Strange But True Crime: The GP Thomas Kwan who poisoned his mother's partner

BBC News

27-04-2025

When police set up a cordon around the house of a 53-year-old GP they suspected of injecting his mother's partner with poison, BBC Look North's Peter Harris was soon there. Dr Thomas Kwan had put on a disguise, pretended to be a community nurse and given Patrick O'Hara a jab the unsuspecting 71-year-old believed to be a coronavirus booster.
"You wouldn't expect this to happen around here," said a dog walker watching the firefighters and police officers filling a street in Ingleby Barwick in the north-east of England.Quite what had happened nobody seemed to know but, as I arrived at the cordon separating the emergency services from the public, flashing blue lights illuminating the night sky, it was obvious something highly unusual was unfolding.These were not just firefighters I could see. They were dressed head to toe in luminous protective hazmat suits, the stuff they wear if they're expecting toxic and dangerous chemicals.
I describe the wild scene in detail in Dr Nope, an episode in the new podcast Strange But True Crime on BBC Sounds.
The team in the hazmat suits came and went from a large detached house and the dog walker was right - you really wouldn't expect this to happen among the densely packed, modern executive homes of a private housing estate in the suburbs of Stockton-on-Tees.I live nearby and friends with a house overlooking the scene had been texting me to ask if I knew what was going on. I'm a reporter, after all. Not for the first time, I hadn't a clue.My first guess was that this would be terrorism-related but the police had ruled that out even before I recorded my report for BBC Look North's late news bulletin.
Next morning, I returned, and all was quiet. But there was news.The man who lived in the house was a Sunderland GP, a family doctor, and he'd been charged with attempted murder. His name was Dr Thomas Kwan.That was intriguing enough, but nothing could prepare me for the e-mail that was about to land on my phone.Kwan had just made his first appearance at Newcastle Magistrates Court and a colleague there passed on what had been said.The GP, he wrote, had attempted to murder his mother's partner, a man in his 70s, by dressing in disguise, posing as a nurse and then injecting him with poison, pretending it was a Covid jab.
Apparently, it was something do with money, over his mother's will, and he wanted her partner out of the way.As is usual, we were not allowed report most of this at that early stage in the criminal proceedings, and most of the neighbours in Ingleby Barwick remained unaware of the extraordinary plot unfolding around them.In his detached garage, Kwan had been keeping an array of lethal chemicals.Among them were ingredients that could be used for making ricin - a scheduled chemical weapon - along with liquid mercury, sulphuric acid and arsenic.In a green plastic bag, he'd kept a glass container with a flesh-eating pesticide in it, along with a hypodermic needle and a syringe. This, it turned out, was most likely the substance he'd injected into his unsuspecting victim.
To add to the intrigue, though, Kwan had pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and so it was that in October I was at Newcastle Crown Court as his trial began.Kwan, a slight, balding, bespectacled man in his 50s, sat impassively in the dock as the details of his crime were read out, including the jaw-dropping moment when his fake ID card was displayed on the screens around the court room.He had taken a picture of himself dressed in a wig, a false beard and glasses - part of the disguise he had used to hoodwink his mother and her partner, Patrick O'Hara, into believing he was in fact a community nurse called Raj Patel when he had turned up at their Newcastle home to deliver the Covid jab that was actually poison.
After listening to the prosecution outlining their case for a couple of hours, I couldn't work out how Kwan could possibly expect to get away with it. And, by this time, it turned out, Kwan had reached the same conclusion. He changed his plea to guilty.Driven by greed and a thirst for revenge on his mother regarding the details of her will, he was jailed for 31 years and is likely to die in prison. His victim, mercifully, is on the mend, but traumatised by the unprovoked attack from someone he thought was an NHS nurse.At the start of the trial, the prosecutor had told the jury that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction and that this was one such case. He wasn't wrong.The residents of Ingleby Barwick weren't wrong either, when the police swooped on their estate that February night.You really wouldn't expect that to happen around here.
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