Episode 26: The Murders at Stepping Hill Hospital

In the summer of 2011, patients began dying on the acute medical wards of Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport. A nurse noticed that several patients had blood sugar levels that made no clinical sense. When the saline supplies were tested, contamination was confirmed. What followed was one of the largest murder investigations in Greater Manchester Police's history. Victorino Chua was a Filipino-born nurse who had worked night shifts on wards A1 and A3 since 2009. He had, it emerged, a past he had kept carefully out of sight. He had written, twelve months before the first patient died, of being an angel who had turned into a devil. This is the story of Tracey Arden, Derek Weaver, and the other patients on those wards - of Rebecca Leighton, a young nurse arrested, charged, and imprisoned for crimes she did not commit - and of a three-and-a-half-year investigation that ended in a Manchester Crown Court jury deliberating for eleven days. Victorino Chua is currently serving a life sentence with a minimum term of thirty-five years.