A GP worried about his inheritance disguised himself as a nurse and injected deadly poison into his victim, who thought he was getting a home-visit Covid booster, a court has heard.
Thomas Kwan was not injecting Covid vaccine into Patrick O’Hara, prosecutors allege, but a poison that gave O’Hara a rare and life-threatening flesh-eating disease.
“Sometimes, occasionally perhaps, the truth really is stranger than fiction,” said Peter Makepeace KC as he opened the prosecution case against Kwan at Newcastle crown court on Thursday.
Kwan, 53, is accused of attempting to murder O’Hara, his mother’s long-term partner and a “potential impediment” to him inheriting her estate.
The court heard Kwan devised an intricate plan to kill 71-year-old O’Hara, who lived in Newcastle with Kwan’s mother, by disguising himself as a community nurse and injecting him with poison.
Makepeace said the plan involved Kwan forging NHS documentation, disguising himself, using false number plates, and booking in to a hotel using a false name.
Police recovered a photograph from Kwan’s computer of him in disguise with a wig, beard and moustache.
“It was an audacious plan,” Makepeace told the jury. “It was a plan to murder a man in plain sight, to murder a man right in front of his own mother’s eyes, that man’s life partner.”
The court heard Kwan was a successful GP and partner at a surgery in Sunderland. The plot to kill O’Hara involved Kwan concocting a fake but “utterly convincing” NHS letter, said Makepeace. It said O’Hara was a priority for a home-visit Covid injection because of his age.
A second fake letter offered an appointment on 22 January, between 9am and 1pm. A grateful O’Hara “fell for it hook, line and sinker”, Makepeace said.
The court heard Kwan booked himself into a Premier Inn under a false name, arriving at 2.45am on the day of the appointment, 22 January. Hotel CCTV captured Kwan leaving wearing a long coat, hat, blue surgical gloves and a clinical mask, the jury heard.
Makepeace said Kwan had clearly disguised himself “and of course he needed to. What he is about to do he is going to do in front of his own mother, to a man who knew him and he knows.”
O’Hara did not recognise Kwan behind surgical gloves, mask and tinted spectacles. He did not even ask for identification, shouting up to Kwan’s mother that “the man from the National Health Service had arrived”, Makepeace said.
After a questionnaire, blood pressure test and the taking of blood and urine samples, Kwan’s mother came downstairs, the jury heard, and asked if the “nurse” could take her blood pressure as she had come off tablets because of a rash.
He did this, with his mother oblivious to the fact it was her son, the court heard. The jab itself, the court heard, caused “terrible pain” and prompted O’Hara to shout “Bloody hell”, but the “nurse” reassured him the pain was not uncommon. As he left, Kwan’s mother remarked that the visitor was the same height as her son.
Later, Makepeace said, O’Hara started feeling increasing pain and eventually went to A&E, where staff assumed the booster had been applied clumsily. The next day, O’Hara’s arm was blistered and discoloured and his GP sent him back to hospital where doctors were baffled, the court heard.
It became clear O’Hara was suffering from a rare and life-threatening disease called necrotising fasciitis and specialists had to remove large portions of arm flesh in repeated procedures. He spent weeks in intensive care.
The court heard Kwan lived with his wife and young son in a detached house on an executive estate in Ingleby Barwick, Teesside.
Kwan had a “deeply disturbing, long-term, interest bordering on obsession” with poisons and chemical toxins and their use in killing human beings, Makepeace said.
When police searched his property they found various chemicals in the garage including liquid mercury, thallium, sulphuric acid and arsenic. There were also castor oil beans and coffee filters. In the house was a recipe for manufacturing ricin from castor beans.
At one stage ricin was thought to be the poison but a Ministry of Defence chemical expert thought a more likely candidate was iodomethane, predominantly used as fumigant pesticide, Makespeace said.
The court heard that there has, until now, been no recorded medical case of any human being injected with iodomethane.
Kwan has admitted a charge of administering a noxious substance but denies alternative charges of attempted murder, or causing grievous bodily harm with intent.
Makepeace said Kwan would claim that he only intended to cause his victim “mild pain or discomfort” but the prosecution allege the defendant used “his encyclopaedic knowledge of, and research into, poisons” to attempt to murder O’Hara.
The trial continues.
