Birmingham nurse recalls working with 'Angel Of Death' child killer Beverley Allitt

Feb 14 2009

The Birmingham nurse who worked alongside ‘Angel of Death’ Beverley Allitt (pictured) – Britain’s most prolific hospital killer – today opens her heart to the Sunday Mercury. In a special first-person article MARY REET, now 48, explains how she and husband Paul, 47, quit the UK to build a new life in New Zealand but are still haunted by guilt.

IN 1984 I started work as a staff nurse on Ward 4 in Grantham and Kesteven Hospital in Lincolnshire – an 11-ward hospital in a mostly rural community. I was a specialist in nursing children, and we took them from newborn babies right up to the age of 16.

We needed extra staff and one of the girls who came along in 1990 was Beverley Allitt, who was 22 years old. She’d done only two years of training and she wasn’t a fully qualified children’s nurse.

She was just average, not someone I’d seek out to spend time with. There was something about her I didn’t like but I couldn’t pinpoint it.

She had a bright smile and seemed cheerful enough. She was keen to make herself indispensable, befriending worried parents and showing sympathy. I wasn’t her boss but she helped out with me.

I was about to go on leave in February 1991 when seven week-old Liam Taylor was brought in, with bronchitis.

He was very poorly but he’d been given oxygen and he started to look better. Allitt was assigned to keep an eye on him and his parents were told to go home and have a rest.

“There’s been a problem with baby Liam,” one of the nurses told me as I returned a few days later. “He got into trouble about 5am this morning and he’s been resuscitated,’ she explained.

He wasn’t expected to survive. It was upsetting. It was hard