Colin Norris was born in Glasgow on February 12, 1976, trained as a nurse at the University of Dundee, and moved to Leeds in 2002 to work on orthopaedic wards at the Leeds General Infirmary and St James's Hospital. He now goes by the name Colin Campbell.
Between April and December 2002 five elderly women on his wards developed sudden and severe hypoglycaemia, low blood sugar, which none of them was diabetic and none had an obvious reason to develop. Doris Ludlam, eighty, Bridget Bourke, eighty-eight, Irene Crookes, seventy-nine, and Ethel Hall, eighty-six, died. Vera Wilby, ninety, survived. In Ethel Hall's case a blood sample taken at the time was later found to contain a very high concentration of insulin with a suppressed C-peptide, which cannot occur naturally and means insulin was injected.
The prosecution case was that unexplained hypoglycaemia in a non-diabetic elderly patient was vanishingly rare, that four such episodes on one nurse's wards in one year could not be coincidence, and that Norris was the common factor. Twenty expert witnesses gave evidence across a five-month trial at Newcastle Crown Court. He was convicted by majority on March 3, 2008, and given life with a minimum of thirty years. He has always denied it.
The premise was then challenged. Later research indicated that spontaneous hypoglycaemia in frail elderly inpatients is considerably more common than was understood in 2008, which if right removed the statistical foundation of the case for four of the five. A BBC Panorama film in 2014 set out the argument, and in February 2021, after a review that had begun with submissions in 2011, the Criminal Cases Review Commission referred all five convictions to the Court of Appeal, saying there was a real possibility they were unsafe, including Ethel Hall's, because that conviction depended on support from the other four.
The appeal was heard over fourteen days and on June 26, 2025 the Court of Appeal dismissed it. Lady Justice Macur, Mr Justice Picken and Sir Stephen Irwin held that the additional cases underlined rather than undermined the features said to be distinctive of injected insulin, and said they had no doubt about the safety of any of the five convictions. The convictions stand. A campaign maintaining his innocence continues.