Beverly Allitt: A Child Murderer

Beverly Allitt, a seemingly normal woman, took a turn for the worse and began a murdering spree that went unnoticed for months. Here is her life...

Facts

• As a child, Beverly Allitt wore bandages and casts over her self-inflicted wounds that she would produce for attention.
• From that time on she suffered from an extreme temper, aggressiveness towards complaining about a series of physical ailments that sent her into a hospital.
• She actually persuaded a doctor to remove her perfectly fine appendix, and then failed to heal because she would pluck at her surgical scar.
• She soon became a nurse as well as a caretaker. Allitt was accused of doing odd things in nursing homes, such as smearing feces on the walls and putting it in the refrigerator for others to find.
• She realized that her fake sicknesses were not getting her the attention she desired, so she decided to go about it another way by abusing children.
• Her first victim was seven-week-old Liam Taylor. He was brought into the hospital with a chest cold. Allitt took care of him and assured the parents everything would be fine. Later that night, Liam went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing. He was on life support, but his parents decided to take him off.
• Her main way of killing her victims was to inject them with extremely high doses of insulin. Allitt’s victims went into cardiac arrest and either died, were permanently brain damaged, or were seriously injured.
• The only motive that fits this case is her diagnoses of Munchausen by Proxy syndrome. It’s a disease in which people injure themselves or others in order to receive attention.
• Allitt went on for months killing and injuring innocent young children. Finally, one of her patients, Claire Peck, was given an autopsy. Doctors found traces of the drug lignocaine in her tissues, a substance used in circumstances of cardiac arrest, but never in a baby.
• Within three weeks of the investigation, police arrested Beverly Allitt. She denied having any part in the murders and she was extremely calm under interrogation. After a series of hearings, Allitt was charged with four counts of murder, eleven counts of attempted murder, and eleven counts of causing grievous bodily harm.
• Allitt was convicted to 13 life sentences for murder and attempted murder. This was the most severe sentence ever given to a woman.
• During her trial she rapidly lost weight and became anorexic. During her time in prison, she burned herself with boiling water and cut herself with glass.

Links to other pages

Crime Library
Beverly Allitt facts
MSD Law