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I can't grieve properly for mother
VERA Wilby had just voted in council elections when she fell and broke her left hip near the polling station in Rawdon, Leeds, in May 2002.
Family and friends had noticed she was getting slightly more frail and forgetful in previous months but until then she had remained active.
Her only son John had even joked with her at her 90th birthday a few months earlier that she would get a 100th birthday telegram from the Queen.
She was taken to ward 36 at Leeds General Infirmary and it was here she became nurse Colin Norris's first victim. She survived a huge overdose of insulin but remained very ill and died the following January.
Mr Wilby said it was several months later when police contacted him to say they were investigating her collapse.
He was now convinced something untoward had happened to his mother and the other patients.
He had hoped she would come to live with his family at their Oxfordshire home as she became more frail but her collapse blighted her final months. She needed intensive nursing and had never really recovered her faculties.
"It's that kind of thing which makes me, not angry, but sad. It's very difficult to come to terms with," he said.
"As a result of someone's actions her last few months were taken away from her.
"The difficult thing looking back is that we had my mother's funeral and you start grieving and you come to terms with it but because we've had the trial hanging over us since 2003, we've not been able to do that properly."
Born in Kirkstall, Leeds, two weeks before the sinking of the Titanic, Mrs Wilby married her husband Norman in 1943 at Burley Methodist Church after they had met at Price Tailors in Kirkstall, which later became United Drapers and John Colliers. Son John was born the following year.
She worked as a secretary there and and later at Leeds City Council and the probation service. She retired in 1975.
She lived in Rawdon for 60 years. Her husband was a Labour councillor for 30 years, at one time chairman of Aireborough Urban District Council.
"He was chairman in Coronation Year which meant they had to go round unveiling a lot of plaques and official duties like that," said Mr Wilby.
They were a close couple and his sudden death in 1988 hit her hard but she joined a bereavement group in Ilkley, a book club and was a member of the Humanist Society.
She liked to travel by bus for coffee at Bettys in Ilkley or go shopping in Leeds. Her family took her for trips to Bolton Abbey, where she enjoyed walking in the woods, or Harrogate.
She had recovered from a heart attack in 1993 and continued to live at home. She was becoming more forgetful and had taken to keeping a daily diary in case something slipped her mind.
Her son found her somewhat confused and frightened after surgery at the infirmary and noted there appeared to be a shortage of staff on the ward – several times she fell out of bed and when she pressed an alarm to go to the toilet it went unanswered. "We were concerned and I think at the time a bit angry at one or two of the things that happened to mum in hospital about her general care," he said.
Perhaps these extra demands were the reason Norris attacked her. Her son, who gave evidence in his trial, found him offhand and unhelpful.
"His whole attitude was to just turn his back and walk away when I was speaking to him. I misunderstood when he was talking about her going to Chapel Allerton thinking this was a nursing home which she would not want, rather than another hospital where she could recuperate, but he didn't bother to explain."
On the night of May 17, Norris gave her the powerful painkiller morphine – even though she had not complained of pain. She became drowsy and shortly before his nightshift ended he gave her a huge overdose of insulin.
Ninety minutes later she was found semi-conscious, suffering a sudden hypoglycaemic attack.
She did go to Chapel Allerton Hospital where her family found staff much more helpful.
Later she went to live in a nursing home in Ilkley before dying at Airedale Hospital, near Keighley, on January 30 2003 from an infection. Her son said: "I can look back on my father's life, what he achieved and what kind of man he was, with very pleasant memories and a feeling of pride, but with my mother, who was an equally decent person, it's been very difficult to start to think of her in those sort of terms – I can't get beyond the last few months of her life.
"She went downhill from being a woman who was starting to become forgetful but was
still fairly mobile and living with a reasonable amount of dignity to not being able to move.
"It feels as if I never really laid her to rest.
"The distressing part is that she could have died in peace; she could have had two or three more years or gone on to 100."
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