My accomplice’s murderous GP son injected me with pesticide whereas disguised as a Covid nurse. It flayed my flesh – I’ve been to hell and again: Patrick’s world-exclusive interview

Patrick O’Hara’s left arm looks like it’s been ravaged by a shark. Jagged scars disfigure his skin from shoulder to elbow, bearing testimony to the multiple surgeries and skin grafts he required to repair tissue and muscle that had been savagely eaten away.

In reality, Patrick wasn’t the victim of a shark attack, though the truth of how he received his horrific injuries is just as dramatic. For they are the result of a poison attack by his former partner’s son, a doctor who conceived an elaborate plot to murder the 72-year-old, whom he believed stood in the way of his inheritance.

This month Thomas Kwan, a 54-year-old GP with a successful practice and a wife and young son, was jailed for 31 years for attempting to murder Patrick.

Now, in his only interview, Patrick gives his shocking account of what prosecutor Peter Makepeace KC described to Newcastle Crown Court as a case ‘stranger than fiction’. As Patrick puts it: ‘He might not have succeeded in killing me, but he took me to Hell and back. I can’t put in to words how bad the pain was.’

What made Kwan’s crime so extraordinary was how brazen it was. Not to mention how meticulously planned.

In November last year, Patrick received what appeared to be an official NHS letter at the Newcastle home he shared with Kwan’s mother Jenny, offering a medical check-up and Covid booster jab. ‘There’d been stories about pensioners blocking beds so I thought it must be a new system,’ he says. ‘I remember Jenny wondering why she didn’t get one as we were the same age.’

The answer to that, of course, was that the letter was sent by Kwan, who had only one pensioner in his sights.

Another letter offering a ‘slot’ between 9am and 12pm on January 22 this year arrived next, followed by a mocked-up NHS text message by way of confirmation.

So when there was a knock on the door at around 9.30 one chilly morning, Patrick was expecting it.

He was faced with what he assumed to be a community nurse, wearing a woolly hat, tinted glasses, face mask and – from what he could see of the sliver visible under his eyes – dark skin. It was Kwan in disguise and neither Patrick nor even his own mother recognised him, something Patrick finds extraordinary now.

‘He’d put on brown make-up to darken his complexion,’ Patrick says, adding with the dry humour that’s helped see him through his horrific ordeal: ‘My friends and I have had a laugh about his disguise. He looks like Inspector Clouseau, doesn’t he?’

Shouting to Jenny that ‘the man from the NHS was here’, Patrick was asked a series of medical questions before giving two blood samples for ‘testing’. Kwan also checked Patrick and Jenny’s blood pressure. Oblivious that this was her son, Jenny had requested he do hers, too. ‘He told her it was on the high side,’ Patrick says, raising an eyebrow.

Then came the ‘Covid booster’ administered into the top of Patrick’s left shoulder, causing an instant and intense pain. ‘It was like my arm was on fire,’ he recalls. ‘When I said it really hurt he said I’d just had a reaction to it, then he was straight out of the door.’

Within a couple of hours Patrick’s arm had started to come out in pus-filled, penny-sized blisters. In great pain, he went to his doctor, who prescribed antibiotics and suggested a cold compress.

A sleepless night followed as Patrick downed paracetamol to try to numb the agony. By the next day, the blistering had spread to his elbow and the pain was almost unbearable. Patrick returned to his GP’s where he waited two and a half hours to see a nurse. ‘She thought it was sepsis and sent me straight to hospital,’ he said.

At this point no one knew what was in Patrick’s system but when he arrived at A&E at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, he was whisked into a cubicle and instantly surrounded by consultants who, he recalls, took photos of his wounds.

‘No one knew what it was at first,’ he says. ‘I remember being rushed for an X-ray then the next thing I woke up in intensive care. It was like having an out-of-body experience.’

Only after several days were they able to establish that he’d been poisoned with enough iodomethane, predominantly used as a fumigant pesticide, to kill a man.

‘At one point they thought it might be ricin,’ Patrick says now. A highly potent toxin, it has been used in assassination-by-injection cases. What doctors did know was that the substance had caused the flesh-eating disease necrotising fasciitis.

‘Basically the cure was removing it, nothing else,’ says Patrick.

This required operations – four in a single week – to remove infected flesh and muscle, and later skin transplants.

‘I was in and out of consciousness for a lot of it, so my daughters had to tell me a lot about what happened,’ he says. ‘At one point my daughter Rachael overheard doctors talking about the fact they might have to amputate my arm, which was terrifying for her.

‘She chose not to tell me until later. Sometimes they had to put me to sleep to remove my bandages as cutting them from the flesh was so painful.’

By day three Patrick was able to talk to police, called by a consultant who, after hearing what had happened, thought a bogus nurse was trying to attack pensioners. ‘I suppose he wasn’t far off – except it was just one particular pensioner. Me,’ says Patrick.

He recalls how, when asked by an officer if he had any enemies, he joked that there were ‘about 500’, referring to his peers at the golf club where he had been enjoying a winning streak. It was not long before suspicion pointed in Kwan’s direction.

‘He was the only person I knew who had medical knowledge and while I didn’t want to think he could do this to me, he was the first name that came to mind.’

While he never imagined the depths of his hatred towards him, Patrick says relations between Kwan and his mother had been strained for a long time.

He remembers that more than once during their 20-year relationship, Jenny used the same three adjectives to describe her son: ‘Arrogant, angry and vengeful.’

But he didn’t pay too much attention to this damning assessment as neither of the respective families were close.

A genial and warm-hearted man, Patrick was raised in his native Newcastle and worked his way from humble beginnings to build a secure life, working in construction and latterly, after being made redundant, taking part-time work at Marks & Spencer to help pay the bills for the home he shared with then wife Theresa and daughters Rachael, now 45, and Rebecca, 42.

It was at M&S that Patrick met Jenny, who also worked there, embarking on a relationship which brought about the end of his 29-year marriage.

‘Perhaps it was a bit of a midlife crisis,’ he says now. ‘I’d lost my job, the kids were at university, everything just got on top of me. I chatted to Jenny a lot on the shop floor and over the weeks we just hit it off. When, a few months later, she asked me for a drink I said yes.’

A year older than Patrick, Jenny had been raised in Macau before moving to Hong Kong after meeting Kwan’s father. Subsequently divorced, she had arrived in the UK to persuade her son not to drop out of medical school. It worked: Kwan qualified as a GP, settling in Sunderland, where he was a senior partner in a local surgery called Happy House.

After they got together Patrick moved into the flat Jenny owned in the centre of Newcastle. He understood she also owned an apartment in Hong Kong and had an investment portfolio, although he paid it little attention. ‘I didn’t know how much money she did or didn’t have in the background,’ Patrick says. ‘I paid my own way and she paid hers.’

While Rachael and Rebecca remained in contact with their father, they did not want to meet Jenny out of loyalty to their mother, while Patrick’s relationship with Kwan was sporadic.

‘We went for a meal a couple of times but he and Jenny just spoke Chinese,’ Patrick recalls. ‘He’d pop over to help his mum with her computer sometimes and he would say hello if I answered the door but in many ways he was a stranger to me.’

But Kwan had a deep-seated interest in Patrick. Despite being a man of considerable means, with a five-bedroom detached home of his own, Kwan was obsessed by money.

He had become fixated on the fact that should his mother die before Patrick, her will gave Patrick leave to remain in her £200,000 flat until he also died. Only then could Kwan sell it. The irony, as Patrick points out, is that his and Jenny’s relationship was on the rocks at the time of the murder attempt.

‘If Kwan had waited a few months I would probably have been gone anyway and none of this needed to have happened,’ he says with a wry smile.

The strained relations between Jenny and her son came to a head with an altercation in early 2023, which Patrick believes fed directly into the horror that came later. Jenny had blocked Thomas from contacting her as he was endlessly haranguing her about money.

‘I don’t know exactly what it was about but he made her very upset, constantly calling and texting,’ Patrick recalls.

For a while there was no contact with Kwan – then he arrived at their flat uninvited. ‘I told him Jenny didn’t want to see him, then he shoved past me and I could hear him shouting at her. I asked him to leave or I would call the police. When he refused I dialled 999,’ Patrick says.

Kwan was released with a caution after Patrick and Jenny said they did not want to bring charges and risk jeopardising his medical career. ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ as Patrick puts it now. The couple then heard nothing further from Kwan until the arrival of the mysterious district nurse.

Police found Kwan had booked a week’s leave covering the time he visited Patrick. When they searched his property they found chemicals in his garage including liquid mercury, sulphuric acid and arsenic, alongside a syringe with traces of iodomethane. Kwan was arrested on February 4 and remanded in custody after giving a no comment interview.

Patrick subsequently learned that the computer ‘help’ Kwan had given his mother included installing spyware giving him access to all her files and financial transactions. Police also found internet searches he had done about how to poison people.

Following his week in intensive care, Patrick spent three more on a general ward, where even morphine still couldn’t completely dull his agony. Discharged after a month in hospital, he admits he struggled to cope. He required endless painful physio and a few weeks after getting out he was struck down almost overnight with debilitating PTSD.

His hair fell out, his legs gave way beneath him and he experienced terrifying hallucinations which required him to be hospitalised again.

‘I lost two stone in three weeks,’ he says. ‘At one point I was hallucinating that I was driving my bed round the streets of Gateshead.’

Patrick’s relationship with Jenny, unsurprisingly given it was already under strain, did not last long after his poisoning. But he bears no ill will towards his former partner, who has gone back to Hong Kong. ‘Whatever he’s done, he is still her son,’ he says.

The one consolation was the steady presence of his ex-wife Theresa, 73, who on hearing of Patrick’s plight took him back to the home she shares with daughter Rebecca and her family. ‘She’s been absolutely wonderful,’ says Patrick, confiding that the couple have reconnected so well they plan to remarry next year. ‘I’ve been very lucky,’ he says.

His forthcoming nuptials, and the devotion of his daughters and six grandchildren, have certainly buoyed Patrick in an otherwise horrendous year.

While Kwan had admitted a charge of administering a noxious substance, he initially denied attempted murder. But after the prosecution’s opening statement Kwan amended his plea to guilty, sparing Patrick a trial. His 31-year sentence means he will likely be behind bars well into his 70s.

‘That was hugely reassuring to me,’ says Patrick, but he adds: ‘I do worry that when he comes out he will still try to target my family.’

Patrick did go to court to read his victim impact statement and to look the man who had wanted to kill him face on. ‘He wouldn’t look at me at all,’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t have been surprised.’

What is perhaps surprising is that despite his ordeal, Patrick refuses to be bitter.

‘I felt terrible against him at first,’ he says. ‘But as time goes by, you know, I’ve learned to let it go. He did it, he’s got the justice that he deserved and I’m lucky I lived to tell the tale.’