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00:10I'm David Wilson, emeritus professor of criminology, and for over 30 years, I've investigated the
00:18phenomenon of murder and what it is that might motivate someone to kill.
00:27Every murder case is different, but time and again, a deadly pattern emerges of warning
00:34signs and red flags.
00:40In this new series, I investigate some of the UK's most harrowing murder cases to understand
00:48how and why these terrible crimes occur.
00:55This is Murder UK.
01:15In the summer of 2011, Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport sees a sudden, terrifying outbreak
01:24of illness. The medical staff are immediately confronted by a series of events that defy
01:31logic. 22 people collapse unexpectedly.
01:37It was a normal month. There are undoubtedly every day, every week people die in hospital,
01:45even those who come in on, you know, for chest infections or something not remotely serious.
01:50But when you've got a spate of people suffering serious harm who've come in for relatively innocuous
01:57reasons, you know, a chest infection or whatever, questions are going to be asked about what's
02:02happening.
02:03And the initial reaction at the hospital is to seek a scientific explanation for what's going
02:11on. They look at monitoring equipment. Is it faulty? Is there something going wrong with
02:16the administration of the medicines?
02:20Then, people start to die.
02:29Of course, when people go into hospital, almost by definition, they are ill or about to undergo
02:35a medical or a surgical procedure. But many of the patients who died were not at the end
02:42of their lives. Many of them were relatively young.
02:46Once is suspicious. Twice is a little bit more suspicious. A dozen times, something's up.
03:01My name's Stephen Wright. I'm associate editor at the Daily Mail newspaper, and I cover crime
03:08and investigations. I've covered some of the biggest crime cases both in the UK and abroad.
03:16Normally, I get attracted to stories which involve some degree of scandal. The police were called
03:22in to investigate, because people were dying. And it was a mystery. A big mystery.
03:31I know that from talking to my contacts in Great Manchester Police, such was the concern that
03:37this was out of control. The idea was even contemplated that they'd shut down the hospital.
03:45The scale of the crisis forces Greater Manchester Police to call in Detective Superintendent Simon
03:53Barraclough to lead an investigation into the unexpected collapses.
03:59We didn't know why people were becoming ill. We didn't know the source of that illness.
04:04So, in other words, whether somebody was actually deliberately in the hospital poisoning patients.
04:09What was actually happening was happening within the hospital on two of the very busiest wards
04:14in the hospital. What stood out really about these episodes is that people were coming in for all types of
04:23illnesses.
04:24It wasn't a particular person or a particular age group.
04:28The police start to investigate individual patient files.
04:38Josephine Walsh was a 72-year-old woman. She had suffered from a chronic lung condition.
04:44But a treatable one and was thought to be getting better when she was taken ill.
04:51She's given a saline bag to help rehydrate her.
04:56Using bags of saline to keep people hydrated are absolutely standard practice on every ward.
05:04There are many patients who are unable to drink, either because they're unwell or because they're about to have
05:10or have recently had surgery. It is absolutely standard. If you walk into pretty much any adult hospital ward,
05:18whether it's a surgical or a medical one, you will see numerous patients hooked up to intravenous bags of saline.
05:26But Josephine's saline bag doesn't offer rehydration. Instead, she describes a terrifying feeling of sudden decline.
05:38She gave a very graphic description of how she felt she was dying, how she could not believe the symptoms
05:48she was suffering, feeling dizzy.
05:49And her blood sugar levels had gone way down.
05:54The normal times that we see severe levels of what we call hypoglycemia or low blood sugar are among people
06:01using insulin as a treatment.
06:04Usually people with type 1 diabetes, sometimes people with type 2 diabetes need insulin as well.
06:11Josephine doesn't have diabetes and does not need insulin.
06:16Mercifully, when she did come round, someone gave her some leucosate, something as simple as that,
06:22to get her sugar levels back up and quite possibly save her life.
06:26But her statement gave a really harrowing account of what it was like,
06:31the agonizing feelings that you had as the saline drips were taking effect in her body.
06:40The medical anomaly in these cases is the discovery of severe hypoglycemia in patients who aren't diabetic.
06:50How does insulin come to be in bags of saline?
06:55And that shifts the focus of the investigation into a contaminated product.
07:01We have to look at access. Access not just to the patients, but also to the bags of saline.
07:07And that will shift the focus of the investigation away from specific illnesses that individual patients might have had,
07:15to the contaminated product itself.
07:18And Josephine is the first of many hypoglycemic attacks on wards A1 and A3.
07:29Grant Missel was just 41 years old and he'd come in with an overdose.
07:34Now, he was expected to make a full recovery and he'd just been kept in for observation.
07:41When he did arrive at the hospital, he was examined and treated with the saline drip.
07:47Mr. Missel was to suffer life-changing brain damage as a result of that interaction.
07:54And this very wealthy, successful man was warned he would never be the same again.
08:02On admission, Grant is seen by a male nurse, Victorino Chua.
08:07His comments in the patient's notes provide a profound contradiction,
08:15entirely dismissing Grant's critical state and raising immediate questions about his intent.
08:22Grant Missel is exhibiting all the signs of a hypoglycemic attack, but Victorino writes up his notes as the patient
08:33is settled,
08:34the patient is calm and doesn't draw attention to the clear medical emergency in front of him.
08:56As the investigation intensifies, the chaos on wards A1 and A3 only grows.
09:04Steping Hill Hospital is desperate to pinpoint the source of the patient collapses.
09:10But the truth remains hidden.
09:15There was no sign of this trend, this very worrying trend ending.
09:25And obviously a situation of deep, deep concern.
09:30I don't think at that stage people in the authorities contemplated the idea that a nurse charged with caring for
09:44people could be setting out to cause complete mayhem.
09:48Over the course of the next just five weeks there are more than 20 incidents of people seeming to suffer
09:55from unexplained insulin overdosing.
09:59And in fact there are two deaths as a result of these incidents in that period.
10:05Tracey Arden was a woman who was 44 years of age when she was admitted to Stepping Hill in the
10:13summer of 2011.
10:14She was a sufferer of multiple sclerosis.
10:18She wouldn't have had a long life expectancy.
10:22Nevertheless, she was not expected to die that year in hospital.
10:32Shortly after Tracey's death, another patient, Derek Weaver, follows the same pattern.
10:39Weaver was in his early 80s who suffered from a chronic lung condition when he was admitted to hospital.
10:49Unfortunately, in this case, because of the impact of the low blood sugar on his body's ability to fight off
10:55the infection,
10:56he died not directly as a result of the low blood sugar, but indirectly as a result of the effect
11:02that that had on his body's ability to fight the bacterial infection that he'd come in with.
11:13The day after Derek Weaver's death, a nurse on ward A1 notices a critical detail.
11:21Five weeks after this outbreak has started, on the 11th of July 2011, we have a young nurse about to
11:30administer a saline drip.
11:32When she notices that the saline appears to be foamy, frothy, which it shouldn't be.
11:42They immediately reported this, and it was as a result of that that it was discovered that that sample had
11:48been tampered with.
11:52She can smell the disinfectant type aroma of artificial insulin.
12:00The nurse immediately informs the senior staff, and an investigation of all the medicines in the treatment rooms is immediately
12:08carried out.
12:09The sense of fear that people have about what's happening on the wards provides the killer with a great deal
12:18of psychological satisfaction.
12:20The killer must understand that they are the cause of what is happening, but are unidentified.
12:30That gives to them a sense of power, a sense of control, and also an imperceptible sense of being unimpeachable.
12:41And, of course, what that does is feed into the killer's narcissism, the need to be the centre of attention,
12:49the need to be the person that everybody's talking about.
12:52The medical team immediately went on to examine other ampules and intravenous bags,
12:59and discovered that many of them, too, had been tampered with and contaminated, mostly with insulin.
13:09Those bags are plastic, and they are relatively easy, because they're plastic, of course, to get a needle, to inject
13:16a needle into,
13:17in order to contaminate them with something else.
13:27The police arrive at Stepping Hill Hospital.
13:30Their investigation, called Operation Roxburgh, begins.
13:35The moment Operation Roxburgh was set up, everything at the hospital changed.
13:40CCTV was set up at the entrance.
13:43It was set up in the treatment rooms, at the drug storage rooms.
13:47Everybody was under constant monitoring.
13:51And more saline bags are found to have been contaminated.
13:55On discovery of 19 contaminated saline ampules in the treatment resource room, CCTV is put into place,
14:08and the medications are kept under much higher levels of security, as the police try to establish what's going on.
14:17Clearly, there's a climate of fear and suspicion, and it becomes apparent that there is wrongdoing going on,
14:24that this is no longer being treated as some kind of technical or scientific problem.
14:32Somebody is deliberately causing harm.
14:38After these bags have been found to be contaminated, the police look at others.
14:43And we discover that it's not just saline bags that are being contaminated.
14:49A bag of metronidazole, which is an antibiotic used to treat severe infections,
14:54has also been contaminated with insulin.
14:57And another bag has been contaminated with lidocaine, which is used as a local anaesthetic,
15:02but which can also cause abnormal heart rhythms and can be potentially fatal.
15:11Other nurses carrying out their normal activities were putting people at risk
15:16without any knowledge that they were doing so.
15:19Nurses were being accompanied by security guards doing their job in July of 2011
15:26because they were so concerned about what was happening.
15:28The whole organisation was in real danger of falling apart.
15:35Access was restricted to even intravenous saline,
15:40which normally you'd never think of as something that you would need to look carefully about,
15:46that you would need to pay close attention to.
15:50So everybody is going to be suspecting everybody else and worrying about the impact,
15:56not just on each other, but of course also on patients.
16:00Police launch a methodical, painstaking search for clues.
16:05They must now systematically dissect the entire operation, patient by patient, shift by shift.
16:14The police do a meticulous and detailed cross-referencing of all the hypoglycemic incidents
16:20that have occurred in the hospital and monitor the shift patterns of more than 4,000 staff.
16:26The investigating team set about looking at every episode that they could find of hypoglycemia,
16:32low blood sugar, and cross-referenced all of those episodes with which staff were on duty.
16:39That must have been a horrible time for all the staff worrying whether they might come under suspicion.
16:44The police's investigation leads to one particular name, Rebecca Layton.
16:51Her fingerprint is found on a saline bag that the police suspect was contaminated.
16:58Very early on in this investigation, the police presented some evidence which gave cause for concern
17:03sufficient enough for her to be charged, not with murder but with causing criminal damage
17:09which engages people's lives, i.e. potentially damaging the saline drips.
17:15Rebecca Layton is remanded in Stile Prison.
17:19There was some pressure to deal with this from a police perspective as early as possible.
17:25And that meant, not cutting corners, it meant that when they became aware, as they did,
17:30of somebody who was perhaps involved in nothing overly criminal but some kind of criminal activity,
17:39the suspicion fell on this particular person.
17:42And then, sadly, the police's role was to try and find as much evidence against her
17:46without thinking there might be somebody else at work here.
17:50In arresting and prosecuting Rebecca Layton, you see the police almost forced into making a decision
17:58when there simply isn't the evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to make that prosecution.
18:05And what does the arrest of Rebecca Layton do for the killer psychologically?
18:10Well, it makes him feel unimpeachable. It makes him feel even more powerful, even more in control.
18:19After six weeks in prison, all charges against her are dropped.
18:24There was no evidence. She was the poisoner.
18:28Thankfully, after six weeks, I'd come to the conclusion there wasn't enough evidence against her,
18:34dropped the case against her.
18:35She was very vocal and later successfully sued Great Manchester Police.
18:40The police later pay Rebecca Layton 53,000 pounds to settle out of court for breach of privacy and negligence.
18:51I mean, that was really a sensational development and increased the interest level in the case,
18:58you know, a proper crime mystery.
19:00Who was it?
19:01The attacker was still at large.
19:15There was urgency and that urgency was such that ultimately the wrong person was suspected initially.
19:27It must have been horrible for all the staff left behind when a colleague with whom they'd worked regularly
19:33and may well have liked and trusted was arrested.
19:37Suddenly, they were left shaken, but almost more shaken,
19:40when it then becomes apparent that she didn't commit these crimes and is released
19:46because the staff will then have realised that actually they've spent the last six weeks still living and working with
19:55the culprit.
19:56A murderer has been among their midst all that time, even when they thought they had been caught.
20:09After Rebecca's release, a quiet calm settles over Stepping Hill.
20:13The attacks stopped, but only for a time.
20:18By that time, the medical store cupboards had a lot more security around them,
20:24which meant that whoever it was who was believed to be contaminating medical products
20:32wouldn't have such easy access should the killer, the attacker,
20:38wish to continue their spree, have to find a new method.
20:47Everything seems to be getting back to normal at Stepping Hill Hospital,
20:53until the night when Victorino Chua gets into an argument with the daughter of one elderly patient that he's looking
21:02after.
21:0586-year-old Maria Pavlijan is admitted to Ward A3 after suffering a suspected mild heart attack.
21:13The nurse who looked after Grant Mizzle is on shift.
21:18Victorino Chua.
21:19Her daughter who gets into an argument with Victorino over the suggestion from another doctor that her mother needs a
21:31heart monitor.
21:32And Victorino sulkily throws a heart monitor without a plug at the patient.
21:38The daughter, in fury, argues with Victorino.
21:44The next morning, her prescription charts are found to have been altered and not even very well altered.
21:51It's pretty crude.
21:53On careful examination, it turns out that she's not the only one.
21:58And in fact, the prescription charts of five other female patients have also been clumsily altered.
22:08Altering prescription charts can be deadly.
22:13In hospital, patients will have a prescription chart which will give medications that they are to be given regularly,
22:19along with how they're to be given, the dose they're to be given, how often they're to be given, and
22:24so on.
22:25And drugs which are to be given as needed.
22:28So for instance, painkillers, which may be needed and given as required.
22:32Those prescriptions are all checked against each other.
22:35So if a prescription chart has been changed and nobody notices,
22:38then the patient may well be given something by the nurses completely unknowingly,
22:44which could do them harm or even kill them.
22:47Who on earth would want to do that?
22:50What's interesting is that there is a sudden, and for me quite a clumsy change in MO.
22:57You know, Chua stops using insulin and starts to change prescription charts.
23:03Now that's actually quite clumsy.
23:05It's clumsy because it's quite easy to ultimately work out who it was that changed the prescription chart.
23:13We could speculate that he's doing that because he feels omnipotent.
23:18He feels as if he's never going to be uncovered.
23:21Or we can interpret that as simply he becomes more desperate.
23:25He becomes more desperate and therefore is trying anything to cover the tracks
23:31that would have led investigators to his door.
23:35Six elderly patients, including Maria Parflagen, are lucky to survive.
23:42Given the severity, the matter is immediately referred to the police.
23:47So the police are called in again and this time they draw up a Venn diagram of all the nurses
23:54on shift the night before.
23:56All of this pointing to only one common denominator, Victorina Chua.
24:07After emigrating from the Philippines, Victorina Chua joined Stepping Hill Hospital in 2009.
24:17Shua was born in the Philippines, Manila in 1965.
24:23He was one of six children, born to a couple.
24:29He had what we in the UK would regard probably as quite a poor background.
24:34His father had died when he was only 19 or 20 and that had affected him badly.
24:41But I think one of his relatives had encouraged him to become a nurse.
24:48And he went to a respected local nursing college, the Metropolitan Hospital Nursing College.
24:57And then he went to another nursing college called the Galang Nursing College,
25:04which was a very notorious nursing college because of the poor academic records there and the finances.
25:12And he did qualify as a nurse at the Galang.
25:16And he was spending about three pounds a day as a nurse.
25:21And he was married and had two children who he was supporting.
25:28In 2002, Victorino answers a newspaper advert to work in a UK care home.
25:36That's not remotely unusual.
25:38There are a huge number of nurses from the Philippines working in the NHS.
25:44And I have to say, having worked with many of them myself,
25:47my experience is that the NHS would fall apart without them.
25:54Victorino works in a number of care homes and seems to get on initially fairly well to adjust fairly well
26:01and be well liked in these care homes.
26:05Victorino, however, is prone to falling out with people.
26:09I think he has that kind of superficial, gentle personality.
26:14But underneath it all, there is a burning anger which does come to the surface.
26:22And we hear about him leaving care homes in dispute when there have been arguments, disputes with other workers.
26:31You've got to have professionalism and any explosions of ill temper would be really bad for patients.
26:38But they're also going to be extremely bad for the morale of the team.
26:54Victorino Chua secures a job at Stepping Hill Hospital, despite management being made aware of his volatile temper.
27:04He seems to be getting on well in his role as a nurse.
27:08But even now, actually Victorino is experiencing anger issues.
27:15He did not like those who managed him.
27:17He did not like the hospital authorities.
27:20He felt that he should be allowed to just get on with his job.
27:24Maybe in part he was upset about the fact that he wasn't being promoted, that he'd been turned down for
27:30promotion.
27:32And so he did not care who was held responsible for the things that he was doing.
27:38Because ultimately, senior managers would take the flack.
27:41And we know that he's actually seeing a therapist for this anger.
27:45And there is just some bits of information that come out from that therapeutic interaction.
27:52Victorino's therapist offers a simple outlet for his frustration.
27:57His therapist, fairly common practice, recommended that in order to find an outlet for his frustration and his anger,
28:06he writes down his feelings.
28:09I don't know when I really become a nurse.
28:14My grandmother suggested it.
28:16It's full of details about Victorino's feelings, about his early life.
28:21It's full of feelings of anger towards his colleagues.
28:28Work also don't help.
28:30Colleagues are bullies.
28:32The nurses, the healthcare assistants, they're all scared of the nurse in charge.
28:42Chua comes across to me as one of those people who are real grievance collectors.
28:49He's fueled by resentment.
28:51He sees himself as undervalued.
28:54He sees himself as having been overlooked for promotion.
28:57He sees himself as much more competent than the role that he plays within the hospital.
29:05And grievance collectors often are very self-righteous.
29:10And that self-righteousness seems to me to be what fuels a lot of his behaviour within the hospital.
29:18He's trying to extract revenge on those people who didn't recognise his worth.
29:24And, of course, that kind of righteous slaughter becomes the outgrowth of that resentment.
29:33Now, interestingly, the people who worked with him say that he was good to work with, that they enjoyed working
29:40with him, that he was friendly.
29:41But there are reports that he was prone to violent outbursts of temper, and particularly when his ability or his
29:49self-esteem were challenged.
29:51Now, I know from my own research that grievance collectors are often prone to violent outbursts.
30:01But, you know, violent outbursts in themselves are not evidence of a crime having been committed.
30:09And, therefore, the challenge for authorities is that they might be able to hone in on Chua.
30:16But can they find definitive evidence that would prove that he was the killer?
30:36Based on the evidence, police discover that Victorino Chua is the common denominator in all the collapses.
30:44He's arrested at his home on January the 5th, 2012.
30:51While they're there, the police search his home, and they find the bitter nurse confession, which, frankly, was a real
30:58smoking gun.
31:01I wrote the letter so that people, or the whole world, would know who I am, of who really I
31:14am.
31:15There's a devil inside me. Some of these things I will take to my grave.
31:19Clearly, he's talking about what he's guilty of there.
31:21But he also talks a lot about his colleagues.
31:25Now, some of them he says are okay, but some of them he describes as nasty bitches.
31:33The angel becomes the evil one.
31:46The bitter nurse confession.
31:54He sees himself as an angel who's turned into an evil person, but essentially an angel.
32:01This is a person who does not really blame himself.
32:05He's so used to attributing blame to other people.
32:10How many nurses write a document where they compare themselves to the devil?
32:15I'm pretty sure that I may not have a long life, but I'm pretty sure I go straight to hell.
32:26No question about that.
32:29It seems to be some kind of confession for all the incidents and murders that have taken place in the
32:36hospital.
32:39I find the bitter nurse confession that Chua writes a kind of fascinating piece of evidence.
32:49It quite consciously tries to construct a narrative about the evil inside the angel,
32:56but it also constructs a narrative which really shows, I think, more than anything,
33:02the narcissism that we're dealing with in relation to Chua.
33:06You know, the bitter nurse confession is about me, me, me, and it's serving a purpose for him.
33:15And that purpose is that we will always remember that confession
33:19as opposed to remembering the people that he killed.
33:22The confession is damning, but detectives know they need ironclad forensic proof to secure a conviction.
33:31The investigation moves to the interview room where Victorina Chua is brought in for questioning.
33:44This blood test was later analysed and found to contain lactose glargine.
33:50That's a synthetic insulin, pharmaceutical insulin.
33:56How did this insulin get into?
34:00Good comment.
34:04The police describe Victorina Chua as a narcissistic psychopath.
34:09Now, interestingly, psychopath is not actually a medical term,
34:13but it's often used to describe somebody who doesn't live within the norms of society
34:19and who doesn't have any empathy or remorse.
34:23It's closely linked with sociopathy.
34:27That's otherwise known as antisocial personality disorder.
34:31And people who have antisocial personality disorder
34:34don't have any empathy for other people.
34:36They don't get inside, they don't have any feelings, they don't care for anybody.
34:42They only care for themselves.
34:44They don't have a sense of right and wrong.
34:48Chua refuses to cooperate with the police.
34:51A very senior police officer was trying to persuade me to charge Chua
34:56on the basis of what little evidence they had at that time.
34:59And I was pushing back, saying there isn't enough evidence.
35:04And eventually, after several hours of discussions,
35:09I was able to persuade him that we're on the same side.
35:13We want to convict the man who has caused these deaths and this harm.
35:19But to charge him now prematurely would ultimately lead to him being found not guilty.
35:25And you would not get the justice and the victims would not get this justice.
35:30Because of the huge numbers of opportunities that he would have had to poison people
35:37and to put their well-being at risk, there was a vast police investigation.
35:44It was incredibly complex.
35:47There were almost 3,300 witness statements taken
35:52and almost 5,300 items entered into evidence.
35:57The sheer complexity of this was mind-boggling.
36:04While the police operation continues, journalist Stephen Wright is also investigating Victorino Chua.
36:13I got a call from my office saying that there had been what was perceived to be a significant arrest
36:19in the Stepping Hill poisoning case.
36:22I was asked, or told, shall I say, to get the first plane to the Philippines the next day.
36:29My boss wanted me to try and find out what I could about this man.
36:37I established very soon in my inquiries there were very serious doubts about his qualifications and eligibility to be a
36:48nurse.
36:49I was able to make contact with the nursing administrator at Galang who still had Chua's records from nursing college.
36:58They looked like his marks had been amended.
37:01It was highly, highly suspicious.
37:04And police were later to form the opinion that someone might even have sat his nursing exams for him in
37:14the Philippines.
37:17So, as a result of those 10 days of initial inquiries in Manila, I had really grave concerns about his
37:26qualifications,
37:27concerns about forged references, concerns about thieving, which he was accused of at the hospital from patients.
37:40I got back to the UK and was put in touch with the senior officer from the Great Manchester Police
37:47on the investigation.
37:49I took the decision that it was in the public interest for me to hand over my dossier.
37:58At the same time, the CCTV at the hospital is also meticulously trolled by the police.
38:06Chua is seen handling saline bags shortly before victims fall ill.
38:12The way in which she killed people was to contaminate bags either of saline or ampoules
38:17and to inject usually insulin into those.
38:22We identified 42 patients who we believed had suffered from those low blood sugar levels
38:29and we started an investigation around each of those 42 patients.
38:34Now, over the course of the time, that was distilled down to 21 victims who we felt we could prove
38:41to a court were indeed poisoned.
38:46Chua engages in what I would call a kind of medical game of Russian roulette.
38:51You know, by tampering with the saline bags, he allows his colleagues to use those contaminated saline bags on their
39:02patients.
39:02And that, of course, directs the finger of blame away from Chua and onto his colleagues.
39:10Nonetheless, he's still in control.
39:12He's still powerful.
39:13He's still manipulating.
39:15But it also reveals what he feels about his colleagues, which is much the same as he believed about his
39:23patients.
39:23He's indifferent to them.
39:25He doesn't see them as equals.
39:27He merely sees them as props within a game that he's playing,
39:33a game which is seeking to exact revenge on those authorities that did not give him the promotions that he
39:41felt he was due.
39:42By 2015, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service are confident in their case against Chua.
39:52An inquiry like this, it's like a jigsaw puzzle.
39:55And you have to put all the pieces together.
39:58And once you do that, the picture becomes clear.
40:02In this case, his presence on the ward, his animosity towards the hospital, his feelings about himself,
40:08the fact that he had access to the saline trips, the fact that he was working on those wars,
40:13the fact that he tampered with the records, the fact that he denied responsibility,
40:17that he tried to blame other people, you put all that together,
40:21and you've got a picture of somebody really at work here.
40:30So we had opportunity, we had methods.
40:33What we didn't have was him actually doing something that brought attention to him
40:39as somebody that was ready to harm somebody.
40:41And these records, the tampering of these records were, in effect, a smoking gun.
40:50He could put on somebody's medical record that they required three times the level of insulin
40:55that normal people would require.
40:57So he began to tamper with records, which meant that he himself didn't have to administer the fatal dose
41:02or the nearly fatal dose.
41:05Somebody else would do the same.
41:07The court is also presented with Chua's bitter nurse confession.
41:14He argued in his defense that it was just the ramblings of a sad man who was alone.
41:21We were arguing that you can't just take the letter on its own.
41:25You have to take the letter with everything else that we know about the man,
41:28that this was in part the motivation for this guy and why he might have done that.
41:37And the letter helped us in identifying what the why was, why he might have done this.
41:51On the 18th of May 2015, following three weeks of careful deliberation, the jury finally reaches a verdict.
42:04Of course, in the back of your mind, you're thinking, well, you know, you've invested an enormous amount of time
42:08in this.
42:09You also want to ensure that, most importantly, justice is done.
42:13There are victims and victims' families who are looking to you for closure or some form of closure.
42:19And it's out of your hands.
42:21It's in the hands of 12 members of the jury, who I think were out for 11 days.
42:25And as the days go by, whilst they're out considering their verdict, you are less sure of yourself.
42:33And, um, it was an immense relief when they came back with the guilty verdicts.
42:39Shua is found guilty of the murder of Derek Weaver and Tracy Arden,
42:44the poisoning of 19 other patients, and the attempted poisoning of seven more.
42:52The families of those poor victims have had to deal with the fact that their loved ones
42:58had their lives taken by junior nurses with dubious qualifications,
43:06who played God effectively around when he decided they should die.
43:12The judge was damning of Shua, jailing him for a minimum of 35 years,
43:21calling him, you know, a truly wicked person.
43:26No motive is ever established for his crimes beyond his history of anger and resentment.
43:34My opinion is that, uh, he's a narcissistic psychopath and an attention seeker
43:48who had complex mental health issues, but at his root was an evil, wicked person,
43:55who enjoyed and took sadistic pleasure out of seeing people suffer agonising deaths or near-death experiences.
44:10In my experience, serial killers don't just stop of their own accord.
44:17They have to be stopped.
44:20They might be stopped by being arrested and incarcerated for some other crimes,
44:26or they might be stopped because eventually enough evidence is found so as to convict them.
44:33And that I've got no doubt that if Victor Shua hadn't been stopped,
44:39he would have killed again and again and again.
44:46Shua was manipulative, very, very cold.
44:49He didn't care who was harmed.
44:52He didn't care how they were harmed or how seriously they were harmed.
44:55He didn't care who did the harming because at the end of the day,
44:58somebody else would be attaching the saline drip or giving the medication.
45:02So he was prepared to put other people in harm's way.
45:05Other people potentially could have been prosecuted for their acts, despite it being innocent.
45:12How on earth was this allowed to happen?
45:15What mistakes were made? What plunders were made?
45:17Why was he able to contaminate these saline bags?
45:21Why was he able to carry out these murderous attacks?
45:26A lot of unanswered questions.
45:28So many issues haven't been resolved.
45:31Questions remain unanswered.
45:33People got away with it.
45:34People allowed him to get a job in the NHS when he shouldn't have done.
45:38There hasn't been true accountability, one could argue.
45:50Although new safeguards are now in place,
45:53the tightened regulations offer little comfort to the victims' families,
45:58whose lives remain forever changed by Chua's murderous spree at Stepping Hill.
46:05Thanks for listening.
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