Colin Norris

Colin Campbell Norris (born 12 February 1976

Background The Milton area of Glasgow, where Norris grew up and where he lived up until the trial. Ruchill Hospital, where the infamous Jessie McTavish incident took place which Norris learned about at university, can be seen in the distance at the top left-hand corner of the image (the building with the tall brick tower). Norris was born and brought up in the Milton area of Glasgow, Scotland. Friends described him as someone who loved being centre stage, and said he enjoyed amateur dramatics. His academic record was average, but he became known for being quick to anger and his aggressive confrontations with tutors and, later, employers. He constantly argued with his tutor, later saying that she "and I didn't exactly see eye to eye. I had a personality clash, basically 'cos I had one and she never, and she was my personal tutor." Colleagues recounted him saying that he didn't like working on minor injury wards or with old people and wanted to work in the emergency department because it was more 'exciting' for him. He said he "wasn't put on this earth to sit in an office." This same storyline is believed to have inspired another UK nurse, Benjamin Geen, to kill his patients. In the month in which he began killing patients with overdoses, Geen appeared in an edition of the Banbury Citizen which featured an interview with Leskovac. Suspicions were raised when Norris predicted the death of one patient, Ethel Hall, saying to a fellow nurse hours before: "I predict 5:15 a.m. as being the time Ethel Hall will become unwell" since he "had a feeling about her". This was despite there being no medical indications of an impending illness, and Hall being on the ward only for a fractured hip. Hall duly fell catastrophically ill that morning around 5 a.m. and she died some weeks later. When nurses including Norris came to tend to her, he tapped his watch and said to the nurse he had predicted Hall's illness earlier: "I told you". An anonymous male nurse called Hall's son from the hospital at 5:30 a.m. that morning telling him that she had taken a "turn for the worse", and it was not established who this man was.

A blood sample was taken from Hall after a doctor raised concerns and ordered blood tests, and her blood was found to contain an inexplicably massive amount of insulin – 1000 units in just one sample – and this became the main hard evidence in the police case. The amount of insulin in Hall's blood was about 12 times the normal level, and it had been injected into her system. The insulin was manufactured and not produced naturally in the body. It had been injected into her abdomen, as indicated by the fact that a bulge was found under her skin there that was consistent with a large injection of fluid. Along with Ethel Hall, none of these women were diabetic (nor was anyone else on the ward), and all of them had been admitted to the wards simply suffering from broken hips. In any case, the amount of insulin Hall had been injected with was far in excess of what a diabetic patient would need. When questioned about the cases Norris said "he seemed to have been unlucky over the last 12 months." On 17 May 2002, Norris injected patient Vera Wilby with an overdose of the painkiller morphine to make her drowsy (as recorded in the hospital notes and later admitted by Norris On 12 June, another patient, Doris Ludlam, was admitted to Norris's ward with a broken hip. Another colleague also later testified that Norris had watched in "detached amusement" after one of the victims had fallen into a coma. Significantly, it was discovered by a member of staff that they had suddenly run out of insulin after Crooke's hypoglycaemic attack. He would not have expected, therefore, a blood sample to be taken from Hall and sent to a specialist laboratory as it was, which finally led to him being caught, Bourke was on Norris's ward at the same time as Ludlam and Wilby, meaning he had contact with all three at the same time. In each case, the fatal dose of insulin had been administered at night, when Norris worked. He also would have known doctors were not on duty overnight at the hospitals, so they couldn't help the patients when they all collapsed during Norris's night shifts. Norris said this despite revealing he had never once seen an intruder on the ward.

Chief superintendent on the case Chris Gregg, holder of the Queen's Police Medal and who caught David Bieber, 'Wearside Jack' and the killer of Leanne Tiernan, said that Norris's prediction of Hall's illness showed that it wasn't just a spontaneous incident where a criminal nurse at work had, for whatever reason decided to kill someone, saying "he actually premeditated this, hours before". Gregg said: "I think he was cocky; I think he was over-confident. He was showing off". went to trial in 2007 at Newcastle Crown Court. Norris's father did not object to the decision to charge his son, whom he described as "scum". At trial Norris denied ever having predicted Hall's death, despite having admitted this in police interviews. He had given Ludlam twice the allowed dose of morphine. It was highlighted that, when police first interviewed him, Norris had not mentioned the cases of Ludlam, Bourke and Crookes when he was asked if he had ever had experience of patients falling into hypoglycaemic comas, even though that is what they had experienced when Norris was on duty. Norris claimed, despite the blood test evidence, that none of the patients had been injected and if they were then an 'intruder' must have done it (since records showed no other staff member could have been responsible). This is despite the fact that the insulin fridge, where the drug had apparently been taken from, had a coded access and only medical staff could access it.

Norris was convicted by an 11-1 majority verdict Norris had acted particularly aggressively throughout the trial, banging on the windows of the judge and attacking members of the press when departing the court, shoving two against a wall.

Referred to in the British press as the "Angel of Death", Norris was convicted of killing his victims by injecting them with high levels of insulin. Ludlam was a mother of two, a grandmother and great-grandmother who had worked as a nursery school teacher and fostered children for the charity Barnardo's. Hall's son Stuart expressed his relief at Norris's conviction, stating: "I think he needs to be kept inside". Norris was imprisoned at HM Prison Frankland.

Other suspected victims After the trial, Chris Gregg revealed that he and the other detectives believed Norris had been responsible for up to six other deaths at the hospitals. He was the only nurse on duty when three other suspicious deaths occurred, but police felt there was not enough evidence to pursue convictions for them. In two other suspicious cases, the fact that there had been no post-mortem examinations prevented enough evidence being accumulated to charge Norris for their deaths. She had been released on appeal after her defence team successfully argued that the trial judge had inadvertently misled the jury in his final summing up, even though the appeal court judges said that it was something a "few words could have cured" and that there was enough evidence to support the prosecution. Norris was tasked with "reviewing" her conduct, and in doing so, he would have learned that insulin is the perfect weapon for murder because it leaves the blood very quickly. She was able to continue her career in nursing after she was released on appeal.

Forensic psychiatrist Richard Badcock, the only psychiatrist to formally assess the serial killer doctor Harold Shipman, stated his belief that Norris was a psychopath, who killed elderly patients simply because they got in his way. Chris Gregg said that he believed that Norris decided to poison the women simply because he found elderly patients irritating. Criminologist David Wilson commented on the case of Norris and other recently convicted serial killers by saying: "What's happening at the moment is that new groups are emerging as being vulnerable to attack".

Dislike of elderly As a trainee nurse Norris often refused to work with elderly patients, saying he "didn't want to be working with that type of person". He admitted to police he found elderly patients challenging. The inquiry recommended the introduction of 'student practice passports', which would report on the personality and integrity of students while they trained as medical professionals at university.

Claims of innocence Norris appealed against his conviction in 2009. Originally, Norris planned to appeal on the grounds that the trial judge had shown a "lack of balance", but then scrapped these plans and sacked his legal team. He subsequently appealed on the grounds that the judge had "misdirected" the jury in his final summary but he lost this appeal, with judge Lord Justice Aikens ruling the convictions were "safe" and saying that the case against Norris was "very strong indeed". Norris's defence team had argued that the deaths could have been the result of 'naturally' raised insulin levels caused by severe spontaneous hypoglycaemia, but the judges rejected this possibility. He claimed the jury at Norris's trial was wrongly led to believe by experts that a cluster of hypoglycaemic episodes, among people who were not diabetic, was sinister. After carrying out his own studies, he said: "Looking at all the evidence, all I can say is I think Colin Norris's conviction is unsafe". He claimed that his own studies had shown that up to 1 in 10 of hypoglycaemia episodes in elderly people were caused naturally.

Marks said the four patients picked out by the experts after Mrs Hall's death "were all at very high risk of developing spontaneous hypoglycaemia" because they had risk factors such as malnutrition, infection and multi-organ failure. They and Marks claimed that Ethel Hall's hypoglycaemic arrest could have been caused naturally by 'auto-immune syndrome'. Norris's mother has tried to prove her son innocent, saying: "Either I am the mother of Scotland's worst serial killer or mother to the victim of the country's most terrible miscarriage of justice". After watching the BBC programme the sister-in-law of victim Bridget Bourke said that she was still convinced of Norris's guilt. In the same year there was outrage amongst elderly residents when a benefit concert was held for Norris in Dundee, with a spokesperson of the Dundee Pensioners' Forum stating: "Having a party for someone convicted of murdering all these elderly, vulnerable people is disgraceful. It's a slap in the face doing it, with all those families still grieving their loved ones". The Times declared he was one of "the 11 most evil staff in the NHS". In January 2015 the foreman of the jury that convicted Norris, after being shown the evidence in the BBC programme, said that he now believes him to be innocent; apparently the second member of the jury to do so (although this would still leave enough jury members to convict him, 10). He said that "the evidence shows a murder wasn't committed at all" (although in 2021 the CCRC concluded that Hall's case at least was indeed a clear murder). In 2021, the Criminal Case Review Commission discounted this claim when they said that there was "no dispute" that Hall was "murdered by the injection of insulin". The CCRC considered that Norris' conviction for Hall's murder relies on support from the other four convictions and the Crown's claim that no one else apart from Norris was responsible. The commission was "satisfied" that the claim that Norris was solely responsible is "less secure" with the new expert evidence. As to Ethel Hall, the CCRC said that "there is no dispute that she was murdered by the injection of insulin". The experts who advised the CCRC said that it was not possible for a natural hypoglycaemic episode to have caused Hall's death, but could not exclude it being a possibility in the other four cases. The renewed appeal was described as being of interest to lawyers acting for Lucy Letby due to her case involving similar concerns about the reliability of insulin testing and expert evidence, though the Court of Appeal would later give an oblique warning against drawing such parallels when handing down its judgement. Norris was represented during the fourteen-day hearing by Michael Mansfield KC. The court reserved judgement on 6 June 2025 and then rejected Norris' appeal on 26 June, holding that there was "no doubt" about his conviction.

In popular culture In 2008, Norris's case was the focus of an ITV Real Crime documentary.