A family doctor has confessed to an elaborate plot to disguise himself as a nurse and murder his mother’s partner by poisoning him with a fake COVID-19 booster jab.
Thomas Kwan, 53, was worried that 71-year-old Patrick O’Hara was a “potential impediment” to him inheriting his mother’s home when she eventually passed away.
So, the doctor came up with an intricate plan to kill O’Hara and protect his inheritance, a court in England was told.
Wearing a false beard and mustache, a wig, and a surgical mask, Kwan turned up at his mother’s home in January pretending to be a community nurse on a routine call. But instead of administering a COVID-19 vaccine, he injected his victim with poison, believed to be a pesticide.
O’Hara didn’t die but was left with a rare, life-threatening flesh-eating disease and spent weeks in intensive care, said prosecutors.
During the visit, Kwan’s mother, not realizing the nurse was her son, asked him to take her blood pressure because she was worried about her health.
“Sometimes, occasionally perhaps, the truth really is stranger than fiction,” Peter Makepeace KC said in his opening statement at the trial in Newcastle, north-east England.
“It was an audacious plan. 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,” Makepeace told the jury.
After initially denying attempted murder, Hong Kong-born Kwan changed his plea on Monday after hearing the prosecution case against him.
Kwan, married with a young son, was said to have an “encyclopedic knowledge” of poisons and police discovered he had researched on his computer how to get away with murder.
He was described in court as being a “respected and experienced medical doctor in general practice with a GP’s surgery based in Sunderland.”
