night.
In the other four cases, the evidence against Norris is circumstantial, resting on the nurse being on duty when they became hypoglycaemic. At trial, it was said hypoglycaemia was so rare in nondiabetics that to have a cluster of cases within six months must mean murder. But Professor Vincent Marks, a world-renowned insulin poisoning expert, told BBC Scotland: ‘It wasn’t as well known at the time of the trial as it is now that in the elderly, f rail, sick person, hypoglycaemia is far from rare.
‘Some people assess it at 2 per cent, others at 7 per cent or 8 per cent. It was not the cause of their illnesses, it was caused by their illnesses, their general debility, their frailty. This is now a well-recognised phenomenon.’
There were other cases which never reached the jury. Lucy Rowell was 82 when she fell into a hypoglycaemic coma and died in February 2002.
After her funeral, the police broke the dreadful news to her family that she may have fallen victim to Norris. Months later, however, officers informed them that Mrs Rowell’s death was no longer being treated as suspicious.
Her granddaughter, Miranda Carpenter, said: ‘This particular male nurse the police had been pursuing wasn’t working the night that Grandma slipped into a coma, so her death went from being suspicious to non-suspicious.’
CAN it really be that cases were cherry-picked to create a cluster of suspicious deaths around Colin Norris? That is among the many questions currently being looked at by the CCRC as part of its substantive investigation.
It is not one the police is prepared to address. In a statement, West Yorkshire Police said: ‘The case is under review by the CCRC and we will consider their findings when they are presented to us.’
Louise Shorter, a former producer of the BBC Rough Justice programme who has researched the case with Paul May, a veteran campaigner against miscarriages of j ustice, is i n no doubt about Norris’s innocence.
She said: ‘There is no direct evidence that Colin Norris hurt anyone.
‘The trial was created out of one inadequate blood test from which a case, based on a medical fallacy, was built. We now know the medical evidence at trial was wrong. We hope the CCRC will refer his case back to the Court of Appeal before Colin loses too much more of his life.’
BBC Scotland has promised to turn over its findings to the commission, which will inevitably delay the outcome of its investigation. A CCRC source said: ‘We would hope to have something in the first half of next year, but it’s impossible to say. The average commission investigation last year lasted 38 weeks and we have already been looking at this case for 30 months.’
So Colin Norris will be preparing for a seventh Christmas behind bars, uncertain how many more will follow. After all, there has never been a serial killer who has turned out to be innocent on all counts.
Could this infamous ‘angel’ really be the first?