AFTER receiving a letter from the NHS in November 2023, telling him he had been selected for a home visit by a community nurse to administer a COVID booster jab, Patrick O’Hara felt comforted.
A second letter included a QR code that took Patrick to a website with a medical questionnaire to complete then a text message fixed the appointment for the following day.
Thomas Kwan brazenly hatched a plan to kill his mother’s partner over an inheritance dispute[/caption]
The doctor disguised himself to trick his mother and her partner at their home[/caption]
Patrick O’Hara was given a painful injection he thought was a Covid booster jab[/caption]
But, unknown to him, the 71-year-old had invited a murderer into his home to give him an injection of lethal poison.
The heavily disguised community nurse was actually his partner’s aggrieved son – a respected and wealthy GP and family man living in Stockton.
The extraordinary account of how and why Thomas Kwan brazenly set about killing Patrick in front of Kwan’s own mother, Jenny, is told in Monday’s Channel 5 documentary Inheritance, Murder in the Family: The Thomas Kwan Affair.
On the day of the poisoning, Kwan, 53, had booked into a Premier Inn in the centre of Newcastle and a couple of hours later walked out, dressed in a nurse’s outfit.
He had darkened his skin colour, wore a false moustache, wig, tinted glasses and a medical face mask and gloves as he made his way to Patrick and Jenny’s house.
In broken English, with an Asian accent, he introduced himself to Patrick as Raj Patel and took some blood samples.
At that point Jenny came into the room and, oblivious to the fact that she was talking to her son, asked him if he wouldn’t mind taking her blood pressure, which he did.
When he gave Patrick his COVID booster jab it was immediately so painful that it caused Patrick to yell, “Bloody hell!”
Kwan made a swift departure and Patrick started to worry because his arm was very sore.
Eventually he decided to go to his local hospital to get it looked at.
CCTV footage obtained by Northumbria police shows Kwan leaving the Premier Inn hotel[/caption]
Police were able to piece together Kwan’s movements in the days leading to the crime[/caption]
“The doctor thought it was a bit unusual but that it wasn’t uncommon to reject the injection,” says Dr Will Rush, Consultant in Emergency Medicine.
“That’s what we want the body to do, so it can gain immunity to a foreign thing. When it’s a bit sore we think it might be an infection so why not give him some antibiotics to see if it helps settle things down?”
But two days later the pain was intense and there was nasty blistering on his skin.
He took himself to A&E where the medics realised that this was not a simple reaction to the vaccine. Something else was going on. But what?
“He was diagnosed with necrotising fasciitis – a kind of flesh-eating infection that goes deep and spreads quickly,” says Will. “But the incidence of getting that infection in an otherwise well person who has just had an injection is vanishingly small.”
Lying in intensive care, Patrick and Jenny feared for his life.
Baffled doctors and nurses started to look at the NHS letters Patrick received, and it quickly became apparent that there was no Raj Patel or community nursing team and the letters were fake.
At that point the police were contacted and there were lots of questions that needed answering.
Who was this would-be murderer? What was their motive? Was this a one-off or a possible serial killer?
“Northumbria Police asked Patrick if he had been having any disagreements or disputes with anyone and the only thing he could think of was about a year ago when there had been a disagreement about money with Jenny’s son, Thomas Kwan,” says Parm Sandhu, former Chief Superintendent Metropolitan Police.
“Jenny added that Raj Patel was the same height as her son.”
Fortunately for the police, there was a wealth of CCTV footage that enabled them to track Kwan’s movements and build a strong case against him.
Working backwards, they saw him arriving at the Premier Inn where he checked in as John Chan, later leaving in his disguise as Raj Patel and making his way to Patrick and Jenny’s house.
His car at the hotel garage turned out to have false number plates but, in the aftermath of the injection, the vehicle was tracked to a
wealthy area of Stockton in Teesside called Ingleby Barwick, which attracted affluent, middle-class professionals to its new-build red-brick homes.
One of them was Dr Thomas Kwan.
Shocking discovery
Thomas Kwan was arrested in his pyjamas last year in February[/caption]
Police tents at the scene of an investigation at Kwan’s house[/caption]
On 5 February 2024, he was arrested and his unusually calm demeanour is revealed via police body cam shown in the documentary.
During questioning at the police station he was uncooperative, answering “no comment” throughout.
But he did tell police to be careful about the garage, when they searched his home.
There they found it was full of lethal chemicals including arsenic, Valium, sulphuric acid, liquid mercury and cyanide as well as the components to make ricin.
Also found were the fake car number plates and examination of his laptop revealed searches about chemicals and how to kill people with undetectable poisons.
The chemicals found were not things you could buy very easily.
“In January 2023, he had set up a shell company,” says Parma Sandhu. “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 who needed them for his research.”
Meanwhile, Patrick was on his fifth day in intensive care and doctors were racing against time to try to identify the substance that had been injected into him.
A medical expert considered that ricin was unlikely and that of all the substances found in the garage, Iodomethane was the most likely to have been used against Patrick.
Tellingly, police also recovered an empty syringe in a grip seal plastic food bag that was labelled with the chemical formula for Iodomethane.
“It is a really uncommon form of poison,” says toxicologist, Professor Michael Eddleston.
“We don’t have much experience of it and I can assure you that in a hospital nobody is thinking about Iodomethane as a potential poison that someone may have been exposed to. It’s so left field.
“Even a toxicologist like myself would not be thinking of this out of the many it might have been. He had come across a poison
that was quite hard to detect.”
Will Rush adds: “Patrick may not have survived if the surgeons hadn’t made the right decisions.
“They cut away tissue to the point where it would be bleeding because bleeding tissue is healthy.
It is a really uncommon form of poison. We don’t have much experience of it and I can assure you that in a hospital nobody is thinking about Iodommethane as a potential poison that someone may have been exposed to.
Professor Michael Eddleston
“But the problem is the balance between cutting away enough to get all the infection, which they did, and cutting away a little bit too much which would leave an even greater level of disability later.
“Thankfully, he survived.”
Police were able to gather evidence that showed there had been a long-running dispute between Thomas Kwan and his mother, Jenny which dated back almost 30 years, when his parents got divorced.
He had accused his mother of withdrawing a million pounds from his father’s bank account before divorcing him.
He was further incensed that she had created a will in 2021 granting Patrick, her partner of 21 years, a share in her Newcastle home.
In a letter to her, Kwan had said that he should get the majority of her estate and that he was the one that she loved the most.
She was unaware that the laptop he had given her a few years earlier had spyware installed which enabled him to track her finances.
“Thomas Kwan was an ordinary man with a lovely home and family,” says Parma. “He was born in Hong Kong and came to England when he was 13 where he studied medicine at Newcastle University.
“He would be one of the people that you would least suspect to have been a criminal, because there isn’t really an obvious motivation.”
But his neighbours described him as being unfriendly and some of his patients thought him cold.
“My friend had a couple of run-ins with him,” says his neighbour, Angela Jones.
“Her children were playing football one day and their ball went over his garden fence and he tried to say it wasn’t there but she caught him stabbing it and throwing it in the bin.”
One of his former patients, Sarah Robson, remembers: “I first had Dr Kwan as a GP around seven years ago when I first moved into Sunderland.
“At my initial appointment, he was friendly and chatty, but that changed in my second visit when he barely spoke at all.
“It was a bit odd. It was a Jekyll and Hyde scenario and it carried
on like that with every appointment I had with him. Something didn’t feel right about him. I wasn’t comfortable.”
Dr Sohom Das, a consultant forensic psychiatrist, was intrigued by Kwan. “I deal with a lot of criminal cases and what makes this case unique, is the offender profile,” he says.
“You’ve got somebody who is well respected, a doctor, that’s the first thing. Secondly, the method that he chose – poisoning – is exceptionally rare.
“Also the audacity and the risk and boldness of what he did – going in disguised to deceive his own mother and her partner – is so audacious, yet he seemed emotionally detached.
“I think the main motivation behind his actions was simply greed. He wanted more money, even though he was quite wealthy, and felt he was entitled to it as the eldest child.
“But I also think there is an element of him wanting to seek some sort of retribution or revenge on his mother.”
Despite the overwhelming evidence against him, Kwan denied the charge of attempted murder right up to the trial.
Chris Atkinson, Head of the Complex Casework Unit, CPS North East, recalls: “We didn’t get very far into the trial when Thomas Kwan indicated that he wished to change his plea.
“On the 7 October, he asked to have the indictment put to him again
and he entered a guilty plea.”
Kwan remained calm throughout the court proceedings, even when the judge jailed him for 31 years and five months.
Patrick has continued to live with the physical and emotional scars of the traumatic incident. His victim impact statement that was read out in court was incredibly moving.
He talked about how his life would never be the same again, describing himself as being a shell of his former self and that all his confidence had gone.
His relationship with Jenny had sadly broken up.
Following the sentencing, Kwan’s wife spoke to the media and gave an extraordinary statement.
“I can’t find a man to compare to Tom,” she said. “In his heart he is very, very good. I don’t blame him. I love him and trust him and will be here for him until the end.
“I am going to be buried alongside him. Our son goes with me to prison to see Tom. I tell him everything and I hope that he will understand his dad. 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.”
Who are the UK’s worst serial killers?
THE UK’s most prolific serial killer was actually a doctor.
Here’s a rundown of the worst offenders in the UK.
- British GP Harold Shipman is one of the most prolific serial killers in recorded history. He was found guilty of murdering 15 patients in 2000, but the Shipman Inquiry examined his crimes and identified 218 victims, 80 per cent of whom were elderly women.
- After his death Jonathan Balls was accused of poisoning at least 22 people between 1824 and 1845.
- Mary Ann Cotton is suspected of murdering up to 21 people, including husbands, lovers and children. She is Britain’s most prolific female serial killer. Her crimes were committed between 1852 and 1872, and she was hanged in March 1873.
- Amelia Sach and Annie Walters became known as the Finchley Baby Farmers after killing at least 20 babies between 1900 and 1902. The pair became the first women to be hanged at Holloway Prison on February 3, 1903.
- William Burke and William Hare killed 16 people and sold their bodies.
- Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe was found guilty in 1981 of murdering 13 women and attempting to kill seven others between 1975 and 1980.
- Dennis Nilsen was caged for life in 1983 after murdering up to 15 men when he picked them up from the streets. He was found guilty of six counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder and was sentenced to life in jail.
- Fred West was found guilty of killing 12 but it’s believed he was responsible for many more deaths.
