BBC programme casts doubt on four murders of Leeds nurse Colin Norris

Nurse Colin Norris was found guilty in March 2008 of the murders while he worked at Leeds General Infirmary and St James’s Hospital. He was jailed for at least 30 years.

A doctor alerted the authorities after noticing that one of the four people who died had suddenly and unexpectedly slipped into a hypoglycaemic coma from which she later died.

Norris’s trial at Newcastle Crown Court was told that Ethel Hall, 86, who was not diabetic, had been injected with a massive and fatal dose of insulin, which reduced the sugar content in her blood to a level where her brain became starved of the glucose it needed to function properly.

Tests revealed insulin levels 12 times the norm, the court heard.

Glasgow-born Norris has always protested his innocence and denied injecting patients with insulin.

But Professor Vincent Marks, an insulin expert, has told the BBC that research he carried out showed hypoglycaemic episodes, where people slipped into comas, were not “that rare” among elderly patients in hospitals.

Norris’s mother, June Morrison, said today that she always believed her son was innocent of the murders.

She said: “It’s very good to hear that this new evidence is going to be presented.

“When we asked Professor Marks to do the report, we didn’t know what the results were going to be, and when he did come back with this, it was very, very helpful to us.”

Asked what the last four years had been like for her and the family, she said: “It’s been like a nightmare, you’re in a bad dream.

“You just don’t believe it is real, but it is real. It’s been horrendous, dreadful.”

She said Norris had his own “coping mechanism” in prison and he was “coping”.

“I can’t help him inside the prison, I can do as much as I possibly can out here,” she added.

Ms Morrison also said she believed juries should not be allowed to convict someone if there any members of the panel had doubts and it was “totally wrong” that jurors could convict someone on circumstantial evidence.

She continued: “We take the new evidence back to the CCRC (Criminal Cases Review Commission) and they will read the fresh evidence and the advice. We put an advice in as well, explaining where we got the new evidence from, how it was brought about.

“They will then decide if it goes back to the Court of Appeal and then the three judges at the Court of Appeal will decide if it’s strong enough for a re-trial or an acquittal.”

Prof Marks was interviewed for the programme BBC Scotland Investigates: Hospital Serial Killer - A Jury In The Dark, which will be broadcast tonight at 10.35pm on BBC One Scotland.

He told the programme his research had found that, in some cases, up to 10% of elderly sick in hospital suffer hypoglycaemic episodes.

Prof Marks undertook a forensic analysis of new international medical studies carried out since 2008 which, he says, disproves the belief that a cluster of hypoglycaemic comas in non-diabetics is “rare”.

Prof Marks told the BBC Scotland programme: “I was surprised at how very common it is in this particular group of elderly, sick people.

“In one very detailed survey, of thousands of patients, it was up to 10%. In others it was 5%.

“And I thought ‘Well, you know, it’s not that rare after all’.”

Asked if it would be unusual for a cluster of four or five patients to occur in a period of a year, he replied: “It wouldn’t be unusual if you were looking through a hospital that had several thousand people over the age of 70 who are sick and so on, over the course of a year - not at all.”

Barrister Paul Williams, who represented Norris during his trial, told the BBC: “The new scientific evidence is incredibly powerful indeed.”

Norris was found guilty of murdering Mrs Hall, Doris Ludlam, 80, Bridget Bourke, 88, and Irene Crookes, 79, at the LGI and St James’s Hospital.

The programme production team said they also looked at the case of Lucy Rowell, who had developed hypoglycaemia, fell into a coma and did not recover.

Relatives told the programme the police informed them that Mrs Rowell’s death was being investigated along with Norris.

But her granddaughter, Miranda Carpenter, said that about 11 months later police told her the case was being dropped.

She told the programme: “They just told us that Colin wasn’t working the night Grandma slipped into the coma.”

A spokesman for West Yorkshire Police said: “Norris was arrested, prosecuted and, on the basis of the evidence presented to the court, he was convicted and sentenced.”