Nurse cleared over hospital deaths: ‘I pleaded with police to find killer’

Rebecca Leighton said she was “passionate” about her job and wanted to return to a normal life after charges against her were dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service earlier this month.

She said she had “pleaded” with the police after her arrest not to stop looking for the real culprit in the investigation.

Miss Leighton she said she still felt unable to go out by herself.

“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,” she told ITV1’s This Morning. “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.”

Miss Leighton was speaking for the first time since being charged in July with contaminating saline solution at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, Greater Manchester.

The 27-year-old spent more than six weeks in custody but was freed on 2 September after proceedings against her were discontinued.

Last week she was cleared to return to work by the Nursing and Midwifery Council subject to conditions. She remains suspended on full pay by Stepping Hill.

Miss Leighton spoke of her disbelief when she was arrested in the early hours of 20 July at her home in Heaviley, Stockport.

“It was horrendous, absolutely horrendous. Obviously I was asleep, in bed, I was meant to be at work the next day and I woke up to the police banging on the door,” she said.

“Even then, I just thought that the police were wanting to ask further questions, or interviews or whatever … I just wasn’t expecting what was to come at all.

“That was when they arrested me. I have never felt how I felt there and then.” She added: “Even when they arrested me, I thought I would be home for tea-time because surely they know I have done nothing wrong.”

She said she was offered the chance to appoint a solicitor at the police station but refused to do so initially as she had nothing to hide. “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,” she said.

She said she believed the media were responsible for public hostility towards her, resulting in Mr Justice Henriques refusing her bail at Manchester Crown Court on 5 August, for her own protection.

She defended her portrayal in pictures posted on her Facebook page, saying: “I was just being any normal girl, I was just out with my friends having a good time,” she said.

She said she had been released and left to try to resume her life in spite of being unable to walk down the street on her own.

“It’s hard to even say about a having a normal life because even now my life is not normal,” she said. “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.”

Detectives are still investigating allegations of tampering with saline solution at the hospital.

Tracey Arden, 44, Arnold Lancaster, 71, and Alfred Derek Weaver, 83, died amid fears that saline solution had been contaminated with insulin.