Beverley Gail Allitt was born in Corby Glen, Lincolnshire, on October 4, 1968. Through her teens and her nurse training she was a persistent presenter at hospitals, with injuries and complaints that repeatedly turned out to have no organic cause, and she wore casts and bandages for conditions nobody could find. She failed a great deal of her training through absence, and was nonetheless taken on as a state enrolled nurse on Ward Four, the children's ward at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, in February 1991. The ward was short-staffed and had no consultant paediatrician resident overnight.
In the fifty-nine days that followed she attacked thirteen children. Liam Taylor, seven weeks old, died on February 23. Timothy Hardwick, eleven, who had cerebral palsy, died on March 5. Becky Phillips, two months, died on April 1. Claire Peck, fifteen months, died on April 22. Nine others survived, several with lasting brain injury. She used insulin, potassium, air injected into the bloodstream, and suffocation, and she was the one who raised the alarm each time and was present at every resuscitation. The press called her the Angel of Death.
The break was a laboratory result. Becky Phillips's surviving twin, Katie, was found to have an impossibly high insulin level with no corresponding C-peptide, which cannot happen naturally and means insulin was injected. Police were called on April 30. A missing ward logbook, an allocation record putting Allitt on duty at every collapse, and traces on a discarded syringe made the case.
She was tried at Nottingham Crown Court and convicted on May 23, 1993, of four murders, three attempted murders and six counts of causing grievous bodily harm. She was given thirteen life sentences, and in 2007 the High Court set her minimum term at thirty years. She was diagnosed with Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a contested category, and has been detained since at Rampton high-security hospital rather than in prison. She has never given a full account of why.
The Clothier Inquiry reported in 1994 on how she was ever employed, given a sickness record that should have been examined, and recommended screening of nursing applicants for the pattern. Its recommendations were widely described afterwards as unimplemented. Her thirty-year minimum expired in November 2021, but she has never been able to apply for parole, because she is detained at Rampton under psychiatric care rather than in a prison, and only a transfer to a mainstream prison would make her eligible. She sought that transfer in 2023 and was refused in December of that year; she is not due to be reassessed before 2026.