Stepping Hill nurse criticises media over arrest ordeal

Rebecca Leighton, who was freed without charge over patients’ deaths, speaks about her experience on ITV’s This Morning A nurse who was held on remand for six weeks on suspicion of being responsible for the deaths of patients at Stepping Hill hospital has spoken of her ordeal and criticised her portrayal by the media following her arrest. In her first interview, with ITV’s This Morning programme on Tuesday, Rebecca Leighton described being arrested by police as absolutely horrendous, and said she was too scared to walk down the street alone because of public hostility. Leighton, from Heaviley, Stockport, said she had “pleaded” with the police after her arrest not to stop looking for the real culprit in the investigation. “I pleaded with the police, every day, all the time: ‘Just don’t stop looking. Don’t stop with me because if you do then surely the person that has done these horrific things is still going to be out there,’” she said. “It worried me so much that the patients, everybody, were still going to be affected by it all.” She believes the media were responsible for public hostility towards her, which resulted in a judge refusing her bail at Manchester crown court on 5 August. She was released from Styal prison in Cheshire, where she spent six weeks on remand, on 2 September, after the Crown Prosecution Service dropped all the charges against her. “Because of how the media have portrayed me to be … they could not be any more wrong, people have formed an opinion about me, so I believe it [the bail refusal] was for that reason,” she said. She said: “It’s hard to even say about having a normal life because even now my life is not normal. “I am living at my parents’, I am not living where I was living. I’m not working. I can’t go outside my house without people taking pictures of me. “I can’t walk down the street on my own because I’m a bit scared. Someone has always got to be with me all the time. It’s far from normal.” She said nursing was all she had ever done, adding: “I am so passionate about my job and looking after patients. That’s what I do. That’s what I have worked so hard for. “All this attention has been totally out of my control and I have been left now to try and sort everything out myself.” She said she wished her name had not been published in the media before she was charged. Police arrested the nurse in July after her fingerprints were apparently found on bags of saline fluid that had been contaminated with insulin at the Stockport hospital. Greater Manchester police have established that insulin was present in three patients – Tracey Arden, 44, Alfred Derek Weaver, 83, and Arnold Lancaster, 71 – who all died in July. Speaking of her arrest, she said: “Obviously I was asleep in bed because I was meant to be in work the next day. The police banged on the door. I thought the police wanted to ask further questions. “They came up to my flat. I was not expecting what was to come at all. I couldn’t believe what was happening. Even though I’d been arrested, I thought I’d be home in time for teatime.” She initially refused to have a solicitor present during questioning as she felt she had nothing to hide. But a police officer advised her to have a solicitor with her. “I just couldn’t make sense. I couldn’t string a sentence together. I just couldn’t understand what was going on, why it was me that was arrested, any of it. None of it made sense to me,” she said. “It was hard. I learned, obviously, through what I had been through, not to look too far down the line as to which way my life is going to go. “I just had that little bit of faith that this is going to end and it has got to end because surely they have got to realise at some point that it is not me.” She defended her portrayal in pictures posted on her Facebook page that were published in the press, saying she was “just being any normal 27-year-old girl” who goes out with her friends. “I was just out with my friends having a good time,” she said. “I have got a big group of friends and the media portrayed it to be that work got in the way of my social life. “Ask any of my friends – my friends will tell you that I never used to go out half as much as they wanted me to because I had a choice of working and I ended up working because that is what I loved.” She said she would love to go back to her life as it had been before, adding: “Anything bad that happens, you’ve got to turn it into a positive.” Last week, the Nursing and Midwifery Council revoked the suspension of her nursing registration with certain conditions. But she remains suspended on full pay by Stepping Hill while inquiries continue into allegations that she stole medication. Nursing Crime Television Health Helen Carter guardian.co.uk

Posted by on September 20, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.