Killer nurse jailed for life: Judge brands Victorino Chua 'indescribably wicked' as he sentences him to a minimum of 35 years for murdering and poisoning patients

 

Devil' nurse Victorino Chua was jailed for life today and will not be released until at least 2050 for murdering two patients and poisoning 20 others.

Murder victims Tracey Arden, 44, and Derek Weaver, 83, died in 'agony' at Stepping Hill hospital in Stockport but their killer was today spared a whole life tariff and given a minimum of 35 years instead. 

Chua, an 'indescribably wicked' 49-year-old father of two from the Philippines, injected deadly amounts of insulin into saline bags and ampoules so his patients would be poisoned at random.  

The nurse, who may have been working in the NHS without being a fully qualified nurse, will not be eligible for parole until he is 84. 

Victims and their loved-ones were at Manchester Crown Court today to watch him being jailed and there were stifled cries and sobbing as he was jailed.

Mr Justice Openshaw said: 'He has committed a dreadful crime and he must now pay the price.'

10 jurors also returned to court to see him sentenced following a trial stretching four months.

All sat grim faced in silence as Mr Justice Openshaw recounted the pain, suffering and deaths of his victims and the anguish of their loved ones.

Impassive throughout the entire trial, Chua, dressed in a brown coat zipped up to his neck, showed no flicker of emotion, only blinking as he sat listening. 

Described as 'dangerous and devious' who used, 'considerable cunning' to harm his patients with insulin, the father of two injected insulin into saline bags and ampoules while working on two acute wards at Stepping Hill Hospital, Stockport, in June and July 2011.

These were then used by other nurses on the ward - leading to a series of insulin overdoses to mainly elderly victims.

Passing sentence Mr Justice Openshaw added: 'What he did was inexplicable and irrational.

'It is a striking, sinister and truly wicked feature of the case, he did not personally administer contaminated products directly to most of these patients but having left saline bags contaminated with insulin he did not know which nurse would unwittingly collect them and still less to which patient the nurse would then unwittingly administer the poison'.

'It is as if he left it to fate to decide who would be the victim'. 

The 'narcissistic psychotic' also enjoyed watching his victims suffer and would give patients contaminated medicine or tamper with their prescriptions to 'shut them up'. 

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Damning: Mr Justice Openshaw, pictured, jailed Chua for a minimum of 35 years and called him 'indescribably wicked'

Within minutes the 22 people poisoned were in 'agony', suffering fits and slipping out of consciousness and tragically two people failed to recover.  

Of Arnold Lancaster, who Chua was cleared of murdering, the judge said the jury could not be sure that the insulin poisoning had caused or contributed to his death due to his terminal cancer.

However he said it was 'indescribably wicked' ‎to poison a dying man with insulin.  

Victim Grant Misell, who survived but suffered permanent brain damage, was 'transformed from a professional accountant transacting multi-million pound deals to someone who can no longer hold down a job stacking supermarket shelves', the judge said.

The judge said the attack on Jack Beeley, who had learning difficulties due to childhood meningitis, was 'truly despicable' because Chua poisoned him just to keep him quiet.

Many of the patients he attacked were elderly, who recovered but have since died, but many 'never got over' what the nurse had done to them.

Philip Jones, 67, said that he watched Chua put in his drip and began to feel unwell and thought 'I was going to die'. 

Pressure was growing last night for an inquiry into vetting failures that allowed a nurse to kill two patients and poison scores more in an NHS hospital.

Victorino Chua, a 49-year-old father of two, attacked the very people he was supposed to be caring for. At the height of his poisoning spree, police even considered shutting down Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport.

Police believe the 'narcissistic psychopath' from the Philippines used forged qualifications to register as a nurse here. They even suspect that someone might have sat his nursing exam for him in his homeland.

Ahead of Chua's sentencing today there were calls for a public inquiry and a review of how foreign nurses are recruited.

It can also be revealed that:

• Chua graduated from a nursing college now shut down amid concerns about its poor standards and finances;
• Lax vetting – including acceptance of photocopied documents – allowed him to register as a nurse in the UK;
• No checks were made with his employers at the Philippines hospital which he left after being accused of theft;
• Detectives fear Chua may have claimed the lives of other patients both here and in the Philippines;
• The trade in fake nursing qualifications that can be bought for as little as £43;
• Occupational therapists at Stepping Hill Hospital failed to raise concerns about Chua's deteriorating mental state in the run-up to the poisonings;
• Victims of the poisonings are in line for millions of pounds in compensation payments from Chua's NHS hospital trust;
• Chua, who became a British citizen in 2008, could use human rights laws to avoid deportation. 

Last night, the recently retired prosecutor who helped bring Chua to justice said he believes there could be hundreds of nurses using fake qualifications in UK hospitals.

Nazir Afzal told BBC North West: 'In all my 24 years as a prosecutor, I have never escalated concerns to another government department except in this case. I do not know whether there were hundreds or thousands or dozens.

'What I do know is the opportunities were there for them to lie about their qualifications, to obtain them fraudulently, and to cover up their disciplinary matters. It must be, for all patients, extremely worrying and desperately concerning.'

Kath Murray, 57, a civil servant who has suffered years of health problems as a result of being given a drip contaminated with insulin by Chua, described herself as a 'living victim' of the poisoner. 

'How could they let someone like that work in a hospital, as a nurse?' she demanded yesterday. 'He was meant to be caring for people, yet he had all that anger inside him.'

Stephen Jones, a clinical negligence specialist at law firm Slater and Gordon which is representing several of those affected, said patients and their families could be entitled to significant damages from Stockport NHS Foundation Trust. Chua injected insulin into saline bags and ampoules while working on two wards at Stepping Hill Hospital in June and July 2011.

These were then unwittingly used by other nurses on the ward – leading to a series of insulin overdoses to mainly elderly victims.

Two patients, Tracey Arden, 44 and Derek Weaver, 83, suffered agonising deaths and a third, Grant Misell, 41, was left brain damaged as the insulin overdoses starved the victims' brains of oxygen. 

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Defence: Hospital bosses have denied they could have done anything to stop Chua because they dealt with medicines in the same way other hospitals do

CALLS TO CURB THE RUSH OF FOREIGN RECRUITS

Demands for an inquiry into foreign nurse recruitment intensified last night in the aftermath of the Chua scandal.

Hospitals have spent £1million in three years hiring nurses from 16 countries including the Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Lithuania, Greece, Poland, Sweden, Italy, India, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

The NHS is now so dependent on foreign nurses that half of hospital trusts have staged recruitment drives overseas since 2012 and there are 23,000 Filipino nurses on the UK register.

Freedom of Information responses also reveal that managers are so desperate to fill vacancies that they are failing to test the nurses' English properly. Instead, they rely on the judgement of recruitment agencies. The former chief prosecutor in the North West, Nazir Afzal, told BBC North West that during the Chua investigation his team wrote to Home Office and Health Department officials and nursing regulators raising their concerns about potentially fraudulent qualifications. He said: 'The concerns related to the robustness... of the qualification and training regime that they had in the Philippines at that time.'

Katherine Murphy of the Patients Association said: 'If we do employ nurses from other countries, we must ensure that they are fully qualified and competent to carry out their duties and that they are competent enough in English to effectively communicate.'

One of Chua's victims, Kath Murray, 57, backed calls for an inquiry into foreign recruitment.

Chua was convicted at Manchester Crown Court yesterday of two murders, 22 counts of attempted grievous bodily harm, one count of grievous bodily harm, seven attempts of administering poison and one count of administering poison.

Det Supt Simon Barraclough, who led the investigation, said: 'I have no confidence in the qualifications he has provided via the Professional Regulation Commission (which verifies the qualifications of nurses).'

Stepping Hill accepted Chua without exhaustive checks into his background in 2009 – seven years after he arrived in the UK. Publicly available documents held at the Regional Trial Court of Manila show that in 2000 Chua was accused of stealing 1,070 Philippines pesos, equivalent to about £18, from the city's Metropolitan Hospital, where he worked.

For 18 months, the case hung over Chua before the allegations of 'qualified theft' were dismissed on February 7 2002.

Two weeks later, on February 21, Chua flew to London, via Amsterdam, to start a new life in the UK.  

There's a devil inside me, killer nurse confessed 

Victorino Chua penned what he called a 'bitter nurse confession' in which he spelt out 'how an angel can turn into an evil person'.

In the extraordinary document released yesterday, he wrote: 'They thought I'm a nice person but there is a devil in me.'

Over 13 rambling pages, the Filipino killer nurse said he might explode at any time, adding: 'If I will be pushed, they gonna be sorry.'

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Dependant on painkillers, sleeping tablets and antidepressants, Chua also wrote he sometimes felt like killing himself, but feared he would 'go straight to hell no questions asked'.

The document was found in a kitchen drawer at his home in Stockport after he was arrested in January 2012.

Jurors were told how in hard-to-follow, broken English, written in scrawling capital letters, he recounts the story of his life, beginning: 'My name is Victorino Domingo Chua.'

In the document, the father of two said he was writing 'in case something happen to me (so) my family can continue my case or can tell somebody to look at it and work out how an angel turn to an evil person'.

He added: 'The bitter nurse confession. Got lots to tell but I just take it to my grave. My family will make history here in England.'

In a later addition to the document, dated December 2010, Chua described how he could control the number of painkillers he took for back and knee pain when he was at home – but at work he 'can't help it to take more than the limit'.

He added: 'I'm just telling them I'm fine and alright just to shut there mouth.

'Still inside of me I can feel the anger that any time it will explode ... just still hanging on ... can still control it but if I will be pushed they gonna be sorry.'

Earlier he wrote how he was avoiding going drinking with friends, adding: 'They thought I'm a nice person but there (is) a devil in me.'

Drug addict and fantasist who tricked his way into the UK: Killer nurse haunted by father's death fled Philippines after answering newspaper advert to work in UK care home 

For Victorino 'Vic' Chua a nursing career in England was a ticket out of poverty. He had been earning just £3 a day as a nurse when he answered a newspaper advert to work in a UK care home.

Chua set his sights on working in Britain after learning of Tony Blair's plan – announced in 2000 – to recruit thousands of overseas nurses.

But it now seems clear that he should never have been working for the NHS. An original transcript of his nursing qualifications suggest that his exam marks may have been tampered with. 

There are also strong suspicions that another individual may have sat some of his exams in Manila. Police in Manchester think the man who sat the exam, in the name of Chua, did not even look like the killer.

The Mail can also reveal that when Chua applied to work in the NHS, only 'cursory' checks were carried out by regulators at the Nursing and Midwifery Council which accepted photocopied documents.

Checks were not carried out on his CV, which contained lies, and there are concerns he forged several references.

Born Victorino Domingo Chua on October 30, 1965, he was one of six children born to Juanita, now 65, and his father, a department store manager of mixed Filipino/Chinese descent – who died suddenly of a heart attack aged 49 in 1985. Despite a difficult upbringing, he did well enough at school to be eligible to take a degree.

At the Chua family's single-storey home of breeze-blocks and a corrugated iron roof in Caloocan City, north of the capital Manila, his mother gave us a copy of her favourite picture of him posing with a skeleton at nursing college, as well as more recent images of him, his wife Marianne and two young daughters in the UK.

She remembers little about his education, saying: 'Because I married and had my first child very young – I was just 14 – I didn't take any interest in my children's education. We were like peers. My in-laws brought up Vic. 

She went on: 'My husband was a womaniser. He had six children with me, five with his first mistress, two with his second mistress, and one with his third mistress.'

Chua was tormented by his father's unexpected death – which may explain his rage against anyone who crossed him. His sister Joanne, 47, said: 'Vic was very close to his father. They used to sleep on the same sleeping mat as each other.'

In the year that his father died Chua enrolled on a four-year BSc in Nursing degree at Manila's Metropolitan Hospital School of Nursing. Records show that he struggled with the course and in the crucial third year he was thrown out and moved to the privately run Galang nursing school, one of the worst in Manila, to finish his degree.

He was awarded a BSc in nursing in October 1989 from Galang. After supposedly graduating he worked at the Galang Medical Centre, part of the same complex as the college.

So many people died at the 70-bed facility that it was nicknamed the 'Galang Memorial Hospital'. Now shut down, it could be where Chua whet his appetite for murder. Records of dead patients have long since been destroyed. 

After a couple of years, he somehow landed a job back at the Metropolitan Hospital. He married Marianne in a civil ceremony in 1996 and lived next to the Chua family home. Joanne was reluctant to talk about why her brother was sacked at the Metropolitan Hospital over a theft allegation in the late 1990s.

He was accused of stealing 1070 pesos, equivalent to about £18. The case hung over Chua before it was quietly dismissed in 2002. This gave Chua the green light to move to Britain. He flew to London on February 21, 2002, via Amsterdam and paid a fixer £2,000 to ensure he had the right visas.

Before he worked at Stepping Hill, Chua worked at a number of private nursing homes, most notably Newlands in Stockport

His family in Manila showed us a reference allegedly from Newlands, dated December 20, 2005, recommending Chua to other prospective employers. But it is feared Chua stole drugs from Newlands, now under new ownership, during his time there – almost certainly for personal use. 

The Nursing and Midwifery Council was responsible for him becoming a registered nurse in the UK in 2003 but it did not carry out any proper checks to verify his qualifications. Officials accepted him as a registered nurse after Chua presented photocopies of his nursing qualifications, as well as proof of education, training and identity.

Jackie Smith, chief executive of the NMC, said: 'That was the process at the time 12 years ago. It is the responsibility of employers to do the appropriate employment reference checks.' Newlands recommended him to the NMC after helping him through a period of 'supervised practice' for foreign qualified nurses. Chua left Newlands in 2007, becoming an NHS 'bank nurse' – or temp – until securing a staff post at Stepping Hill in 2009.

Stepping Hill accepted him without exhaustive checks. Once there, it was not long before he became a deeply unpopular member of staff. But repeated warnings about his conduct and behaviour were ignored.

One concerned an elderly woman with breathing problems. She received inappropriate treatment from Chua, who rubbed cream into her buttocks while treating her late at night. She complained to the hospital authorities, but it was not dealt with properly. 

There was also evidence of Chua falsifying signatures and forging statements. Stepping Hill said concerns about Chua from staff were about 'his interpersonal skills only latterly' and were dealt with 'in accordance with Trust Policy and procedures'. When he was arrested, police found he was addicted to pain killers. In his body were 'industrial quantities' of codeine. He also took large amounts of other drugs.

Police suspect he stole them from Stepping Hill. They also think he stole valuables from patients. His spiralling drug dependency and deteriorating mental state coincided with him needing counselling from therapists.

By now a British citizen, he was allowed to continue working at Stepping Hill even when suffering from Hepatitis B. In the months leading up to the murders, he was receiving emotional support from the occupational health team at Stepping Hill. Although he confided he was suffering from severe depression, the Stepping Hill occupational health team did not alert managers to any concerns about him.

They advised him to write down his frustrations, which Chua did in a rambling 13 page letter he called the 'Bitter Nurse Confession'. In it, he described himself as a 'Robin Hood guy', who, while in the Philippines, would help the poor to get cheap medical care.

His wife and children now line in the south of England and did not attend the murder trial. 

For just £43, I bought the bogus papers that 'qualified' me as a nurse: Reporter uncovers rampant trade in counterfeit certificates as questions are raised over killer nurse's credentials  

From Stephen Wright and Jamie Wiseman in Manila for The Daily Mail

Nursing diplomas can be bought for as little as £43 in the Philippines, I can reveal today.

Doubts about Victorino Chua's qualifications emerged after this newspaper alerted police to suspicions over his credentials back in 2012.

And I have found there is a rampant trade in bogus exam certificates in Manila – with fixers and forgers always on hand to fabricate any document.