Disguised doctor injected mother's partner with poison, court hears

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 heard yesterday.

- Mark Brown

Dr 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 case against Kwan at Newcastle crown court.

Kwan, 53, is accused of attempting to murder O'Hara, his mother's long-term partner and a "potential impediment" to his inheritance.

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."