Beverley Allitt was an enrolled nurse aged 22 when she attacked 13 children on Ward 4, the children's ward of Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital in Lincolnshire, over about two months in the spring of 1991. Four of the children died: three babies and an 11-year-old boy. Nine survived, some with lasting harm. In May 1993 a jury at Nottingham Crown Court convicted her of four counts of murder, three of attempted murder and six of causing grievous bodily harm with intent, and on May 28, 1993, Mr Justice Latham gave her 13 life sentences, one for each child.
The case reached well beyond one hospital. The Health Secretary, Virginia Bottomley, ordered an independent inquiry under Sir Cecil Clothier, and its report, laid before Parliament on February 11, 1994, found that a laboratory result proving that a baby had been injected with insulin reached the ward on April 12, 1991, while the police were not called until April 30. In that interval another child died. The inquiry's main lesson was that everyone caring for children should keep in mind the possibility of deliberate harm. In 2024 the inquiry into Lucy Letby's crimes at the Countess of Chester Hospital went back to that lesson and asked what had become of it.
Allitt has been detained in hospital rather than prison. By February 1994 she was held at Rampton, a high-security psychiatric hospital in Nottinghamshire, and she was still there in 2023. Her minimum term of 30 years expired in November 2021, but a patient held in hospital cannot be considered by the Parole Board, and in 2023 she asked a mental health panel to move her to a prison.
Beverley Gail Allitt was born on October 4, 1968, and grew up in Corby Glen, a village a few miles from Grantham, according to the magazine VICE and the Grantham Journal. She trained as a nurse and was taken on at Grantham Hospital as an enrolled nurse in 1991, the Grantham Journal reported. She was 22 when she came under suspicion, VICE reported, and 24 when she was sentenced, according to United Press International.
VICE, in a 2019 account of the case, described a history of attention-seeking illness that began in childhood: bandages worn for injuries she did not have, a normal appendix removed after she complained of pain, a wound she kept from healing, and a later hospital stay during which she tampered with a thermometer to raise its reading. The Clothier inquiry examined her sickness record in detail, and the Health Secretary summarized its conclusion on that point in the Commons: nothing in Allitt's sickness absence, she said, had suggested that she was a danger to the children in her care.
Ward 4 was the children's ward of Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital. The children Allitt attacked had been admitted with minor ailments, the Press Association reported. Children who became critically ill could be transferred to the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham, which received seven of them.
The Clothier inquiry described the Grantham hospital as working "on the edge of viability," with a tight budget, the BMJ reported when the report came out. There were no middle-grade doctors on the children's service. The two consultant pediatricians, Dr Nelson Porter and Dr Charith Nanayakkara, and two senior house officers worked a one-in-two rota. Staffing by trained children's nurses on Ward 4 was below the standard set by the regional health authority and below the higher standard the Department of Health later recommended, Mrs Bottomley told the Commons. Sir Cecil, however, called the staff shortages "a tangential issue," the BMJ reported.
The inquiry found the hospital's appointment procedures "sloppy," the BMJ reported. Pre-employment checks on Allitt were unsatisfactory, according to the Thirlwall Inquiry's later summary of the report. Even so, the inquiry doubted that proper procedures would have identified her as unsuitable at that stage of her career. Allitt began work on Ward 4 early in 1991. The BMJ, reporting the inquiry, said she spent 58 days on the ward between February and April.
Public reports give only an outline of what happened over the next two months.
Between February and April 1991, children admitted to Ward 4 with minor ailments began to collapse. Some stopped breathing. Some went into cardiac arrest. Seven were transferred to Nottingham. The crash team from the Queen's Medical Centre was called out four times in about two and a half weeks, David Blunkett, Labour's health spokesman, told the Commons in 1994. He counted 26 incidents involving 13 children over 61 days. Local reports have given the period as 59 days.
In each case, as the Press Association later summarized the investigation, the same nurse was on duty. That nurse was Allitt.
Each attack was treated, at first, as a medical event. The Clothier inquiry criticized the two consultants for their "failure to grasp sooner than they did the significance of the cascade of collapses with which they had to deal," the BMJ reported. It also criticized the Queen's Medical Centre, which received seven of the children and did not recognize that a malicious cause was possible.
Liam Taylor was the first child to die. He was seven weeks old, according to LBC, which reported the ages of the four children who died; a 2018 Grantham Journal report gave his age as eight months. VICE gives the date of his death as February 22, 1991.
The inquiry treated his death as a moment when the sequence might have been stopped. Dr Nanayakkara tried to arrange for a pediatric pathologist to examine him after his death. That was blocked by the coroner's officer and by the locum pathologist, according to the BMJ's report of the inquiry's findings, and the report suggested that a specialist examination might have "brought to a halt" what followed. One of the inquiry's recommendations was that a pediatric pathologist should be involved whenever a child dies unexpectedly or for no clear reason.
Timothy Hardwick was 11. He was the only older child among those who died; the other three were babies. VICE gives the date of his death as March 5, 1991. Little else about him was reported beyond his age and the fact that his death was one of the four murders of which Allitt was convicted. The Grantham Journal, reporting the convictions in 2023, described them as the killing of three babies and an 11-year-old boy.
The case turned on a single blood test. A baby boy, P.C., five months old, had been admitted to Ward 4 with a chest infection, VICE reported, and became seriously ill there. A sample of his blood was tested. VICE reported that his insulin level was 43,147 milliunits, and that only one higher reading had ever been recorded.
The result showed that he had been given insulin from outside his body. The BMJ, reporting the inquiry's findings, said that this result, which reached the hospital on April 12, 1991, was the first clear evidence of foul play. The child survived. VICE reported that investigators later established that he had been given three overdoses of insulin on the day of his seizure. He was one of the three children Allitt was convicted of attempting to murder, according to the counts reported by the Grantham Journal (three babies whom she attempted to kill); the reports do not say in terms which of the three attempted-murder counts concerned him.
Detective Superintendent Stuart Clifton, who led the police investigation, told VICE in 2019 that the case became a murder inquiry only when his team decided to concentrate on one surviving child, and that the insulin result was among the facts that made Allitt the prime suspect.
Becky Phillips was two months old, according to LBC and VICE. She had a twin sister, who was also admitted to Ward 4. VICE gives the date of Becky's death as April 1, 1991. Her twin was resuscitated twice after she stopped breathing, VICE reported, and survived with severe brain damage and partial blindness.
Allitt had seemed to the twins' parents to be a skilled and caring nurse. VICE reported that their mother told the trial that Allitt had seemed competent and in control, that she had trusted her, and that the family had asked Allitt to be the surviving twin's godmother in thanks for her care.
Claire Peck was 15 months old. She died on April 22, 1991, VICE reported, and her death was recorded at first as a heart attack. The Press Association, in a 2023 summary of the case, described her as the fourth child to die and said that staff grew suspicious after a run of cardiac arrests on the ward that ended with her death.
Her body was later exhumed. Tests found lignocaine, a drug used to treat adults in cardiac arrest, in her blood, according to VICE.
Claire Peck died after the insulin result on the five-month-old boy had reached the hospital. The inquiry's view of the hospital's response in that period, as the BMJ summarized it, was that it was "feeble and indecisive" while Allitt continued on her course. The police were not called until April 30, more than a week after Claire died.
Nine children survived. Allitt was convicted of attempting to murder three of them and of causing grievous bodily harm with intent to the other six.
The family of one survivor has spoken often to the Grantham Journal. Their daughter was 15 months old when, they say, Allitt injected an air bubble under her arm. She had two cardiac arrests and was left with permanent brain damage, and she was later diagnosed with a rare genetic condition. She has lifelong difficulties with fine movement, mobility and hearing, LBC reported in 2023. In 2021 her father told the Grantham Journal that she sometimes checked under her bed and in her wardrobe, fearing that Allitt would come for her. "We have a genuine fear if she is freed she could walk into our lives one day," he said. "A life sentence should mean life."
The Clothier inquiry criticized what happened between April 12 and April 30, 1991, after the laboratory had shown that a baby had been given insulin from outside his body. The BMJ, summarizing the report, said the response in that interval was "feeble and indecisive." In her Commons statement, Mrs Bottomley said the report drew attention to "the failure to take quicker action after the first evidence of possible foul play."
The report found that those managing Ward 4 showed "a general lack in the qualities of leadership, energy and drive," Mrs Bottomley told the House. It found no lack of clinical skill or conscientious care on the part of the two consultants, but said that they had not acted decisively on the unusual events.
The report also put the failure in its widest terms. Fragments of medical evidence existed that, taken together, pointed to deliberate harm. "The principal failure of those concerned lay in not collecting together those pieces of evidence," it said, in a passage Lady Bottomley quoted to the Thirlwall Inquiry in 2024. Had they been combined, the BMJ reported, they would have pointed clearly to deliberate harm.
Dr Porter pressed for the police to be called after Claire Peck died, according to VICE's account of the investigation. The police were told on April 30, 1991.
Stuart Clifton, then a detective superintendent, led the police inquiry. He told VICE in 2019 that it was the highest-profile case he ever worked on and one he had lived with ever since. "Cases with children do that to you," he said.
He said he worried at first that he knew nothing about medicine. He also met resistance from the families. Many of the parents believed that the hospital had saved their children's lives, and at first they did not want the police involved. "There was a suspicion of the police coming in and putting their size tens when they weren't wanted," he said.
Several facts pointed to Allitt. VICE listed them: the insulin result; her earlier report that the key to the drug refrigerator had gone missing; the discovery that 25 pages of the ward's nursing log, covering the period of the deaths and collapses, had been torn out; and her presence at every one of the children's deaths. The Press Association, summarizing the case in 2023, said investigators found she was the only nurse on duty during all of the incidents.
Clifton found her calm in interview. "She was a strange girl," he told VICE. "I thought that from the moment I met her." She had never been in trouble before, he said, but showed no fear. "In interviews she'd talk very openly about anything, football, the weather, anything newsworthy, but the moment you'd get onto events that had taken place in the hospital, she wouldn't talk." VICE reported that she was arrested in November 1991. She was charged with murder, attempted murder and causing grievous bodily harm with intent.
While the police inquiry went on, the Trent Regional Health Authority, which oversaw the Grantham hospital, held its own inquiry, described by Lady Bottomley as the 1992 Regional Fact Finding Inquiry. It made 51 recommendations. By the time the Clothier report was published, the Health Secretary told the Commons, action had been taken on all 51. Ward management at Grantham had changed, and children's services there had been handed to the University Hospital trust in Nottingham.
Allitt's trial was held at Nottingham Crown Court in 1993. She pleaded not guilty, the Grantham Journal reported. She was absent for much of the case: United Press International reported that her appearance for sentence on May 28, 1993, was her first in court since soon after the trial began.
At the center of the evidence was the finding that she had been on duty at every incident. Two medical specialists told the court that she was psychologically disturbed and suffered from Munchausen's syndrome by proxy, a condition in which a person harms another, often a child in their care, to draw attention to themselves, UPI reported. A Home Office forensic psychiatrist described her as a deeply damaged person, according to VICE. By the time of sentence she had been treated at Rampton for severe anorexia nervosa, UPI reported.
In May 1993 the jury convicted her of the murders of Liam Taylor, Timothy Hardwick, Becky Phillips and Claire Peck. It convicted her of three counts of attempted murder and six of causing grievous bodily harm with intent, each against a different child. The Thirlwall Inquiry's legal team, summarizing the case in 2024, recorded the offences as murder, attempted murder and causing grievous bodily harm with intent. Press summaries in 2023 and 2024, from the Press Association and others, give the same totals: four, three and six.
On May 28, 1993, Mr Justice Latham sentenced her to 13 life sentences. Allitt sat with her eyes cast down throughout the hearing, UPI reported. "You are cunning and manipulative and you have shown no remorse for the trail of destruction you have left behind you," the judge told her. "There is no real prospect that a time will come when you can safely be released."
The parents of the children who died said they were relieved. The mother of one of the children told ITN that she hoped Allitt would be held at Her Majesty's pleasure and never released. Whether Allitt would serve her sentences in a hospital or a prison was left for the Home Secretary to decide, UPI reported.
The press called her the Angel of Death, VICE noted. The name has followed her since.
Parents wanted a full public inquiry, with witnesses heard in the open. They did not get one. On June 7, 1993, Martin Redmond, the member for Don Valley, tabled an early day motion condemning the Health Secretary's handling of cases in which children had been killed or harmed in NHS hospitals. It said she had refused to examine in public the management failures at Grantham, and it called on the Prime Minister to replace her. Fifty-four MPs were recorded on the motion.
Parliament's subject index records that the inquiry was set up in May 1993, following the conviction, and gives its terms of reference from a Department of Health notice dated May 18, 1993. Lady Bottomley told the Thirlwall Inquiry in 2024 that she had chosen a private, independent inquiry after discussion with her Permanent Secretary, Sir Graham Hart, on the view that "the truth may more readily emerge in a private investigation than in a public forum." Its six terms of reference covered the circumstances of the deaths and injuries, the hospital's response, the procedures for appointing and supervising staff, a review of the Trent inquiry, the handling of serious untoward incidents, and any other relevant matters.
Sir Cecil Clothier QC chaired the inquiry. Its other members were Anne MacDonald and Professor David Shaw. The inquiry heard 94 witnesses in private and studied thousands of pages of documents, Mrs Bottomley told the Commons. The report was titled The Allitt Inquiry: Independent Inquiry Relating to Deaths and Injuries on the Children's Ward at Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital During the Period February to April 1991.
It was published on February 11, 1994, and Mrs Bottomley made a statement to the Commons that day (Hansard, House of Commons, volume 237, columns 586 to 593). She described the events as the work of "a malevolent, deranged criminal mind." The report's main conclusion, she said, was that "a determined and secret criminal may defeat the best regulated organisation in the pursuit of his or her purpose."
The inquiry found that Allitt could not easily have been detected or stopped. It did not single out scapegoats, and Mrs Bottomley called it "conspicuously fair and balanced." Its findings, as the Thirlwall Inquiry's legal team later summarized them, were that pre-employment checks on Allitt were unsatisfactory, staffing on the ward was inadequate, senior managers were indecisive in a crisis, the consultants were slow to recognize what the collapses meant, and efforts to arrange a specialist post mortem were frustrated. It also stressed that what Allitt did was almost without precedent. "Without Ms Allitt's grotesque and almost unique proclivities the tragedy would not have occurred," the report said, in words Lady Bottomley quoted in 2024. It found, too, that she had been admitted to and had worked within an environment that somehow gave her the scope to do what she did.
The report noted that the only other known cases of nurses killing patients in series, in the United States and Canada, had taken even longer to detect, the BMJ reported. The British Paediatric Association told the inquiry that many pediatricians would have struggled in the same way. Dr David Southall, who had experience of Munchausen's syndrome by proxy, said the delay on Ward 4 was no longer than in comparable cases.
The report made 12 recommendations; the Thirlwall Inquiry's table of them lists 13 items, adding the report's general conclusion about awareness. In summary, the inquiry recommended:
that anyone entering nurse training should have their sickness absence record from their most recent employer or place of study provided;
that coroners should send post mortem reports to the consultants who had cared for the patient;
that pediatric pathology should be used whenever a child died unexpectedly or for no clear reason;
that no candidate showing evidence of a major personality disorder should be employed as a nurse;
that nurses should be formally health-screened when they took up their first post;
that sickness records from previous institutions should be made available to occupational health departments;
that managers referring staff to occupational health should state the criteria that triggered the referral;
that trainees showing signs of psychological disorder should not be accepted until they had shown they could live independently and had held stable employment for two years;
that, with the candidate's consent, family doctors might certify that nothing in a candidate's medical history made them unsuitable for work in the NHS;
that the Department of Health should make sure its guide The Welfare of Children and Young People in Hospital was more closely followed (the tenth recommendation, the only one directed at a particular body, which concerned the number of qualified children's nurses on duty);
that whenever a monitor alarm failed, an incident report should be written and the equipment serviced before it was used again;
and that reports of serious untoward incidents to health authorities should be made in writing and through a single channel.
Above all, the report said, "the Grantham disaster should serve to heighten awareness in all those caring for children of the possibility of malevolent intervention."
Mrs Bottomley told the Commons that the government had taken immediate action on the 11 recommendations within its responsibility, and that the Home Secretary had accepted the one on coroners. The chief executive of the NHS, Sir Duncan Nichol, asked health authorities to report by May 1, 1994, on staffing of children's wards. New guidance on occupational health was promised, though the government first had to consult on how far family doctors could be asked medical questions without breaching confidentiality.
The statement was followed by questions. David Blunkett, for Labour, asked whether an open statutory inquiry would not have been better, and set out the scale of what had happened: 26 incidents, 13 children, 61 days. He urged that well-staffed wards with trained nurses be made an NHS priority, "not left to the vagaries of the market," and said Grantham was not different from other hospitals.
Mrs Bottomley replied that an adversarial public inquiry could have intimidated witnesses and added to the families' distress, and that the report vindicated the method chosen. On staffing she cited a 60 percent rise over four years in the number of sick children's nurses in training. Liz Lynne, for the Liberal Democrats, and Alice Mahon, a Labour member, both said the parents had wanted a public inquiry. Mrs Mahon said the parents "desperately wanted" one and that it would have helped them grieve.
Richard Alexander, the Conservative member for Newark, said the parents of one of the children were his constituents. He spoke also for Douglas Hogg, the member for Grantham, who as a government minister could not take part by convention. Four pediatric consultants from the Queen's Medical Centre were by then running children's services at Grantham.
Mrs Bottomley ended by placing responsibility on the person who had done it. "If it were not for her grotesque actions, four children would be alive today," she said.
The parents of the children called the report a cover-up, the BMJ reported, because nurses and doctors had lost their jobs while managers had not been held to account. The two consultants, the clinical services manager and the ward sister had been made redundant when pediatric services at Grantham were reorganized. The consultants appealed to the Health Secretary under the terms of their contracts.
Both consultants defended themselves. Dr Nanayakkara said that if blame attached to those who had been willing to consider the possibility of deliberate harm, then he might fairly be criticized. Dr Porter said hindsight made events look clearer than they had been. "I believe that if anyone else had been in my shoes they would not have done any better," he said.
On January 29, 1994, shortly before the report appeared, the BMJ had published an editorial by W. J. Appleyard under the title "Murder in the NHS." He wrote that without the diligence of Dr Porter and Dr Nanayakkara, Allitt "would probably not have been convicted of murder," and objected that the inquiry was being held in private, so that neither the staff nor the public could be sure its lessons would be learned. Children's services in Grantham, he noted, had already been cut back.
On November 2, 1994, in a written answer to Richard Spring MP, Mrs Bottomley reported to the Commons on progress (Hansard, volume 248, columns 1232W to 1234W). From April 1995, the English National Board would apply consistent guidelines on references and sickness records for nursing entrants. The Home Secretary would commend the coroners' recommendation to coroners in a circular. A working group would look at pediatric pathology. New occupational health guidance would cover recommendations four to nine. A survey had found that nearly half of hospitals met the daytime staffing standard for children's wards. Pre-registration entrants to children's nursing had risen from 183 in 1988 to 819 in 1992 to 1993. An expert group of the Medical Devices Agency was drafting proposals on alarm failures that went further than the inquiry had asked, and regional directors would be asked to set up direct reporting lines for serious incidents.
That was the last report to Parliament on the subject that Lady Bottomley could find. In 2024 she told the Thirlwall Inquiry that she had found no later progress report by herself or her successors.
Allitt had been treated at Rampton, a high-security hospital in Nottinghamshire, before she was sentenced, UPI reported in 1993. By February 1994 she was held at Rampton Special Hospital, the BMJ reported, and she has been reported there since. In 2019 VICE reported accounts of self-harm during her detention.
In July 2018 the Grantham Journal reported that she had been seriously ill at Rampton. That report rested on an unnamed source quoted by a national newspaper.
The minimum period Allitt must serve before release can be considered was fixed in 2007 at 30 years, less the 1 year and 190 days she had spent in custody before sentence, the Grantham Journal reported in 2021. That term expired in November 2021.
The expiry did not open the way to release. In August 2021 a spokesman for the Parole Board told the Grantham Journal that Allitt's case had not been referred to the board, and that she could not be assessed while she remained detained under section in hospital. If she were judged fit to move to a prison, she could apply for parole.
On October 3, 2023, Allitt went before a mental health assessment panel to ask to be transferred from Rampton to a mainstream prison, the Grantham Journal reported. A move would have allowed her to apply for parole. LBC reported that she was 54. A spokeswoman for Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust told LBC she could not comment because of patient confidentiality, and a spokesman for the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary said it never commented on specific cases.
The families opposed any release. "She should never be released," the father of one survivor told LBC.
No decision on the 2023 application was reported by an independent outlet. A report in December 2023, which the Lincolnshire press took from a national tabloid, said the bid had been refused.
In August 2023 Lucy Letby, a neonatal nurse, was convicted of murdering babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital. The Press Association, listing earlier cases of health workers who killed patients, placed Allitt's case first among them and said she was then held at Rampton.
The public inquiry into the Letby case, chaired by Lady Justice Thirlwall, opened its hearings in September 2024. Its counsel, Rachel Langdale KC, told the opening hearing that the case of Beverley Allitt had formed part of Letby's student training at the University of Chester, the Press Association reported. Ms Langdale said that about 25 years after the Clothier inquiry, "another nurse working in another hospital killed and harmed babies in her care."
The Thirlwall Inquiry examined what had happened to the Clothier recommendations. Its legal team's review, published in May 2024, set out each one and how far it had been carried out. For several, it recorded that guidance was promised in 1994 and that no later implementation was found. Tom Luce, a former Department of Health official, told the inquiry in a 2024 statement that the Allitt recommendations "were not acted on." On December 2, 2024, Sir Duncan Nichol, who as NHS chief executive had circulated the report's lessons in 1994, told the inquiry that he had left his post within a month or two of sending out the letter. Lady Bottomley told it that recommendations left unimplemented can fall by the wayside without anyone intending it, and that where a recommendation is not carried out there should be a public explanation of why.
Allitt has never given a public account of her reasons. The diagnosis given at her trial was Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. Clifton, speaking to VICE, rejected illness as the explanation. "I don't think Beverley was ill, unless wanting to be centre stage is an illness," he said. "She was doing it for self-gratification. She wanted people to say she was a good nurse." Asked whether she intended to kill, he said it was hard to answer, but that anyone giving drugs to children without knowing what they were doing would know there was a good chance of causing death or harm. "She must have known the inherent danger of what she was doing." The diagnosis, he said, was "not a reason for crime, but it might be an explanation for it."
He did not think any hospital system could reliably stop such a person. "If you've got a rogue nurse, it would be very difficult to identify," he said.
In October 2023 Allitt was held at Rampton Secure Hospital in Nottinghamshire, according to the Press Association (August 2023) and the Grantham Journal (October 2023). Her minimum term expired in November 2021.
Proven by final judgment: the murders of Liam Taylor, Timothy Hardwick, Becky Phillips and Claire Peck; the attempted murder of three other children; and causing grievous bodily harm with intent to six others, all on Ward 4 in 1991. No appeal against the convictions was reported.
Not fully reported: the method used on each child. Insulin was proved in at least one case by laboratory test, and lignocaine was found in Claire Peck's blood after exhumation. Air injection is described by one survivor's family; potassium is named only in later press summaries. Where she obtained the drugs was not reported.
Accounts differ on the length of the period (58 days in the BMJ's report of the inquiry, 59 days in the Grantham Journal, 61 days in David Blunkett's Commons figures); the number of incidents (26 in Blunkett's figures; "more than 36" in LBC's 2023 report); Liam Taylor's age (seven weeks per LBC; eight months per the Grantham Journal in 2018); and the dates of the children's deaths, which come from VICE's account. The court that fixed her minimum term in 2007 is described by the Grantham Journal as "the appeal court". One 2023 report says she was told at sentencing that she would serve at least 30 years, but the 1993 sentencing reports record no minimum figure, and the 2021 report says the term was set in 2007.
October 4, 1968: Beverley Gail Allitt is born; she grows up in Corby Glen, near Grantham.
1991: begins work as an enrolled nurse on Ward 4, the children's ward of Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital.
February 1991: Liam Taylor, a baby, dies after collapsing on the ward (February 22, according to VICE); an attempt to arrange a specialist post mortem is blocked.
March 1991: Timothy Hardwick, 11, dies (March 5, according to VICE).
Spring 1991: a five-month-old boy, Paul Crampton, is given overdoses of insulin and survives; Becky Phillips, two months old, dies, and her twin sister is left with severe brain damage.
April 12, 1991: a laboratory result showing injected insulin in the five-month-old boy's blood reaches the hospital.
April 22, 1991: Claire Peck, 15 months old, dies.
April 30, 1991: the police are told.
November 1991: Allitt is arrested.
1992: the Trent Regional Health Authority's fact-finding inquiry makes 51 recommendations.
1993: trial at Nottingham Crown Court; she pleads not guilty.
May 1993: convicted of four murders, three attempted murders and six counts of causing grievous bodily harm with intent.
May 18, 1993: the Department of Health announces the independent inquiry under Sir Cecil Clothier.
May 28, 1993: Mr Justice Latham imposes 13 life sentences.
June 7, 1993: early day motion in the Commons condemns the refusal of a public inquiry.
January 29, 1994: BMJ editorial "Murder in the NHS."
February 11, 1994: the Clothier report is published; the Health Secretary makes a statement to the Commons.
November 2, 1994: written answer to Parliament on progress with the recommendations.
2007: her minimum term is fixed at 30 years, less time on remand.
August 2021: the Parole Board says her case has not been referred to it.
November 2021: her minimum term expires.
August 2023: Lucy Letby is convicted; Allitt is reported to be at Rampton.
October 3, 2023: Allitt asks a mental health panel to move her to a prison.
September 10, 2024: the Thirlwall Inquiry opens and hears that the Allitt case formed part of Letby's training.
December 2, 2024: Sir Duncan Nichol gives evidence to the Thirlwall Inquiry about circulating the Clothier report.