Beverley Allitt As A Serial Killers
Most serial killers have one thing in common, their actions reflect troubles from their past. Traumatic experiences in someone’s childhood can lead to mental disorders which affect their actions. A person is considered a serial killer after they kill at least three or more people, the ages, race, and sex of victims can vary. Many different things can lead to someone becoming a serial killer, although the most known motive is psychological reasons, the murders may be due to the killer being angry, in seek of thrills, financial gain, frustration, and attention seeking. In Beverley Allitt’s case, it included a little bit of psychological reasons and attention seeking.
Beverley Allitt was a child serial killer in the United Kingdom. Allitt was born in Grantham, England on October 4, 1968. She had a total of about 13 victims, all under the age of 18. As a child, Beverley showed signs of being troubled at an early stage. She was very attention seeking, and wanted everyone to focus on her. Since she was little she would draw fake wounds on herself and put bandaids on or she would wear a cast on her arm to draw attention towards herself. Beverley’s attention seeking didn’t stop there, she constantly lied about being sick and would visit many hospitals for health conditions she didn’t even have. She would go doctor-hopping, and this continued for a while until she convinced herself that her appendix was damaged. This led to her having surgery to get her appendix taken out. Her healing process took longer than it should have because she kept picking at her wound. When she stopped receiving attention for her fake illness, Allitt started hurting others as her alternate way to get attention. These same actions were later reflected in her adulthood.
Allitt’s actions as a child raised some attention from her parents. She got attention because of her pretending to be sick and also for her hurting others, although it didn’t raise as much attention as she was older. Allitt was later diagnosed with Munchausen Syndrome. Munchausen Syndrome is a “factitious disorder, a mental disorder in which a person repeatedly and deliberately acts as if he or she has a physical or mental illness when he or she is not really sick”.
Allitt went to Charles Read Academy in which she was described to be an outcast. Her boyfriend at the time described her as “aggressive, manipulative, and deceptive”, he stated that before the end of the relationship she had fasley accused him of rape and had claimed she was pregnant when she wasn’t. She shortly dropped out of her high school and took a nursing course at Grantham College in which she rarely attended class due to her “illness”. Her large amount of absences led to Allitt failing her course exams.She soon got contracted to work at Grantham and Kesteven hospital for 6 months. They hired her only due to the fact that they were low on staff. Before Allitt started working at the hospital she would volunteer to babysit for other people, and she also worked at a nursing home. Since Allitt started working/studying at the nursing home, she was described to have started acting weird and said that she was “smearing feces on walls”. Allitt worked in the children’s ward 4 in the hospital with two other nurses. Allitt’s co workers worked the morning shift while she worked the night shift, allowing her deception of what she was truly doing to be hidden for a longer period of time.
Victim one was Liam Taylor. He was 7 months old and was brought into the hospital for a chest infection. Allitt persuaded the parents to go home and while they were gone Liam had suffered a “respiratory emergency”. After getting better from his first respiratory emergency he was in another respiratory emergency, although it was believed he would get better, his condition only worsened as time passed. Liam had started getting red blotches on his face and got really pale. It was later determined that he had suffered severe brain trauma and had died of cardiac arrest. Shortly after he was taken off of life support.
Her next victim was eleven year old Timothy Hardwick, Timothy was taken to the hospital after suffering an epileptic attack. Allitt was left alone to care for Timothy and under her care, Timothy was found once again without a pulse. His autopsy could not point out a cause of death, so they blamed it on his epilepsy.
Victim three was Kayley Desmond, she was one year old and was admitted for a chest infection. Five days after Kayley was admitted into the hospital, she suffered cardiac arrest, and was resuscitated. She was transferred to another hospital and there the doctors found an air bubble in her arm which they dismissed as an injection. She survived Allitt’s attacks.
The next victim was five month old Paul Crampton. He was admitted for a bronchial infection which was not serious, and he seemed to be recovering from. Before he was discharged home, Pauls insulin levels elevated and shortly went into insulin shock almost leading him to go into a coma. The high levels of insulin in his blood were unexplainable to the doctors. He also survived Allitts attacks.
Allitt also had other victims but these were her first victims, two of which died and two of which survived Allitt’s attacks. Allitt had a total of 13 victims and four of her victims died. Her murders took place from February 1991 to April 1991. The police felt as though they had enough evidence to charge Allitt with murder in July of 1991, but didn’t charge her until November 1991. Allitt was charged with “four counts of murder, eleven counts of attempted murder, and eleven counts of causing grevious bodily harm”. At the time of her arrest Allitt remained calm and restraint. She had denied having taken any part in the murders and was later proven guilty when the police found parts of her missing nursing log at her house.
The police did more background checks on Allitt and discovered that many of her behavioral patterns as a child proved to show that she has Munchausen’s Syndrome, and Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy which is “a mental health problem in which a caregiver makes up or causes an illness or injury in a person under his or her care, such as a child, an elderly adult, or a person who has a disability. Because vulnerable people are the victims, MSBP is a form of child abuse or elder abuse”. As she waited for her trial, she was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. Allitt’s anorexia just proved to others how bad her psychological state was. Allitt’s trial lasted two months and was given 13 life sentences.
Due to Allitt’s psychological state she did not go to prison and instead was put in Rampton Secure Hospital. The hospital holds many inmates who are there under the Mental Health Act. As she was put in the hospital, she tried to start seeking attention from others in the hospital by eating glass and pouring boiling water on herself. To this day Beverley Allitt remains in Rampton Secure Hospital and is not allowed out early through parole as she is considered a danger to others surrounding her.
Beverley Allitt was very dangerous in a place where people went to search for help. In her case, her childhood reflected a lot of what she was like in adulthood. Although nothing traumatic truly happened to her in her childhood her mental disorder, Munchausen’s Syndrome, did affect her in both her childhood and adulthood. Her mental disorder proved to be the motive for which she killed young, innocent children. Her disorder made her believe that the children she was watching over at the hospital were sick when they truly weren’t. Allitt had a total of 13 victims, four of which died after her attacks and others which survived. This just shows to prove that we will never truly know what goes on in other people’s heads. The angel of darkness took loved ones and children from parents, family members, and friends.
Works Cited:
- “Beverley Allitt.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 25 June 2019, www.biography.com/crime-figure/beverley-allitt.
- “Beverly Allitt.” Crime + Investigation, 25 Mar. 2019, www.crimeandinvestigation.co.uk/crime-files/beverly-allitt.
- Bhandari, Smitha. “Munchausen Syndrome (Factitious Disorder).” WebMD, WebMD, 20 May 2018, www.webmd.com/mental-health/munchausen-syndrome.
- “Who Is Beverley Allitt? Everything You Need to Know.” Facts, Childhood, Family Life & Crimes of English Serial Killer, www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/beverley-allitt-21119.php.
