Does any of this sound familiar?
At ten o’clock this morning, a 24-year-old nurse is due to step into the dock for the beginning of a trial which has already been the focus of extraordinary emotion, media interest and political manoeuvre.
The police say she murdered four of the children in her care and attempted to murder nine others. The press have been drawn to the case not only by allegations of multiple murder, which remain rare in Britain and particularly rare where women are concerned, but also by the distant scent of anxiety in high places. For this is really two trials.
The first is a straightforward criminal trial in which the jury will have to decide whether the string of incidents was simply an unlucky cluster of natural events or whether there was foul play and, if so, who was responsible. In search of clues to the truth, they will be led deep into the undergrowth of medical science:
Behind the scenes, however, there is a second trial which began as soon as the children began to fall ill and which is entirely political. In this shadow trial, it is the National Health Service which is in the dock, accused of being so understaffed and overstretched and so thoroughly commercialised that the deaths and near-deaths of 13 children could take place in the heart of an NHS hospital without anyone being able to act.
Although this second trial has been running for nearly two years, it has until now been conducted entirely behind closed doors. In public, the NHS defence has amounted to nothing more than insisting on its right to silence.
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It's from the 1993 trial of Beverley Allitt. If you don't know about this case, look her up. She's still in prison, under a judge's recommendation never to be released.
Allitt administered large doses of insulin to at least two of her victims and a large air bubble was found in the body of another, but police were initially unable to establish how all of the attacks were carried out.
She never gave an explanation.