74 Facts About Colin Norris

Colin Campbell Norris was born on 12 February 1976 and is a British serial killer who was convicted of the murder of four elderly patients and the attempted murders of two others in two hospitals in Leeds, England, in 2002.

Suspicions were raised when Colin Norris predicted that healthy Ethel Hall would die at 5:15 am one night, which is when she fell into a catastrophic arrest, and tests revealed that she had been injected with an extremely high level of man-made insulin.

Insulin was missing from the hospital fridge and Colin Norris had last accessed it, only half an hour before Hall fell unconscious.

Detectives believed that Colin Norris was responsible for up to six other suspicious deaths where only he was always present, but a lack of post mortem evidence and other factors meant that investigators and the Crown Prosecution Service could not pursue convictions for these deaths.

Colin Norris is believed to have been inspired by Jessie McTavish, a fellow Scottish nurse who was convicted of murdering a patient with insulin in 1974 before having her conviction quashed in 1975.

Colin Norris was born and brought up in the Milton area of Glasgow, Scotland.

Colin Norris originally worked as a travel agent after leaving college, but after a few years in this role decided to retrain as a nurse.

Colin Norris was then tasked with "reviewing" her conduct by the tutor.

Colin Norris began working in Leeds after qualifying in June 2001, but quickly fell out with experienced authority figures, finding it difficult to be told 'no' or what to do.

Colin Norris said that, around the time of the murders, Norris had become engrossed by a storyline in Holby City, in which a serial killer nurse played by Rachel Leskovac killed patients with insulin before eventually being uncovered as a murderer.

The partner had reported him to the police but Colin Norris claimed the cat had died from hitting its head on a wall.

At the time of the murders, Colin Norris worked at Leeds General Infirmary and St James's University Hospital in Leeds, having qualified as a nurse only a year earlier.

Colin Norris said that he thought Hall was "going off tonight" and that he was a "jinx" on the hospital.

Colin Norris complained that he would have to fill out the paperwork for her death.

When nurses including Colin 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".

The next night, Colin Norris specifically called the ward to ask what had happened to Hall.

Two vials of insulin were found to have been taken from the fridge, which had to have been taken by someone during the night shift which Colin Norris was working when Hall became unwell.

Colin Norris had on a previous occasion been caught stealing drugs from the hospital.

Colin Norris immediately came under suspicion and was questioned by police about Hall's murder.

On 17 May 2002, Colin Norris injected patient Vera Wilby with an overdose of the painkiller morphine to make her drowsy, despite the fact that she was in no pain and needed no morphine.

Colin Norris then administered insulin before going off shift, for no apparent medical reason.

Colin Norris was discovered in a coma 40 minutes after he went off shift.

Colin Norris was then transferred to St James's University Hospital, and on 10 October 2002,79-year-old Irene Crookes was admitted to Colin Norris's new ward with a broken hip.

Colin Norris was the only staff member who worked on both the wards in the two hospitals where all the hypoglycaemic incidents were occurring.

Colin Norris said that "everything he did that night had to be prompted".

At the time of Hall's death, Colin Norris suspiciously said to colleagues: "it is always in the morning when things go wrong" and "someone always dies when I do nights".

Colin Norris 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.

Colin Norris had been one of the few who was on duty at the time of Hall's deterioration in health.

Police analysed medical staff rotas, phone records and personnel files to determine who had access to the wards, insulin and who was on the wards at the time of that incident, and it was found that all staff members except Colin Norris could be ruled out as it was only Colin Norris who was on duty when all the incidents occurred.

Colin Norris was the only staff member who worked on both the wards where the incidents occurred.

Colin Norris admitted predicting the time of Hall's death to his colleague but said it was because he had a "black sense of humour".

Colin Norris was suspended from his job while the police investigation was carried out.

Colin Norris's mother defended her son's trips around Europe, saying he was "trying to live his life the best he could while under the pressure of a police investigation".

Colin Norris said this despite revealing he had never once seen an intruder on the ward.

Colin Norris behaved bizarrely in the interviews he had with the police.

Investigators stated that Colin Norris did not seem to be explicitly denying the murders, but insisting that they could not be proved, demanding officers told him how he did it and saying that he didn't think their facts were "good enough" to prove he had killed them.

Colin Norris later admitted that he was trying to show how much more he knew than the police in interviews.

Police noted that, in interviews, Colin Norris showed no empathy for the women who had died or for their families, and claimed he couldn't remember any of the women.

Colin Norris, recorded as being of Egilsay Terrace, Glasgow, went to trial in 2007 at Newcastle Crown Court.

Colin Norris's father did not object to the decision to charge his son, whom he described as "scum".

At trial Colin Norris denied ever having predicted Hall's death, despite having admitted this in police interviews.

Colin Norris admitted giving Vera Wilby and Doris Ludlam overdoses of morphine on 17 May and 25 June 2002 respectively.

Colin Norris had given Ludlam twice the allowed dose of morphine.

Colin 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.

Colin Norris was sentenced the following day to life imprisonment, and ordered to serve a minimum term of 30 years in prison.

Colin 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.

Hall's son Stuart expressed his relief at Colin Norris's conviction, stating: "I think he needs to be kept inside".

Colin Norris was imprisoned in HM Prison Frankland as of 2019.

Colin Norris 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.

Colin Norris had been arrested for another death of a patient, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to charge him in this case because of "complicating factors".

Colin Norris had worked at Ruchill Hospital in Glasgow, less than a mile from where Norris grew up.

Colin Norris 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.

Colin 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.

Just like Colin Norris, McTavish had 'predicted' the exact time when a healthy patient would die.

Colin Norris was able to continue her career in nursing after she was released on appeal.

Colin Norris had notably attended lectures in 1999 on diabetes and the treatment of diabetic patients with insulin, where he learned about the consequences of blood sugars being too high or too low.

Forensic psychiatrist Sir Richard Badcock, the only psychiatrist to formally assess the serial killer doctor Harold Shipman, stated his belief that Colin Norris was a psychopath, who killed elderly patients simply because they got in his way.

Chris Gregg said that he believed that Colin Norris decided to poison the women simply because he found elderly patients irritating.

Psychologist and senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University Dr David Holmes concluded that Colin Norris was searching for a sense of power, since a medical staff member like him "administers literally life and death to affirm their own status or self-appointed status".

Colin Norris admitted to police he found elderly patients challenging.

Police would later discover that Colin Norris had repeatedly mistreated elderly patients in the early months of his nursing career at the same Leeds hospitals in which he would later go on to murder patients.

Two elderly ex-patients said that Colin Norris had verbally abused them after they rang an emergency buzzer on a ward when an elderly patient climbed out of bed, with Colin Norris then saying to them "I hope you suffer" and "rot in hell".

Originally, Colin 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.

In 2010, an independent inquiry into Colin Norris's murders was held.

Colin Norris had been asked by the Norris family to find evidence in the case.

Colin Norris 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.

Colin Norris claimed that his own studies had shown that up to 1 in 10 of hypoglycaemia episodes in elderly people were caused naturally.

Colin 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".

However, in 2014, the son of victim Vera Wilby, John Barrie Wilby, said that he was "sad and upset" about the claims that Colin Norris may be innocent, and said that he was still convinced of his guilt.

In January 2015 the foreman of the jury that convicted Colin 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.

Colin Norris said that "the evidence shows a murder wasn't committed at all".

The commission was "satisfied" that the claim that Colin Norris was solely responsible is "less secure" with the new expert evidence.

Colin Norris's defence team stated that Hall's case was a case of natural death, as with the others.

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