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In walks a man in his 70s, in clear agony,
something wrong with his arm.
He was in excruciating pain.
He was literally screaming out.
And there's blisters, there's areas that look like they're dying.
It was a race against time, trying to find out what had been injected.
They didn't know whether he was gonna live or die.
The infection is causing a state of sepsis.
He'd had a botched COVID jab.
RAPID BEEPING
LONG BEEP
SIREN WAILS
Just looked like a stranger attack. Premises were gonna get searched.
It was crazy, full of emergency services.
The police didn't really know what they were dealing with.
They find a cache of books and documents
about poisons and chemicals and murder.
He used the identity of a community nurse.
He's vanished. There's no sign of him.
What's the motive?
Who is this man?
Ingleby Barwick, it's a lovely place to live.
We live just on the golf course, so we've got nice views.
When I first moved here, it was a new build,
and there was a vicar first living next door.
We've got nice neighbours.
We have ex-footballers, we've doctors.
This is an area where wealthy, affluent,
middle-class professionals live.
It's very respectable. It's got a neighbourhood watch.
My husband was working away at the time,
and the next day, he rang me and asked why our house was on news.
So, obviously, it was a big thing, everyone was talking about it.
Murderers aren't always people that you think are gonna have that look.
You see it on TV and films,
and they're always portrayed as a monster.
But it's actually the people that you know,
and people that you're supposed to trust.
In Ingleby Barwick, neighbours know each other.
But little did they know
that behind the garage door of one of these houses,
there is an individual who's plotting to murder.
In November 2023, a man called Patrick O'Hara
received a letter from the NHS, telling him that he'd been selected
for a home visit by a community nurse,
and a COVID booster jab.
Patrick then received a second letter in January of 2024,
and that again reiterated the details of the appointment
for the injection to be delivered,
and had a QR code that took Patrick to a website
with a medical questionnaire that he could complete
ahead of the appointment.
And he was happy to have that home visit.
PHONE VIBRATES
And on Sunday,
Patrick receives a text message from the community nurse,
telling him that he'll be getting his home visit the next day.
The nurse knocked at the door, Patrick opened the door,
saw the nurse, saw it was someone in a mask,
had tinted spectacles, a hat,
a long coat, and gloves on.
The community nurse introduces himself as Raj Patel,
takes some blood samples.
And at that point, Patrick's partner, Jenny,
comes into the room, and asks the community nurse
if he wouldn't mind taking her blood pressure, which he does.
Patrick couldn't see the face of Raj Patel,
but his ID was a man with a clipped, neat moustache,
a beard, glasses, and a full head of hair.
The nurse was speaking in a broken English, Asian accent.
And then the community nurse tells Patrick
that he's eligible for his COVID booster jab,
and so offers his arm and gets the injection.
The jab was incredibly painful. Patrick yelled in pain.
He yelled, "Bloody hell!"
The nurse assured him this sort of thing happened.
But Patrick's starting to get a bit worried,
cos his arm is very sore.
He's a little bit worried about what's going on,
so he leaves the house to see where the nurse has gone.
And there's no sign of him. He's vanished.
Patrick was concerned about the pain in his arm, and as a result,
he attended the local hospital.
It was deemed to be likely to be side effects of a vaccination.
The doctors would've thought that's a bit unusual,
but it's not uncommon to react to an injection.
It's what we want the body to do, so that we can gain immunity
to that foreign thing.
And so, when it's a bit sore, we might be thinking,
"Oh, look, could there be an infection that was introduced?
"Possibly. Why not give him some antibiotics
"and just see if that helps settle things down?"
That should have been the end of the case.
The pain is really getting quite intense now.
There's some quite nasty blistering on his skin.
He's really worried, so, eventually,
he goes to the accident and emergency unit
at his local RVI hospital in Newcastle.
SIREN WAILS
When he comes back and the antibiotics haven't worked,
the pain is worse, and he's now got areas of skin
that are clearly dying or blistered,
then this is no longer a simple vaccine reaction.
Something else has gone on.
If this was an infection,
then it hasn't been controlled by antibiotics,
it means that it's a severe infection.
If there's something else that's gone on to cause this tissue to die,
then he needs that dead tissue to be removed.
He's diagnosed with necrotising fasciitis,
which is basically, like, a flesh-eating condition.
Necrotising fasciitis is a deeper infection,
goes right down to the fascia which covers the muscle,
and it spreads quickly.
They have to keep cutting away the tissue to clear the infection.
But the incidents of necrotising fasciitis
in an otherwise fit and well person who's just had an injection
is vanishingly small.
It's not something we see.
I haven't seen any necrotising infections,
bad flesh-eating bugs, in anyone who's had a vaccination before.
And that's in 20 years of doing medicine.
So, all this time, Patrick's lying in intensive care,
not knowing what's caused this,
not knowing what the outcome's gonna be,
worried he's gonna die.
And of course, Jenny, who's been his partner for 20 years,
has no idea what's happening,
and she's looking at the possibility that he might die.
The doctors and nurses at the RVI were baffled by what happened.
When Patrick's on intensive care is likely when they realise,
"We need to feed back to the community nurse,
"we need to let the vaccine manufacturer know
"that something was wrong."
So, they'd have started digging.
They start to have a look at the letters that he'd received
about this appointment.
And very quickly, it becomes apparent that there is no Raj Patel
and there is no community nursing team,
and these letters that he'd received were actually fake.
And at that point, the police were contacted,
because it appeared that somebody had administered an injection
of an unknown substance into Patrick,
and caused him to be seriously unwell.
If this community nurse has injected Patrick
with a life-threatening poison,
could it be that he's going round the community,
doing it to other people?
Is there a wider risk to the general public
with regards to this individual, or is it an isolated incident?
It's a very real prospect that the police have got to consider,
cos they just don't know who this person is.
Who is Raj Patel?
Patrick O'Hara, a man in his 70s, is lying in intensive care.
Er, he's in agony.
This was a guy who initially went in
saying he'd had a botched COVID jab.
It was a race against time
trying to find out what had been injected.
And so, at that point, they call in the police,
er, and it becomes apparent
this is an attempt to take somebody's life.
Generally, when you're talking about murders and homicides,
the statistics say it's around about 80% of victims
have had some kind of contact with the person who've killed them
or attempted to kill them.
Whether that be a domestic environment or socially,
stranger murders are very unusual.
They very rarely take place.
They do happen, obviously, but it's rare.
Most people have some kind of relationship
with the person that's killed them,
whether that be a long-term relationship
or a very short interaction.
On face value, it was somebody called Raj Patel...
..who is or is purporting to be a health care nurse
attending the address to deliver a vaccine.
Which, actually, was all false.
You have got two people,
two elderly people in their own home,
who have been attacked.
Now, where do you start from?
Because when you deal with a murder in the street,
there's normally obvious signs of how it's happened.
The method, there's a scene, there's evidence.
But on this occasion,
a person has gone in, they've got gloves on,
they're completely covered up, so there's not going to be any DNA.
For all intents and purposes, for any one of us,
if we looked at these letters,
they would look as if they were genuine letters from the NHS.
They were established as forgeries.
As an investigator, you want to show,
one, the planning involved in forging them,
but also you've got to prove that they are false.
And that means going to the hospital,
going to the NHS,
and evidencing the fact that it is false,
the fact that Raj Patel doesn't exist.
Is there somebody called Raj Patel in the hospital?
Is he using somebody else's name, or is it just a work of fiction?
The fact that everything within that letter is false,
and the only people that can give you that evidence are the NHS.
Patrick's lying in intensive care not knowing what's caused this,
not knowing what the outcome's gonna be, or if he's gonna die.
MARK BROWN: It wasn't a COVID booster,
but nobody had any idea of what it was.
Medical staff wanted to know.
It was obvious now Patrick O'Hara had been poisoned,
had been left for dead.
Jenny, his partner, has no idea what's happening.
After he was admitted to hospital,
he had this pain in his arm where he had been injected.
And gradually, the tissue underneath the skin
became badly damaged and became infected,
and that created this condition called necrotising fasciitis.
You can lose the arm or you can die. It's really quite a dangerous thing.
It happens when you damage the skin, and bacteria inside the skin
start growing and start damaging the tissues under there.
And perhaps what happened when he injected the poison,
we presume under the skin,
was he created a locus where that damage could happen.
So whenever, as a doctor,
we find someone with necrotising fasciitis,
we'd urgently call a surgeon, ask for an assessment.
There'd be imaging happening, probably a CT scan or an MRI,
try and understand what's going on,
and the surgeon will try and remove the skin
as fast as possible to get on top of what's going on.
JOHN FITZPATRICK: In any investigation,
you start at the point of the crime
and work your way backwards a lot of the time.
And so it's like you are reversing what's happened in real time.
MARTIN EVANS: So, the police are desperate to identify
who this Raj Patel person is who's visited Patrick at home
and given him this injection.
Fortunately, Patrick lived in the centre of Newcastle,
St Thomas Street.
There was a wealth of CCTV in the case.
Both Premier Inn and Newcastle City Centre as a whole
have good coverage of CCTV cameras.
So they're able to see this very distinctive-looking character,
a person dressed in the long coat, the hat and the surgical mask,
walking on foot through the city centre.
Northumbria Police picked up Raj Patel
and followed him all the way through the street
and back to the Premier Inn.
JOHN FITZPATRICK: I think, when they started viewing
the footage within the Premier Inn, alarm bells was... started ringing.
When Northumbria Police examined the CCTV from the Premier Inn,
they were expecting to see Raj Patel,
a man of Indian descent.
They realised that he had checked in as John Chan,
and when they examined the CCTV,
they saw a man who looked of Chinese heritage.
They can see this chap who's checked in as John Chan
eating breakfast in the restaurant, going back to his room.
And then, a couple of hours later,
leaving his room dressed in the outfit
that we know that Raj Patel was wearing.
Police tracked John Chan through CCTV
and saw him going into the car park at the Premier Inn.
MARK BROWN: They found him and his white Toyota Yaris.
They thought they'd got the man.
Then they found out it had fake number plates.
They thought, "Who is this man?"
Patrick was being monitored on intensive care
with checks every hour, continuous monitoring.
They'd looked at his condition and seen that it was getting worse.
They made the decision to go back to theatre
to cut out more of the dead tissue
and make sure that his chances of survival were only increasing.
Doctors were trying to find out what had been injected into Patrick.
When you look at a poisoner,
the typical profile is somebody who wants to have insidious control,
and they want to dominate their victims.
They wanna watch them suffer,
but in quite a distant and cowardly manner.
But I have to say that Raj Patel
doesn't quite fit into this narrative
because he never intended to stick around.
You know, his plan was to give this injection and leave,
and distance himself as quickly as possible.
Medics are working round the clock to identify what this poison is.
There's some classic poisons, like arsenic.
Now, arsenic we use in medical therapy now.
So, people with cancer may receive arsenic
cos it's toxic and it helps kill the cancer.
But it was the classic poison,
the poisoner's poison of the 1700 and 1800s.
The classic poison you would kill someone with was always arsenic.
Thallium is, erm, is interesting.
It's a slow acting poison, really.
It destroys your bone marrow
but also damages your nerves and also makes you lose your hair.
So, classic of people have been exposed to thallium,
some days or weeks after the exposure,
you find they lose their hair,
they get pain in their fingertips from the nerve damage,
and they'll, early on, have problems with their gut.
Also, they might have diarrhoea, pain in their abdomen,
as the thallium is damaging the cells in the lining of the gut.
So, those are two very classic poisons.
But it wasn't any of these poisons.
From the outset, very unusual crime,
somebody to be injected with what now appears to be
a potentially life-threatening poison.
What's the motive, and who's the person responsible?
JOHN FITZPATRICK: The investigators established
that the number plates on the car were false.
They were the same make of car, but not the model,
and so again, because he was in the car in the city centre,
they were able to trace the car's movements on CCTV
and, er, ANPR.
Now, there's ANPR cameras,
that's automatic number plate recognition cameras,
on many main roads in Britain now.
So, they're able to track the route of the car,
and he heads south out of Newcastle, down towards the Teesside area,
which is about 40 miles away,
and eventually ends up in a very nice wealthy place
near Stockton called Ingleby Barwick.
And they're able to trace the car all the way back to a house,
and that house belongs to a man called Dr Thomas Kwan.
Northumbria Police, as part of their investigation,
spoke to Patrick and to Jenny.
And one of the things that Jenny said
was that the nurse, Raj Patel, was the same height as her son.
And when they spoke to Patrick and said,
"Have you been having disagreements or disputes with anybody?"
Because they're trying to find out why.
Why was Patrick targeted?
Patrick told them that he had had no disputes,
no disagreements, and wasn't in any sort of arguments with anyone.
The only thing that he could think of
was about a year ago there had been a disagreement,
and that was about money,
and that was with Jenny's son, Thomas Kwan.
So, the information from Thomas Kwan may have been given, er,
to police by Patrick, but that would only be a suspicion at the time.
And so they would be developing that as a line of investigation,
but also you've gotta follow where the evidence takes you,
and by tracing the car in CCTV to the house of Thomas Kwan.
So, that suspicion that Patrick had given to the police officers
who had attended the hospital was kind of cemented.
The police went to the hotel and obtained the details
of the person who had... who had booked in, John Chan.
However, the bank card they'd used to pay
for the room was not in that name.
And when they did the financial inquiries regarding the bank card,
it's at that stage, they realised,
that the person was Thomas Kwan
or certainly that he had paid for the hotel room.
That bank card had also been used to pay for parking
for the car that had been driven to Newcastle on false number plates.
And then when the police looked into Thomas Kwan's address,
they found that he owned a car, of the same make and model
that had travelled to Newcastle on the false plates.
And that led to Thomas Kwan being identified as a suspect.
Northumbria Police felt at that point
that they had enough to arrest Thomas Kwan.
So they attended his home address.
POLICE RADIO CHATTER
BANGING ON DOOR
OFFICER: Hello there, are you Dr Kwan? Yes.
Do you mind if we come in for a second, please?
Yes. Thank you.
It was 6:30 in the morning.
Police got to Kwan's house.
The time is now 06:30 hours, OK?
I'm arresting you for the offence
of the suspicion of the attempted murder.
You don't have to say anything but it may harm your defence
if you do not mention when questioned
something you later rely on in court.
Anything you do say may be given as evidence.
His demeanour was very calm.
He didn't say anything. He was... He was calm.
He wasn't shocked in any way.
You're now under arrest on suspicion of those offences, OK?
At the point the police contacted me,
they'd clearly identified a single suspect in Thomas Kwan.
They had a range of evidence which strongly suggested Thomas Kwan
as being the person responsible
for delivering the injection to Patrick.
The issue at that point
was nobody had any idea what was in that injection.
And from that it made it quite difficult at that point
to really try to understand
what Thomas Kwan's intentions were in delivering that injection.
And that was the real challenge at that point in the case.
It was fairly clear that Thomas Kwan was the person responsible,
but exactly what he'd done and why
was the difficulty as far as I saw it.
After Thomas Kwan's arrest and his interview,
he didn't cooperate, he didn't answer any questions.
It's not unusual for people to remain silent during the interview.
But it doesn't mean that we don't ask the questions.
And it can be frustrating for the person being interviewed,
and it can be frustrating for the legal advisor
within the interview as well.
But the interviewing officers won't get frustrated
because they've got a job to do.
They've gotta ask every question that's relevant,
because what you don't want is you don't want him
sort of coming up with answers within court at a later date
to questions that you haven't asked.
It's not unusual when people are suspected of serious crimes
that they remain silent during police interviews.
Obviously, you don't wanna incriminate yourself
by saying something that will give the police the evidence
they need to charge you.
The fact that Patrick was so ill, you know, you would use that
as part of your strategy during an interview.
You would pose questions with regards to, you know,
if you tell us what you injected him with,
you might be able to help.
You've got to remember this is at the beginning of the investigation.
And so a lot of the evidence that would've been recovered
would probably be after those interviews as well,
once everything's been put together.
So him and his legal advisor would not know the full extent
of the evidence against them at that point.
The fact that Thomas Kwan refused to participate in the investigation...
..it does raise red flags, because if he was innocent
and if he was horrified that somebody had tried to kill
his mum's partner of 20 years,
surely any normal person would've said, "I wasn't there.
"It wasn't me." And they would've denied it.
The fact that he said nothing, nothing at all,
would be quite concerning as an investigator.
By remaining silent, you're clearly not coming across
to the police as somebody who's got nothing to hide.
Thomas Kwan is an ordinary man.
He was born in Hong Kong,
and he came to the country when he was 13
and he went to boarding school.
And then studied medicine at Newcastle University.
His parents, I think, had divorced about 27 years before this incident.
My name is Angela, and Dr Kwan is one of my neighbours.
So, if I look out my window, I can see into the garden.
So we're all quite close.
I don't think he was very friendly with any of the neighbours.
They more or less kept themselves to themselves.
Just see them coming in and out sort of thing.
Never really saw him out playing with a child or anything.
It was all a bit strange.
My friend has had a couple of runs in with him.
So, her children, when they were young,
were playing football, the ball went over the garden,
and he tried to say the ball wasn't there,
but she caught him, stabbing it and throwing it in the bin.
And when the neighbour mentioned that, you know,
ooh, the press might like to hear about the local GP
acting in such a way, he turned up at her house
with some brand-new footballs and football kits.
So, is it relevant to the investigation?
Erm... probably not.
Erm, it's interesting,
it's interesting that he cares about what people think about him.
When you look at Thomas Kwan, he's 53,
he's got a lovely house and home and family.
He would be one of the people
that you would least suspect of being a criminal
because there isn't really an obvious motivation.
I first had Dr Kwan as my GP
around seven years ago
when I first moved to Sunderland.
It was my first choice of practice
cos it was the closest to where I live.
He seemed all right at first.
His room was definitely more lavish than other standard GP rooms.
I mean, the room that we're in right now
is your normal standard - table, bed, what have you.
But his was very lavish.
He'd had really big curtains
and a massive, like, pelmet at top of his window
and the draped curtains.
A huge oak table instead of your normal table
that doctors would have.
He had ornaments and things like that,
which kind of also made me think he likes finer things in life.
So, he was obviously concerned about his image.
He was concerned about his image as a doctor,
but then he was a GP and he was a well established GP in the area,
so it would be obvious that he's concerned
about what people think of him.
At first, my initial appointment was,
he was friendly, he was chatty, welcomed us to the surgery.
You know, nothing out of the ordinary.
Had a nice chat with him about any other health issues I had.
But that changed from my second visit
of him not speaking at all.
I say "at all", probably you'd get a "hello"
or a "how are you?" when you got into the room.
But after that he would just sit and type on his computer.
He wouldn't look at you or speak or anything.
And it was very daunting.
And that was obviously a big change from the first...
from the first appointment.
That was a huge change.
And it was just a bit, hm, that's a bit strange, bit odd,
a bit peculiar to experience.
He's a professional.
He has to engage with people
because he has to find out what's wrong with them.
He has to diagnose them with stuff,
but then he has to do his work as well.
So that just could be the way he works as a doctor.
Very much Jekyll and Hyde type of scenario.
And it carried on like that from every appointment I had with him.
He opened the door for me and walking past him...
was, I don't want to say intimidating...
..but there was something
that you could just feel that wasn't right.
You know when you walk past somebody and you just go,
"Oh, no, they're not nice."
You just don't feel comfortable walking past 'em.
It was like that. I just didn't feel right.
And I just thought, "I've gotta trust my gut.
"I need to see somebody else."
I ended up not feeling safe
because I didn't feel like he was listening to us properly.
And I just didn't feel right with him.
So, as a forensic psychiatrist,
I deal with a lot of criminal cases
and what really stands out to me
and what really makes this case unique is the offender profile.
So, you've got somebody who's well respected, a doctor,
a GP, that's the first thing.
Secondly, the method that he chose of poisoning is exceptionally rare.
But also the audacity and the risk-taking that he did,
the boldness of what he did,
going in disguise to see his own mother
and his mother's partner.
Thomas Kwan had had breakfast at the Premier Inn,
he'd sat there for 20 minutes, he'd enjoyed his breakfast,
he didn't appear to be stressed,
worried about anything that he was about to do.
And then he put on his disguise and became Raj Patel.
That, to me, demonstrates a real lack of empathy about caring,
and about the awful task...
the awful thing that he was about to do.
He just seemed to be so relaxed about it.
Externally, he looked calm,
but you never really know what somebody's feeling internally.
But it does feel like he's emotionally detached.
It feels like he's committed to his actions.
This doesn't strike me as somebody who's ambivalent, who's panicking,
who's trying to decide whether he wants to go through this or not.
It feels like he's already made his decision.
After Thomas Kwan injected Patrick
with what he believed was going to be a lethal poison,
he then gently saunters off
and walks into a Greggs, where he gets something to eat.
Now that's somebody who's really relaxed
and really at peace with himself.
They'd be emotionally aroused.
There's probably a lot of adrenaline going through their body.
They wouldn't be hungry.
So the very fact that Kwan could do this after,
from what he thinks he's just killed his mother's partner,
to me, shows a level of emotional detachment and calmness.
It seems like he's comfortable with what he's just done.
I think it's fair to say that most people in this situation
would be, you know, frightened.
Of course, this lack of fear is one of the key features of psychopathy.
But having said that,
I don't think I could definitively say that Kwan was a psychopath
because we don't know enough about the other core features
like manipulation, being very, very charming.
And also, psychopaths are like this
in all their actions throughout all of their lives,
not just on one particular event.
One big question in this case which everybody has asked is,
how come Patrick O'Hara or Jenny Leung
didn't recognise that it was Thomas Kwan?
Jenny didn't recognise that it was her son.
Patrick O'Hara didn't recognise that it was his partner's son.
This was somebody they knew.
So, how good was Thomas Kwan's disguise?
Clearly very good.
Why wouldn't his mother and Patrick recognise him?
But if you think of the context of the crime,
and how it was planned and how it was put together,
you know, the letters that were sent,
they looked original, they looked genuine.
If you think of the text that was sent the night before,
and if you think of the context at that time,
that people were getting COVID boosters...
So why would they think it? Why would they be suspicious?
The audacity of Kwan's actions.
You know, he put on this disguise,
he put on some make-up to darken his skin,
to change his identity,
but he went to his own mother's house
and he interacted with his mother's partner.
They'd been together for 20 years.
So obviously they were very familiar.
So just the boldness that it takes
to try and pull something like this,
and the naivety of all.
From my own experiences, it's really unusual
for people to go to such lengths to disguise who they are
and to, you know, change their name, their identity,
not just once, but twice, to use the identity of Raj Patel,
and then to use the identity of John Chan.
And coupled with the letters,
the false letters that Thomas Kwan wrote,
it's really unusual to go to that length.
And it wasn't just as if he planned all this the day before.
Patrick, of course, is still in the hospital
with a serious health condition,
And medics are battling to save his arm, save his life.
The problem is they don't know what they're dealing with.
They don't know what this poison is.
And, of course, the one person who does know what the poison is
is the person who administered it.
And that is the suspect, Thomas Kwan.
POLICE OFFICER: Dr Kwan? Dr Kwan? Hello.
You don't have to say anything but it may harm your defence
if you don't mention when questioned
something which you later rely on in court.
He was just the average doctor.
You know, I trusted him. I put my life in his hands.
I don't understand how he's done something like this.
I received contact later that same day
to explain that when they'd searched Thomas Kwan's house,
they had had to stop the search.
After Thomas Kwan's arrest, and his interview,
although he didn't cooperate and he didn't answer any questions,
one of the things that he did say to police officers
was to be careful about going into the garage.
Specialist search teams were called into the address
so that they could safely examine what was in the house.
I don't think police could quite believe what they found
when they went into the garage.
It was around early evening
and I got a call to say, "Terry, you need to get to Ingleby Barwick,
"there's something happened in this street."
So, we arrived at the street.
It was crazy, full of emergency services.
I work on my own, I'm a one-man band, and I get out
and I... I start taking photographs and filming whatever's happening.
So, in this quiet place of Ingleby Barwick,
residents suddenly see police officers turning up
in blue, sort of, chemical protective suits
and going into the house
of a person they think is a respectable, upstanding citizen.
Everyone was looking out the window. We'd all taken pictures.
It was exciting,
but we were actually getting more and more scared
the more the night was going on
and more tents were popping up and things like that.
So, we started knocking on doors, knocking on neighbours' doors.
Some would speak, some wouldn't,
but none of them knew what was going on.
Gossip would've been flying around
and, very likely, the police weren't telling them much at that stage.
Cos in reality, the police
didn't really know what they were dealing with either.
My initial suspicions were that it was some type of fire
or there'd been a fire and I'd missed it,
because the amount of fire engines and firemen on scene...
The neighbours were concerned.
They were asking us, you know, try and find out what's happened.
People look out for each other here.
There is a neighbourhood watch,
and obviously all the gardens, you can see what everybody's doing.
My neighbour rang me and said,
"You need to come over here and see what's going on."
They were putting big lights up, tents were popping up.
We knew it was a doctor, we knew something bad had gone on.
We actually thought he'd been killing people
and there was bodies in the garden, as the tents were coming up.
They were coming out of the house with boxes,
and there was just bright lights flashing everywhere.
When police conducted the home search,
they would cordon off an area,
and they'll tell people to either stay in their homes
or get out of their homes, depending on the severity.
But that would lead to speculation.
That would lead to people looking out their windows,
that would lead to people posting things on social media.
So, there is a fine line
between an investigation and sharing information.
We were looking out on one of her son's bedrooms.
Then when Terry the snapper were let in,
he was getting some photographs from another bedroom view
that other people couldn't get hold of.
When we're talking about a search of a premises,
you have to have a strategy.
"Is there anything forensically within that premises
"that we need to recover?"
"What are we looking for?"
"If we find items, how are we gonna preserve that evidence?"
And there'd be a digital forensic strategy as well
with regards to any digital devices like laptops or iPads.
We'd seen that they were getting changed into PPE.
Not just normal PPE.
I've arrived at jobs before and I've seen PPE
and, you know, suits that they have to wear for different incidents.
This was, like, you know...
They looked as if they were gonna get ready to go into space.
It was as if there was, like, some explosive in the house
and they didn't know, or they weren't aware of what it was,
as to how careful they were going, you know?
I mean, they're carrying trays in the house,
and bringing trays out, things on the trays
and placing them very carefully and it was...
You know, it's like nothing I've ever seen.
The officers who attended
found the false number plates that had been used on the car
to travel to Newcastle.
It was quite clear by that stage
that we could establish that Thomas Kwan
was the individual who delivered the injection into Patrick's arm.
The question was, what it was that had been used in the injection,
but also whether there was any motive for doing so.
Kwan's house looked ordinary.
It looked spotless. It was clean.
It was just a normal house.
But as they move through the house,
they found something far more sinister.
Upon finding what appeared to be harmful chemicals
and documents relating to poisons,
those officers then had to stop, leave the address.
Police, they've obviously had this comment from Kwan
about being careful about the garage.
and it's clear quite early on
that he has got a big stockpile of chemicals.
Specialist search teams then had to be called in
in order to conduct that search safely,
given the nature of the poisons that were being recovered.
Patrick laid in intensive care for five days.
The doctors that were treating him were racing against time
to try and identify the substance that had been injected into him.
If the police are thinking about poison being present in a house,
they'd be careful when they walk in.
They're gonna take precautions. Those precautions are standard.
Don't wanna blunder in and knock things over
and not understand what's going on in the house.
From a poisoning perspective, there's another element as well.
You don't want to touch things which are poisons.
You don't want to knock bottles over,
you don't want to release gases.
There's lots of things you don't really want to do around a poison.
Therefore, going in slowly and carefully, fully protected,
is a very sensible approach.
When they went into the house, they found a number of different poisons.
And those poisons included arsenic and thallium,
and sulphuric acid.
Sulphuric acid is a very strong acid,
which will cause damage in direct effect.
If you inject it into yourself,
or you spill it on yourself, or you swallow it,
you really get terrible damage in the skin
or the lining of your gut as well.
Liquid mercury in itself is not particularly toxic.
It's quite hard to get into your body.
The disaster time of mercury
is when you get a big dose into your body through inhaling it.
Cyanide is present in lots of chemical reactions.
You find it in school chemistry departments.
You find it in industry. It's a mitochondrial poison.
So this is a mitochondria, the energy parts of your cells.
Our cells work because this part of the cell
is producing lots of energy.
If the mitochondria stop working, it's very toxic.
You'd get ill quite quickly.
And they found the components to make ricin.
We worked with the police to find an expert
who could comment upon both Patrick's injuries,
but also the substances that had been recovered
from Thomas Kwan's address.
And whether any of those substances
were likely to have caused Patrick's injuries.
The Chief Medical Officer
at the Defence Science Technology Laboratory
was able to tell us that ricin was unlikely
to have been the substance that was injected into Patrick.
Police searched and scoured through this garage full of chemicals,
and they found iodomethane.
Of all the substances that had been found in Thomas Kwan's address,
iodomethane was the most likely candidate
as the substance that had been used against Patrick.
This was a real breakthrough. It was a eureka moment.
Tellingly, the police had also recovered an empty syringe
in a grip-seal plastic food bag
that was labelled with the chemical formula for iodomethane.
So, putting together this report and the recovery of that syringe
with that chemical symbol on it
meant that we could safely infer
that the chemical that had been used against Patrick was iodomethane.
They find a cache of books and documents about poisons
and chemicals and murder.
They find that he's got a book
from the National Police Centre For Excellence
on murder investigations.
They look at his computer,
they find a huge number of searches being carried out
about how to kill people with poisons.
They find a terrorist handbook.
They find a book which is called the Mujahideen Poison Handbook,
which is how to kill people with certain chemicals.
I was impressed about the number of poisons he had
and the variety and the kind of potency of the poisons.
These chemicals are not things you can buy very easily.
In January 2023, he set up a shell company.
He used the address of his surgery where he worked legitimately.
And through that shell company, he was able to buy poisons.
He purported to be a researcher
and that he needed those poisons for his research.
In the garage, the photographs indicate
there was a lot of stuff in there
which must have made it quite difficult
to go around preparing poisons.
May have been the reason why he decided
not to go down the ricin route
because you would want to have a very clean, careful environment
to do work with ricin.
Perhaps with cyanide as well.
Perhaps going for something like iodomethane or sulfuric acid,
cos it's neat and in a bottle, can just be drawn out with a syringe.
Iodomethane, it's a really uncommon poison.
There's not a large amount of information about it.
We don't have much experience of it.
I can assure you, if you come to hospital,
nobody's thinking about this as a potential poison
you might have been exposed to.
So turning up the hospital, having had this injected into you
is so left field.
Even a toxicologist, someone like myself
who thinks day in, day out, of all the poisons out there,
I'm not gonna be thinking of this poison.
It was apparent that he'd been doing some research online.
There was some material found on computers and telephones
that showed Thomas Kwan had been conducting extensive research
into how to produce ricin,
how much of it would be used to kill somebody.
We know he'd been trying to manufacture ricin.
But of course, the problem with ricin
is to administer it, you put yourself at risk as well.
And clearly he didn't want to do that.
So perhaps iodomethane was the perfect chemical in his mind,
because he could administer it without risk to himself,
and it would make it extremely difficult
for the medics treating Patrick to know what they were dealing with.
If you look at the compound, it's a very simple compound.
It's simply a methane, which is a single carbon,
three hydrogen ions, and an iodide.
It's about as small a molecule as you can imagine.
So if I was going to take a blood sample from a patient
and look for a poison, generally, we are looking for multiple things.
We're not looking for this at all.
So unless there's a particular reason to go looking for it,
again, you wouldn't detect it.
So he's come across a poison which is quite hard to detect.
If it's just in a routine thing -
you're doing a postmortem or a sample you sent to a lab
saying, "This person's had a poison, can you find anything?" -
they're probably gonna say "No, there's nothing in there."
There have been a few cases in literature.
The majority of the cases are industrial accidents
when people have either inhaled it
because it's been released in the factory,
or their PPE, their overalls have leaked,
and actually there's been exposure through the skin,
they've absorbed it through the skin, and become quite unwell.
The likelihood is that he chose iodomethane
because it was such an unusual chemical to use.
It's something that medics have got no experience of treating, really.
So, by using that chemical, he made the likelihood
that he would succeed in his plan to kill Patrick even more likely.
The chain of events started by Thomas Kwan would've led to death.
Patrick may not have survived this
if the surgeons hadn't made the right decisions, which they did.
They took them to theatre.
They would've been cutting away tissue
until the point that it would be bleeding.
Cos bleeding tissue is healthy tissue.
The problem is, there's a balance
between cutting away enough to clear all the infection -
which they did, and they had to do -
versus cutting away a little bit too much,
which will leave an even greater level of disability later.
How dangerous is this poison?
Not many humans have been exposed to it,
so we don't really have very good information.
But Patrick did badly because he got necrotising fasciitis,
which is a complication of how it was given to him
rather than the actual poison itself.
Even with all of the expertise being applied,
Patrick still could have died.
Thankfully, Patrick survived.
Policewoman came into the streets knocking on everyone's doors,
telling us not to leave the house,
to keep the doors shut, and all the windows shut.
Cos obviously he had,
supposed to have had a very dangerous ricin poison
in the garage.
So we were all quite upset, actually,
because we felt that he'd put us into danger.
One of the aspects of this case
is the danger that he caused to himself, but also to others.
He was concocting all sorts of poisons and lotions in his own home,
in the garage.
He's a father. He's got a wife.
Any one of them could have gone into that garage unsuspectingly
and touched a poison
or hurt themselves or others through that.
My husband was working away at the time,
and the next day, he rang me and asked why our house was on news.
The news of his arrest was everywhere. It was huge.
I think a lot of people were just shocked, cos they seen him a lot,
they had a lot of patients at that surgery.
Then when it come out about attempted murder,
that's when it really kicked off in the town.
When I'd found out that this guy tried to kill his mother's partner
and, you know, inject him with something to kill him,
you don't think about a doctor doing something like that.
You know, they're supposed to be trusted professionals.
So it's, erm... It was quite shocking.
This was a GP who'd disguised himself
to give a fake COVID jab to somebody he knew,
somebody who was his mother's partner,
knowing that it wasn't a COVID jab, it was poison.
GPs are incredibly trusted people.
You trust your life with 'em.
It would've been really difficult for his patients to realise
that they were being treated by a man who was willing to murder.
As investigators, we follow the evidence.
Is this a targeted attack on an individual?
And if it is a targeted attack on an individual, why?
What is the motive?
Patrick O'Hara was a 71-year-old guy who's leading a normal life.
Why would he be targeted in such a way?
Because the perpetrator of the crime
left so many bits of evidence for the investigators to follow,
I would imagine fairly quickly they put the story together.
The police were able to gather evidence
that showed there'd been a long-running dispute
between Thomas Kwan and his mother, Jenny.
It dates back almost 30 years, when his parents got divorced,
and he had accused his mother
of withdrawing a million pounds from his father's bank account
and then divorcing him.
And there was clearly a belief
that he had not got what he was entitled to.
And I think that was at the heart of the issue
that he had with his mother over money.
The relationship between Kwan and his mother,
to me, it seems very conditional, very transactional.
He felt slighted by his mother.
And money was one thing that he could argue about.
He, himself, was wealthy.
He was trying to buy a house for two million pounds.
Cos let's not forget, this is a man in his 50s.
He's an established doctor.
But he seems to still view his mother
as a potential source of income.
In Chinese culture, the eldest son inherits the estate.
Kwan was clearly furious
when his younger brother inherited his father's estate.
Thomas' mother had put in her will
the fact that Patrick could live in the house after she died,
and therefore, he had some kind of ownership of that house.
He saw Patrick as the villain.
He was entitled to inherit his mother's estate.
This perceived injustice festered for years
and led to Kwan writing to his mother,
insisting that she make him executor of her estate.
His mother's property in Newcastle
was worth a little bit more than £200,000.
It wasn't life-changing sums.
And I think it was more about his belief
that he had a right to the inheritance,
rather than the amount itself.
He felt slighted in the fact
that Patrick had got access to the will,
and that also that the siblings would probably get an equal share.
So I think Kwan thought that he was entitled to something
as the eldest son, from the estate,
and there is a sense that he wasn't getting what he deserved.
In one letter he wrote to his mother, he'd said,
"I should get the majority of your will."
Erm, "I'm the one that you love most."
In November 2022, things reached a boiling point
and Kwan went to his mother's house in Newcastle,
forced his way in,
began shouting and becoming aggressive
and demanding answers.
It got so heated that Patrick and Jenny did call the police,
who arrived and asked whether they wanted to press charges.
Jenny decided that she didn't
because she was worried about her son's career.
I think this shows that, in certain circumstances,
if his buttons are pushed,
Kwan is somebody who can be quite explosive, quite volatile.
And according to him, there's a bit of bitterness and resentment
because she hadn't showed him enough love growing up.
It's hard to know where the truth actually lies.
It clearly established a motive for Thomas Kwan.
And this was useful for us as a prosecution team
because it set out why he would seek to kill Patrick.
I do think that the main motivation behind Kwan's actions
are simply greed.
He wanted more money, even though he was quite wealthy.
And this sense of entitlement. He deserved this money.
But I also think, to a degree, there was an element
of him wanting to seek some sort of retribution or revenge
to his mother
because there had been some recent bad blood between them,
they had fallen out.
And it feels like he's doing something personal to her
by attacking her partner.
The amount of planning that Thomas Kwan did
dated back a long, long time.
In 2020, he gave his mum a laptop.
It was installed with spyware so that he could actually watch them.
It was like a covert camera in their home,
and he could also monitor their emails
and their financial transactions.
And then you go to November 2023,
which is when he first sent the very first NHS letter
asking, or suggesting, a COVID injection.
Then in December 2023, he cleared his diary for January.
DR DAS: And in January 2024,
Kwan started researching poisons like ricin.
So, it really feels like he was... His plan was crystallising.
We know that before he went to Patrick's home
to carry out the attempted murder,
he carried out a reconnaissance mission.
So, he and his wife, and his young son,
checked into the Premier hotel in Newcastle.
He no doubt gave his family some excuses
as to why they were gonna spend the night in Newcastle.
But he could check out his route.
And then, the day before he injected Patrick,
he sent a text reminder
posing as Raj Patel, the community nurse.
And to do that, he ordered an anonymous sim,
because, obviously, had he sent a text message from his own phone,
Patrick would've immediately realised what was going on.
During the police investigation,
Northumbria Police did actually uncover two other methods
that Thomas Kwan must have considered
in administrating this poison to Patrick.
They found letters.
One letter was supposed to be from a gentlemen's wine club,
and another letter was to provide free meals and free drinks
to Patrick.
Obviously, Thomas Kwan was actually considering
whether or not to lace the wine or lace the food
that he was going to provide to Patrick.
If he sent wine or he sent food that was laced,
Patrick may not have eaten it.
Jenny could have eaten it, or they could've given it away.
You know, there's no guarantee that Patrick's going to eat it.
And if he is going to eat it, when is he going to eat it?
Because Thomas Kwan wanted the money straightaway.
He never sent those letters,
so he obviously decided that, under the guise of the COVID injection,
he could probably do a better, more lethal job.
As a forensic psychiatrist, part of my role as an expert witness
is to give evidence
to decide if a defendant is in control of their actions.
If they have criminal culpability.
For example, if it's related to mental illness.
And looking at this case, I can say unequivocally
Thomas Kwan was definitely in control of his actions,
and I think his pre-planning,
and putting in all this time and effort, proves that beyond doubt.
You have kind of a juxtaposition between him committing a crime
but not being a criminal.
And so, whilst the planning was detailed and extensive,
it was also a little bit amateurish in terms of criminality.
A little naive in relation to sort of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs
for the police to follow in the end, which he did.
When Thomas Kwan was spoken to,
there was a real lack of remorse shown throughout.
After he gave Patrick the injection, he quite casually went to Greggs.
He casually drove home.
He's never apologised,
never shown any sign of weakness or regret at what he's done.
You know, even after arrest and being remanded in prison
and facing a trial for attempted murder,
he wrote to his wife and mentioned the fact
that Patrick may seek compensation for his injuries.
And the tone of that letter and the contents of that letter
was quite arrogant
with regards to, you know, "one old man's compensation
"for ruining three people's lives", along those lines.
From that letter,
he seems to be portraying himself as the victim,
himself and his family, as being the victims of this old man,
who is Patrick, rather than the other way round.
Patrick nearly died.
The lack of remorse, the lack of acknowledgement
about the level and the gravity of what he'd done,
it is unusual with regards to...
You know, we have to bear in mind that he was a doctor,
and he wasn't a seasoned criminal.
Having that level of arrogance and entitlement,
I would say, in his circumstances, very unusual.
He denied the charges of attempted murder,
and kept on denying them until the court case,
and the trial opened.
Kwan went to trial at Newcastle Crown Court
in October 2024,
where Kwan denied the charges of attempted murder.
The barristers were present at court,
witnesses had been arranged to attend,
and the trial began.
Thomas Kwan was in the dock, and the prosecution barrister
delivered his opening speech to the jury,
describing to them the evidence they were likely to hear,
and what the prosecution's case was about what had happened to Patrick.
From the outset, Kwan had denied the charges.
When he was first arrested, his legal team
said he would vehemently contest the charges
and deny attempted murder.
There was a lot of evidence against Kwan.
There was the CCTV showing him leaving the scene of the crime.
There was all the material found at his home.
There was the copies of the letters that he'd sent to Patrick.
There was the books about poison. There were the chemicals.
So the weight of evidence against him was extremely strong.
I think sometimes when defendants get into court
and the reality of a trial hits them,
er, they can sometimes have a change of heart.
We didn't get very far into the trial
when Thomas Kwan indicated that he wished to change his plea,
and on the seventh of October,
he asked to have the indictment put to him again,
and he entered a guilty plea to the charge of attempted murder.
At that point, the prosecution's role changes,
and our job is then to present the case to the judge
so that they can make a determination
as to what the appropriate sentence was.
The prosecution was clear
that what had driven this crime was greed,
and greed for the sake of greed.
An extraordinarily audacious crime.
We needed to make clear to the judge the level of planning in this case,
the number of steps that Thomas Kwan had taken
to disguise what had happened.
It was also important to highlight to the judge
that this was an attempt to murder Patrick for financial gain.
Thomas Kwan's ultimate aim was to remove Patrick as an obstacle
to his perceived right to his inheritance from his mother,
and the law recognises that murdering someone for financial gain
is a particularly serious offense.
Another important factor was the location of the offense.
The offense was committed in Patrick's own home,
and we should all have the right to feel safe in our own home.
Patrick was in court surrounded by family members.
The impact on him was extraordinary.
So, not only the physical scars, which were really quite bad...
I mean, he had part of his arm removed.
He lived with the scars and the pain for the rest of his life.
But also the emotional scars.
Hearing Patrick's victim impact statement in court
was incredibly moving for everybody in court, I think.
He talked about how his life would never be the same again.
He talked about the psychological damage
which had been caused to him.
And everybody just listened.
He described himself as being like a shell of his former self.
His confidence has gone.
His relationship with Jenny sadly broke up.
It's hard to overstate the impact
that this attempted murder had on him,
and will have for the rest of his life.
During the sentencing, Kwan was very calm.
In fact, he was calm throughout the whole court proceedings.
The judge jailed him for 31 years and five months
and told him, "You won't be out of jail until you're in your 70s."
The judge reflected in her comments that Thomas Kwan,
it wasn't just about the money for him,
it was about the money to which he felt entitled,
and that he was prepared to kill to get that money.
We were waiting on the afternoon for his sentencing.
I wouldn't think I'd have a neighbour
that was capable of planning murder on somebody,
especially a doctor.
He did all of this stuff, you know, to harm his mother's partner,
and it just doesn't make sense.
We're quite shocked he got 31 years,
but then, when you think he was a doctor,
and the long planning that he's done, for murder,
that's why he got so long.
The outcome of this case was the culmination of months of hard work
between the Crown Prosecution Service
and Northumbria Police.
And I'm pleased that we were able to deliver justice for Patrick.
Obviously, this year has been horrendous
and I would hope it would never happen to anybody else.
And at the moment, I'm still recovering,
especially from the post trauma - that was really bad -
and er... I'm just, er, seeing a psychologist and everything else
to try to get through all this trauma.
In 31 years, he might be really old,
but still get out and have a little bit of a life left, if he's lucky.
Thomas Kwan was a medical doctor, people trusted him,
and he has abused that trust
and undermined the trust that we all have
in our doctors, nurses, medical staff.
And the fact that he used the identity
of Raj Patel, a community nurse,
chipped away at that trust and confidence.
And I do feel that that has had a part to play in his sentencing
because he used his medical prowess, his knowledge,
he used all of the information that he had to hand
to commit his crimes.
So his background and his knowledge
were part and parcel of the way that he was able to plan,
and the way that he was able to actually commit this crime.
I've covered many, many big stories, nationally and locally.
Dr Kwan is gonna be one of them that I'll never forget.
You know, the lengths that he went to
to try and get away with what he did is unimaginable.
So, following the sentencing, his wife spoke to the media,
and she gave what was quite an extraordinary statement, really.
"I can't find a man to compare to Tom.
"In his heart, he is very, very good.
"I don't blame him, I love him, trust him,
"and will be here for him until the end.
"I'm going to be buried alongside him.
"Our son goes with me to prison to see Tom.
"I tell him everything and I hope he will understand his dad."
She said, "He felt very lonely and helpless all his life.
"He was looking for his mother's love and never found it.
"He always believed that she loved others more than her own child."
I'm not sure she necessarily believes
that he's innocent of what he ultimately admitted to,
but I think she thinks, like he does,
that this was his mother's fault.
She vows to stand by him. Only time will tell if she does.
A question that I ask myself is, had Kwan not been caught,
could he have gone on to kill somebody else?
I don't think he's capable of extreme violence,
so I don't think he's physically dangerous,
but absolutely, I think he lacks the moral boundaries, the empathy,
which would allow him to do something clandestine and secret
like poisoning.
How could someone who had gone through medical school,
who'd spent all that time working as a GP,
flip, and go from being one of the guys helping people
to someone trying to harm someone?
There's no case in my career in the CPS that's comparable to this.
The lengths Thomas Kwan went to to commit this offence
and to try and hide his offending were unparalleled.
Donning a disguise such that he fooled his own mother
as to who it was who was in her address,
is something I've not seen before,
and I very much doubt I'll see it again.