Is this nurse serving 30 years for murders that never happened? Compelling new evidence suggests 'Angel of Death' is innocent

To the judge at his trial, Colin Norris was an 'arrogant and manipulative man with a real dislike of elderly patients'. A cold-blooded serial killer, he had been convicted of murdering four elderly women – and almost killing a fifth – by injecting them with insulin.

For his crime he was sentenced to a minimum of 30 years in jail. He is serving his sentence in the forbidding, maximum-security jail HMP Frankland, near Durham, alongside Soham murderer Ian Huntley.

Other inmates regularly contaminate his food with bodily fluids and sharpened foil from coffee jars that can be fatal if swallowed.

But now, compelling new evidence suggests not only that Colin Norris, the former nurse who was dubbed 'the angel of death', is innocent, it also hints that his 'victims' in two Leeds hospitals were not murdered at all – that they died instead of natural causes.

The prosecution at Norris's trial in Newcastle in 2008 said the women all died from hypoglycaemia, extreme low blood sugar, which causes the brain and other major organs to cease functioning.

It was claimed this condition almost never arises spontaneously – suggesting it was triggered by injections of insulin.

There was no direct evidence that Norris injected them with anything.

But it was argued that he was the 'common factor' in their deaths because he was looking after them all when they died. The odds against this happening by chance were therefore 'overwhelming'.

But now, a series of scientific studies has shown that hypoglycaemia often arises in elderly patients admitted to hospital for other reasons – in as many as ten per cent of cases.

At the same time, an investigation by Paul May, the veteran campaigner against miscarriages of justice, and Louise Shorter, the former producer of the BBC Rough Justice programme, has revealed that at least six women who were never looked after by Norris at all died from hypoglycaemia in the hospitals where he worked in the same period.

Yet Operation Bevel, the West Yorkshire police inquiry into the alleged murders at Leeds General Infirmary and St James's, took no account of these further deaths. Apparently officers were fixated on Norris as a suspect. Their chief superintendent had reviewed the Harold Shipman case, after which police were criticised for not catching Shipman soon enough.

Norris was jailed for life in 2008. Now 37, he has already lost one appeal which was fought on narrow legal technicalities.

But the fresh evidence unearthed by May and Shorter is now being 'actively pursued' by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which has the power to refer the case back for a further appeal.

Yesterday, speaking by phone from prison, Norris made a moving statement to The Mail on Sunday, relayed via his mother, June Morrison. 'All I want is for the facts to speak for themselves,' he said.

'I am not the angel of death. I am an ordinary man trapped in a living nightmare. I never killed anyone.

'My family and friends have stood by me, and for that I thank them from the bottom of my heart. But they have done so because they know the truth – not only that I am incapable of committing them, but the crimes I am convicted of never took place.'

Norris's 'nightmare' began early on the morning of November 20, 2002, when Ethel Hall, 86, a patient recovering from an operation to repair a broken hip on ward 36 at Leeds General Infirmary, was found unconscious. Mrs Hall had a long history of losing consciousness for mysterious reasons which had never been diagnosed, and had suffered from pernicious anaemia for 20 years.

In fact, she had passed out the previous afternoon, when she had been given oxygen and recovered.

This time, however, there was no reviving her. It was Norris, who was covering the night shift, who discovered she was suffering from severe hypoglycaemia, and she was given glucose injections.

Her blood sugar level returned to normal, but she did not recover, dying three weeks later.

Meanwhile, a lab in Guildford, Surrey, found that her blood contained a high level of insulin, which, it was claimed, could not have happened naturally.

The police began an inquiry. It was led by Detective Chief Superintendent Chris Gregg, who just 18 months earlier had reviewed the 22 West Yorkshire deaths associated with Britain's most prolific serial killer, Dr Harold Shipman.

Shipman is thought to have killed some 250 patients in his care by giving them overdoses of heroin. The Shipman case had made police extremely sensitive to possible murders by medical personnel because he had been allowed to get away with his crimes for years.

They decided Norris was a suspect on the basis of remarks he made to colleagues on the night Mrs Hall fell ill, claiming they were 'sinister'. Yet all they consisted of were statements such as, 'I don't think Ethel looks right,' and that he had a 'funny feeling' about her. None of his colleagues told police they believed he had contributed to her death.

On December 11, Norris was arrested, questioned and held for 29 hours. He answered all questions freely, denying that he gave her an insulin injection, or did anything else to harm her.

The first Mrs Morrison knew of what had happened to her son was when he phoned her after his release, on police bail. 'I couldn't believe I was hearing him right,' she said.' He was trying to be calm, but I came off the phone and had a good cry. Then we went down to Leeds to see him.'

The Guildford lab test was to be a mainstay of the case against Norris. Mrs Hall, it suggested, did have a high level of insulin in her blood. In some people this can happen naturally, but when it does, there is normally a high level of another substance, too, an enzyme called C-peptide – which was not present in the sample from Mrs Hall.

However, normally two tests should be done on separate samples to confirm such a result.

Moreover, the lab had breached its own protocols by conducting its single test on a sample taken from Mrs Hall after she had been given glucose – which, say experts, can distort the results.

Now, new evidence has emerged that she may have been suffering from a condition known as insulin auto-immune syndrome, which causes insulin levels to rise dramatically without C-peptide. There is a simple chemical test available which establishes whether this syndrome is present. It was not carried out.

But at least there was evidence that Mrs Hall's blood contained insulin. In the other four cases which the Operation Bevel team examined over the following three-and-a-half years while Norris remained on bail, all that could be said with confidence was that the patients had hypoglycaemia – these patients' insulin levels had not been tested at all.

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