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00:10I'm David Wilson, Emeritus Professor of Criminology, and for over 30 years I've
00:17investigated the phenomenon 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 signs
00:35and red flags. In this new series, I investigate some of the UK's most harrowing murder cases
00:46to understand how and why these terrible crimes occur.
00:55This is Murder UK.
01:24In 1994, in Bordsley Green in Birmingham, Eric Lloyd is being nursed by his Filipino partner,
01:33Marie Wiston. She's a nurse and they live together in his home.
01:41Eric Lloyd was eight years older than Marie.
01:48On the surface, it looks like this gentle nurse is taking care of an ill man and looking after
02:00him. I mean, nursing would have been just the most natural profession for somebody with
02:09Marie's personality.
02:13I was a medical student and I supported myself through medical school by working as a nursing
02:20assistant in a psychogeriatric hospital where I was surrounded by nurses from the Philippines.
02:28There was a huge influx of nurses from the Philippines around about that time.
02:33They were incredibly devoted, but they also worked very, very long hours.
02:39So if Eric knew that Marie was a nurse, he might have thought that she would be both excellent
02:46at caring and also very, very grateful to have him to care for her financially.
02:59Eric's medical records show that early on in his relationship with Marie, he suffers two mystery
03:06health scares, both ending in a hospital emergency room.
03:13Shortly after getting together with Eric, Eric is rushed to hospital on two separate occasions,
03:19suffering from excess insulin in his blood.
03:23Doctors are stunned. Eric isn't diabetic, so why would he have insulin in his system?
03:30The only way to have too much insulin is if you're given too much insulin, then your blood sugar can
03:37drop through the floor.
03:38In the early stages, that can lead to feeling hungry, feeling generally unwell, feeling lightheaded,
03:44possibly having blurred vision, feeling irritable and angry.
03:48As time goes on with a more severe episode of hypoglycemia, you can become disorientated,
03:54you can act very oddly, you can become confused, you can collapse, you can have seizures.
03:59And in extreme cases, it can cause abnormal heart rhythms and even death.
04:06Since Eric wasn't diabetic, the critical question is obvious.
04:13Did his own partner and nurse, Marie Wiston, deliberately inject him with insulin?
04:25It is not something you take without knowing it. You can't eat insulin.
04:30If you take insulin in oral form, then it doesn't get absorbed into your system.
04:34So it needs to be given by injection.
04:40Eric knows that that just isn't possible. He hasn't been injecting insulin.
04:45So what sense can he make of this? And does he suspect Marie?
04:52And yet he remains with her.
04:54I think that, quite simply, Eric Lloyd needs Marie at this stage.
05:13Two years on from his two health scares, Eric seems to have recovered until one day, the inexplicable illness strikes
05:22again.
05:25Marie was working a night shift at the hospital.
05:28She came home from work and found Eric dead.
05:39An unexplained, unexpected death.
05:44Eric's death appears to be from natural causes, but not everyone agrees.
05:50One former police officer in particular, Stephanie Stevens, begins to harbour serious doubt.
06:00I was working as a coroner's officer for the West Midlands Police.
06:06If emergency services are called if there's a sudden death, then usually it would be the ambulance service who arrive
06:13first.
06:13It might be the police service who arrive first, depending on the circumstances.
06:18If they have concerns, any concerns, they are required to inform the coroner's service.
06:23And the coroner's assistant will be informed.
06:27And on this occasion, the coroner's assistant, Stephanie Stevens, actually attended the scene.
06:35I always remember it was a Friday and it was about midday.
06:40I had a phone call from a GP who said that one of her patients had died and it was
06:47unexpected.
06:48And she obviously needed to refer to the coroner.
06:53I went out, went to the house in Belchers Lane, Borsley Green, in Birmingham, which is right opposite to Heartland
07:03Hospital.
07:05Heartland Hospital is where Marie works.
07:09Marie opened the door wearing her nurse's uniform.
07:13I went upstairs, walked past a very pretty bedroom, which was obviously her room, walked into his bedroom and he
07:23was lying across the bed.
07:24Very, very sparse bedroom, just a bed and a set of drawers.
07:32And he was dead, obviously.
07:35So I examined the body, very, very cold.
07:37He'd be dead for a long, long time.
07:40And immediately, Stephanie is concerned and suspicious.
07:45That is entirely due to Marie Wiston's reactions.
07:52I was met by a woman dressed in a nurse's uniform.
07:57Straight away, I was just like, this is really weird, because it was midday.
08:02And why...
08:05Why had she only just reported it?
08:08I went downstairs to speak to her.
08:11And I said, why are you still in your uniform?
08:15And she said, well, I've just finished nights.
08:20I said, this is midday.
08:22Well, I went out to the shops.
08:27My first impression of Marie Wiston was that she was lying.
08:33She was absolutely lying.
08:37But it is Marie's unusual way of grieving that strikes Stephanie Stevens as most suspicious.
08:44She was trying to cry, but there was no tears.
08:48And she was looking out the corner of her eyes to see if I was looking.
08:54And I was looking.
08:55And I could tell that she was lying.
08:59Marie Wiston appeared to be very upset, but she felt that her tears were crocodile tears.
09:06She felt that her concern and her upset was totally false.
09:11If you don't mind me doing this, this is what she was doing.
09:18Trying to cry, but not letting me see.
09:24And I was just, there's something really weird about you.
09:34What Stephanie Stevens seemed to be picking up on is that Marie Wiston was performing grief, almost as if she
09:43was conforming to a script.
09:46That it wasn't authentic.
09:47It wasn't emotional.
09:49It wasn't grief.
09:51You know, grief is overwhelming.
09:54Grief is all-encompassing.
09:56And you can't, therefore, switch it on or switch it off again, depending on who's watching you and how they
10:03are reacting to you being in grief.
10:06So I think that's quite interesting that what Marie Wiston seemed to do was perform a script as opposed to
10:13actually having those genuine feelings.
10:16Marie also seems unusually anxious for Eric to be cremated as soon as possible.
10:23Stephanie also was very concerned that Marie Wiston appeared obsessed with finding out when and whether Eric could be cremated.
10:35All she said was, I want him cremated. I need him cremated straight away.
10:40Now, of course, Stephanie Stevens, with her experience with the coroner's office, would have been very aware that a post
10:48-mortem is impossible once a patient has been cremated.
10:51And, of course, there is no chance of going back to look for further evidence.
10:57And straight away, I got this instinct that she was trying to hide something.
11:06Cremation is probably the ultimate form of destroying forensic evidence.
11:12You are literally burning the body and, therefore, any toxins within the body, any physical marks on the body are
11:20immediately going to be destroyed because, of course, the body will be burned.
11:24And, therefore, pushing in the way that Marie Wiston did for an early cremation is again going to raise suspicions
11:32in the same way that her performance of grief had raised suspicions.
11:37This was, frankly, another red flag.
11:41So she then does some looking around. She is suspicious enough that she looks around the scene.
11:48She noticed that Eric had vomited, that there was a pool of vomit.
11:53Now, this would be very unusual if a patient had simply had a cardiac arrest.
12:12If a death is reported to the coroner, then it's the coroner's job, or them and their coroner's assistant, to
12:19decide whether there are any suspicious circumstances.
12:22If they do feel that there may be suspicious circumstances, they don't have to have proof at this stage, but
12:29if they feel there may be suspicious circumstances, then, firstly, they will report it to the police.
12:35They will decide whether a forensic post-mortem, taking much, much more careful note of what's going on, will happen.
12:43And, of course, they can decide that a death certificate, which will allow the release of the body, should not
12:51happen.
12:54So we took the body back to the mortuary.
12:57The post-mortem was done the very same afternoon.
13:02Despite the post-mortem, Eric's sudden death remains unexplained.
13:09The pathologist called me, this would be now about half past three, and said, I can't find a cause of
13:16death.
13:17So I've taken stomach contents, blood and urine, as we normally do.
13:23And we took all those contents, obviously because we've got no cause of death.
13:28Stephanie Stevens was suspicious, and there is no question that she was going to allow this to proceed to cremation
13:36without looking into it further, no matter how much Marie Whiston wanted it.
13:42There was no way I was letting it go. No way at all.
13:47Police determine they must uncover more about the background of Marie Whiston.
13:53Marie Whiston grew up in the Philippines, which is an extremely poor country.
13:59A lot of people there either live in very rural locations or an awful lot of them in the capital
14:04of Manila, which is very overcrowded and very, very poor.
14:09She marries very young, which is not unusual there.
14:1218-year-old Marie Whiston in the Philippines marries a man who, unbeknownst to her, is actually a violent alcoholic.
14:24She then flees the Philippines and comes to the United Kingdom.
14:31Once in England, Marie trains to become a nurse.
14:35If you met her, she would seem the most caring and gentle of people.
14:42To go into nursing was a fairly obvious career choice.
14:47There was a television program around about that time called Angels, and there was very much a feeling that nurses
14:54were, in some respect, angels.
14:56There they were in the caring profession, looking after other people.
15:00It would have allowed her a very different lifestyle, if you like, compared to what she'd had.
15:07She wasn't dependent on anybody as she had been in the Philippines.
15:11It would have allowed her financial independence.
15:14And that would have been enormously important for her.
15:17But it would also have given her social status because of the high regard in which nurses were held.
15:24And that would have been, I suspect, very appealing to her.
15:28Now settled in England, Marie decides to remarry.
15:33In 1973, Marie then meets and unmarries Robert Whiston.
15:39Coming to the UK as an immigrant and fleeing the kind of violent marriage at such a young age that
15:46she did,
15:47she will have felt very exposed and vulnerable.
15:51But over time and through meeting Robert, she becomes more established, she has children, she goes into the nursing profession
16:00and puts down roots in England.
16:04Serial monogamy is a survival strategy, especially for people who feel exposed or vulnerable in some way.
16:13And so quickly marrying one partner after another is to give that person a sense of security, a sense of
16:21safety.
16:22The relationship, in other words, isn't emotional, it's transactional.
16:27If that security no longer is forthcoming, then that person will quickly move on to the next partner.
16:35So serial monogamy is an interesting pattern in how Marie Whiston behaves throughout her life.
16:43But Marie holds a profound secret, one she's desperate to keep away from her new husband.
16:50They went on a holiday to the Philippines.
16:54We don't know if he'd had any suspicions before, but while he was there, it appears his suspicions were very
17:00much aroused that she might still be married to her abusive and alcoholic first husband.
17:10It's actually a bigamous marriage. She remains married to the violent alcoholic husband in the Philippines.
17:19The bigamy, I think, is just something that she felt she had to do to survive, even if that means
17:26committing bigamy.
17:27And when Robert discovers this, things turn nasty.
17:34He married a gentleman called Robert Whiston.
17:38They had, I think, two children.
17:41But eventually the marriage broke down in rather acrimonious circumstances.
17:48There was a big battle over the custody of the children.
17:51And in the end, it was Robert Whiston who was awarded the custody of the two children.
17:57Robert was given care and control of their children, in other words, effectively full custody.
18:01But I think it would have been very unusual for a father to be given full custody, especially when their
18:08mother was a nurse.
18:10So why does the judge refuse to grant custody to the children's mother, Marie?
18:16There's talk of Marie trying to set fire to Robert.
18:21Somehow the judge is picking up on something unstable, erratic, untrustworthy, lying beneath the apparently placid and gentle demeanor that
18:36Marie is presenting.
18:38And I think this is the first time that anybody is picking up on this.
18:43And I think it's here that we get our first indication of the instability and volatility of Marie's personality.
18:57In 1989, Marie makes the acquaintance of former factory worker, Eric Lloyd.
19:04So quite quickly after her marriage to Robert has imploded, Marie meets a car factory worker, Eric Lloyd, who is
19:17not in the best of health.
19:18He and she live together in his house.
19:24Marie very easily falls into a nursing role for him.
19:30Mr. Lloyd had made Mrs. Whiston the beneficiary of his will, and so if he died, then she stood to
19:39inherit a significant sum of money.
19:43But despite being a beneficiary of Eric's will, Marie immediately embarks on another affair.
19:52Her interest in him waned, and eventually she met a gentleman called Mr. Beattie.
20:01And at the time that Eric Lloyd died, Mrs. Whiston was in effect in a relationship with Mr. Beattie.
20:09This new relationship is more than just a passing fancy.
20:14The pair are making plans to start a new life together in Canada.
20:20In fact, she'd been off registering her forthcoming marriage to another man.
20:25She was aiming to elope with him or to go abroad with him and marry him.
20:30And of course, if she'd done that, then she would have missed out on her inheritance from Eric.
20:39So, while with Eric Lloyd, she was also conducting an affair with Mr. Beattie.
20:46I think all the while preparing for that, looking for a means to cash in on her relationship with Eric
20:54Lloyd, knowing that he was not very well.
21:06Of course, when the serial monogamy leads to the end of a relationship, there's often a tipping point.
21:14And sometimes that tipping point, as in this case with Eric, would be because Marie has established that there would
21:21be a better transactional relationship with someone else, in this case with Mr. Beattie in Canada.
21:28She therefore needs to get rid of Eric.
21:31And therefore, the serial monogamy will move on yet again.
21:36It suggests that Eric's murder was a calculated transaction to finalise the past and fund the future.
22:02Stephanie Stevens, the coroner's officer, is sure something's wrong.
22:07And she's not the only one.
22:09Eric Lloyd's family are also certain he didn't die from natural causes.
22:15Just a couple of days after Eric's death, his daughter makes a dramatic accusation.
22:22On a Monday morning, literally as I got to work, knocking at the coroner's door was the daughter saying,
22:30Marie Wiston, my dad's common law wife, I think she has killed him.
22:38So I was like, well, what makes you think that?
22:41She said, well, dad's just changed his will.
22:43Marie is the primary beneficiary of Eric's will.
22:49Then, for an unknown reason, Eric changes his mind.
22:54This threatens the most fundamental thing to Marie.
22:57Marie's survival instinct will have been utterly kicked in by this.
23:03To someone like Marie Wiston, to exclude her from his will will have activated, will have triggered that survival instinct.
23:13Having excluded her from his will, he sealed his fate.
23:17Marie now had both the method and the motive in her hands.
23:27Underneath the placid demeanor, there was always a potential to react to when she needed to survive.
23:37But now things have imploded again and acrimoniously.
23:42She's become something much more strategic, much more dangerous.
23:47She's mutated into somebody much more ruthless.
23:51Somebody who will now do anything to survive.
23:56And I think that that's why very soon after meeting Eric Lloyd, we see her beginning to put into play
24:05a plan to murder him.
24:13Marie appears to have a motive.
24:15But which method did she use?
24:18The two mystery insulin overdoses that Eric suffered earlier in their relationship are the key clue.
24:25It seems very likely, given that Eric firstly said he'd never taken insulin.
24:31Secondly, had no reason to because there's no suggestion that he wanted to harm himself.
24:35And thirdly, wouldn't have had easy access to insulin.
24:38The only person who A had access to insulin and B might have wanted to harm him is Marie.
24:45That very much suggests that she is giving him insulin in order either to harm him or in an attempt
24:53to kill him.
25:02What I believe is, and this is what I told the coroner, is that she'd come home from working her
25:08night shift.
25:10She'd gone out to dispose of the syringe, which we never found.
25:18I actually went round the bins in Borsley Green looking for the syringe, but I never found it.
25:24There was a pond and I even went out into the pond and searched the pond to see if there
25:31was anything in the pond.
25:33Nurses are extremely used to giving injections.
25:36Marie Wiston was an experienced nurse.
25:39While she was working on wards, she would almost certainly have had patients with type 1 diabetes
25:45and she would have been giving them injections if they were incapable of doing it themselves, of giving them injections
25:53of insulin.
25:55So there's no question she knew about the effect that insulin could have.
25:59She knew about the danger of giving too much.
26:10If you give a person who's got a normal hankreas producing a normal amount of insulin,
26:19extra insulin from outside by way of an injection, then that can and will reduce dramatically the amount of sugar
26:30in the blood
26:31and that can lead to death, for example, by heart failure.
26:41In fact, as recently as 2020, there was a review in a medical journal which was sort of asking the
26:48question,
26:48wasn't saying, but was asking the question, is insulin the perfect murder weapon?
26:56But at this stage, Eric's post-mortem shows no signs of foul play.
27:02The police are not convinced Marie is a suspect.
27:07When I informed the police, the police were, no, I don't think there's any evidence.
27:14The coroner backed me and he said, actually said to me,
27:18as a coroner's officer, Stephanie, I trust you, go with your instincts and do what you need to do.
27:27Stephanie returns to Eric's house, determined to find physical proof.
27:33That's when I went back and I cut the carpet up where he'd been sick.
27:39I found a mediswab, which is what you use to pre-inject someone.
27:48Eric was not a man who was taking injections of insulin or anything else, to her knowledge,
27:54and therefore there's no reason for pre-injection swabs to be in the place
27:59if it wasn't that somebody else had been giving him an injection.
28:04As forensic tests are carried out on the vomit-stained carpet,
28:08Marie offers up another explanation for Eric's death.
28:13Suicide.
28:16Marie Whiston was not about to admit murder straight away.
28:21She, perhaps, does the obvious.
28:23When she suspects, maybe, that there isn't going to be a cremation,
28:28and that the insulin might be found, she decides to claim that Eric has committed suicide,
28:34which would, of course, be a way of explaining how he had such high levels of insulin in his body
28:40if she hadn't given it to him.
28:43When Whiston realises that she can't refute the evidence in relation to the presence of insulin in Eric's bloodstream,
28:53she quite clearly tries to manipulate the narrative once more.
28:57She tries to box clever without admitting her own guilt,
29:02and that's why she starts to claim that Eric committed suicide.
29:06She recognises that the police have evidence in relation to the insulin,
29:10and she's simply fabricating a narrative to explain why the insulin might be there.
29:18With the police still unconvinced, it forced a Stephanie to prove that Eric Lloyd died from an insulin overdose.
29:25Now, the best way to show whether you've been given insulin or whether you've produced it naturally
29:32is to use something called C-peptide, which is a natural chemical produced by your body when it's producing insulin.
29:42In the ordinary person, where they've got insulin in their blood that's come from their own pancreas,
29:49there is a known relationship between the amount of insulin and the amount of C-peptide.
29:58And if those two substances are in the normal relationship,
30:03well, that demonstrates that the pancreas is responsible for the insulin that's in the blood.
30:09Where a person is injected with insulin, that injection does not contain any C-peptide.
30:20The manufacturers of insulin don't put C-peptide in it because it's not a substance that has any known use
30:26to the body.
30:29The science is clear. If Eric's blood shows insulin without corresponding C-peptides, it proves the insulin was injected.
30:40But there's a major problem. The blood samples collected from Eric during his post-mortem are compromised and may be
30:48unusable.
30:51The problem was that they weren't acceptable as evidence because the samples were too damaged.
31:00Pathologists took two blood samples at the initial post-mortem.
31:04But by the time those samples came to be examined, they had deteriorated.
31:12What happens is, when somebody dies, the blood coagulates.
31:18So when we were trying to test for what we suspected was an insulin overdose,
31:24bear in mind, Eric Lloyd, the deceased, wasn't a diabetic.
31:29We couldn't test the blood.
31:31The red blood cells within the blood had broken down.
31:36And so the prosecution said that blood really could give no reliable information so far as the presence of incident.
31:46With the blood samples compromised, Stephanie needs a plan B.
31:53Eric Lloyd's first post-mortem was inconclusive.
31:56But Stephanie Stevens was not prepared to give up.
31:59He had a second post-mortem.
32:04I first became involved with the case of Eric Lloyd through the coroner's office.
32:10I knew Stephanie quite well of going to the coroner's office most days of the week.
32:16And she seemed to have an instinct about the case that something wasn't quite right.
32:24There's already been a first post-mortem as a general orgy, so-called coroner's case, where a colleague of mine
32:33had made a preliminary examination and his findings were inconclusive.
32:40There's already been some increasing suspicion about the case was developing through Stephanie Stevens' concerns.
32:50And therefore, it was felt that the home office pathologist should have another look at the body.
33:13To bring a case against Marie, police must prove Eric Lloyd died from an insulin injection.
33:20But there are no signs of a struggle, nor any obvious needle marks on Eric's body.
33:32I was able to really confirm that there was no obvious external injuries.
33:38There was a bruise on the thigh, which possibly may have been related to a needle mark, but could have
33:45occurred through any other trivial incidents.
33:50Methods of estimating insulin are particularly difficult in blood and urine, especially urine, at the time.
33:59So, again, that was difficult.
34:03We were struggling, really, to try and prove or disprove that Mr. Lloyd had an overdose of insulin.
34:16We couldn't test the blood, so the coroner said, well, let's try something else.
34:23So, this is the first time ever in history that we decided to test the urine.
34:29Looking at both the insulin and his C-peptide level, the problem was that the samples were so damaged that
34:36they couldn't be used in evidence.
34:38Now, that left the scientists, the investigators, with only one choice, which was to turn to the urine samples.
34:47What they did was to look at two urine samples that had been taken at the initial post-mortem.
34:57But nobody had ever tested urine before for the presence of insulin and C-peptide.
35:04Ordinarily, you don't need to. You just use blood.
35:12With the critical blood evidence ruined, investigators are forced to look beyond conventional forensic methods.
35:21So, what they did was to compare those urine samples with lots of other deceased people.
35:30And they treated them blind without anybody knowing which sample was which.
35:36And they were able to identify which one had very high levels of insulin and not of C-peptide, which
35:43suggests that it was an insulin injection.
35:51The central mortar in Birmingham, they would be doing something like six to ten autopsies a day.
36:00So, there was the opportunity to take blood and urine samples.
36:04They weren't taking any tissue.
36:05These were materials that would have gone to waste anyway.
36:15The painstaking work takes a full year as samples are collected and a new technique is developed.
36:24For 12 months, I collected over 100 urine samples to test for insulin.
36:33And in all those 100, only two came back as positive.
36:38And they were the only two people that actually were diabetics.
36:43And they really developed a new science of examining urine samples in this way and establishing that there was a
36:53relationship between the amount of insulin and the amount of C-peptide in urine,
36:58which could demonstrate that a person had been given insulin from outside the body.
37:06Experts come to a final conclusion.
37:09Eric Lloyd died from a lethal overdose of insulin.
37:20It was as a result of that that they were able to charge Marie Whiston.
37:28But will the controversial technique be enough to convict Marie Whiston of murder?
37:33This science was very controversial.
37:37A lot of experts gave evidence at trial and it was hotly contested that this science was reliable.
37:44If the science isn't 100% reliable, the prosecution needs compelling circumstantial evidence.
37:53Unfortunately for Mrs Whiston, the prosecution case did not rest solely on scientific evidence.
38:02There was a lot of other circumstantial evidence which the prosecution contended supported their scientific case.
38:13Investigators begin to delve deeper into Marie Whiston's past.
38:22Perhaps most significantly from the prosecution's point of view, during the course of the divorce proceedings from Mr Whiston, which
38:34had taken place many years before, Mr Whiston had sworn an affidavit.
38:41Marie's ex-husband said that not only had she threatened to kill him in the past, but that she had
38:48threatened to do it with insulin and that, as a nurse, she knew how to do it.
38:56The ex-husband's affidavit really is a game changer, both in terms of the investigation and in terms of the
39:03court case.
39:04Because what it demonstrates is that this is premeditated.
39:09The ex-husband said that Marie had threatened him by injecting him with insulin, which of course happens in this
39:16case, and that the injection would be in a pretty obscure place between the toes.
39:22It's almost an open and shut case because of what our ex-husband says.
39:30He had set out in writing in a document that had been submitted to the court at the time, 1988,
39:41an allegation that Mrs Whiston had threatened to kill him by injecting him with insulin.
39:53And that she would do so by injecting him between the toes where an injection site would not be discovered.
40:04So here was this allegation, which was made many, many years before, which was extremely damaging to Mrs Whiston's credibility.
40:19It was, on the face of it, an extraordinary coincidence that many years ago she should make such a threat.
40:27And then, years later, in respect of a different man, there should be compelling scientific evidence that that was exactly
40:37the way in which he had been killed.
40:43Analysis of the vomit-stained carpet also reveals some damning evidence.
40:52It's highly unlikely that Eric Lloyd, who, from the sound of it, already had great suspicions of his wife, was
40:59going to let her inject him without knowing exactly what was going on,
41:04and to inject him with a drug which he must have known could not possibly be for the benefit of
41:11his health.
41:12So it's perhaps no surprise that when Stephanie Stevens arranged for the vomit on the carpet to be examined, it
41:19was found to contain sedatives,
41:20which almost certainly, Marie Whiston had given him to render him unconscious.
41:25That then allowed her to inject the incident freely.
41:30Wiston's trial gets underway at Birmingham Crown Court, the culmination of three years of painstaking work.
41:40It was a very long and difficult period for Mrs Whiston, and when the police interviewed Mrs Whiston after the
41:48death of Mr Lloyd,
41:49she told lies about her relationship with Mr Beattie and tried to cover it up.
41:55As the investigation went on, more suspicious lies and other circumstances came to light.
42:01For one thing, Marie claimed that she'd been working a night shift.
42:05Now, that gives her the aura of being very caring.
42:08I've been off caring for patients. I came home and found my husband dead.
42:12In fact, she'd been off registering her forthcoming marriage to another man.
42:17She was aiming to elope with him or to go abroad with him and marry him.
42:23And, of course, if she'd done that, then she would have missed out on her inheritance from Erica.
42:33She was just lying. I could just tell she was lying the whole time.
42:40There's no question that Marie believed that her expertise as a nurse would allow her to get away with murder.
42:47It's ironic that, in fact, it was her behaviour when Eric was found which finally resulted in her being found
42:56out.
42:56It was only because she was so keen to get away with murder and to have Eric cremated that Stephanie
43:04Stevens, the coroner's assistant,
43:06was so suspicious of her.
43:08And it was as a result of that, that a series of investigations was set in place, which resulted in
43:15her being convicted.
43:21The jury returns its verdict.
43:25Marie Whiston is found guilty of murder.
43:29She actually stood up and shouted that I was a bitch because I'd found her guilty.
43:41But it was just her evil, evil behaviour that I knew that she was guilty.
43:54Marie murders Eric actually by injecting him with an excessive amount of insulin, causing a death which could very easily
44:05have been written off as being the result of natural causes.
44:10Now, there's a sophistication to that, but actually it's a medical sophistication.
44:15It's a sophistication that's born out of her medical knowledge.
44:19Marie Whiston is sentenced to life in prison with a recommendation that she serve a minimum of 16 years.
44:31I really didn't think we would get a conviction because I didn't have all that much evidence.
44:37But the jury convicted her on my evidence and the fact that she was just guilty.
44:47On appeal in 2000, Marie Whiston's sentence is reduced by two years.
44:54Proving to be a model inmate, she soon earns her parole.
44:59I believe that Stephanie Stevens, the coroner's assistant, deserves more credit than perhaps anybody else in bringing Marie Whiston to
45:06justice.
45:06I think that Stephanie's involvement in this case and her suspicions were vital in pursuing the end result.
45:21Eric became almost a part of my family because I was just so convinced that a wrong had been done
45:33and I needed to undo that wrong.
45:40She was such a wicked woman.
45:45Of course, the real hero in this case is Stephanie Stevens.
45:50You know, Stephanie Stevens saw Marie Whiston's mask slip and was not prepared to let that go.
45:59And because of her determination to find out the truth, a calculated killer was brought to justice.
46:15To be continued...
46:32To be continued...
46:35To be continued...
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