The conviction that "doctor knows best" held a daughter back from asking questions while a GP allegedly gave her father lethal overdoses of morphine, a court was told yesterday.
Belief in the superior knowledge of a professional restrained Alison Moss from challenging the treatment given by Howard Martin, who is accused of killing 59-year-old Frank Moss, a former soldier, and two other patients in County Durham.
Ms Moss told a jury of six men and six women at Teesside crown court that she had been surprised at the repeated doses, which were later found to have been about six times the recommended sedative level.
After giving one injection to Mr Moss, who was suffering from lung cancer which had spread to his brain, the GP came back unexpectedly in the evening, in March 2003, to administer more.
"He said he was going to give a top-up injection, which I thought was quite strange because my father had not woken up since the first one," she said. "But I thought with him being a doctor he knew best so I didn't ask any questions."
Under cross-examination, Ms Moss agreed that she had talked with her father, who ran his own forestry business after leaving the army, about the fact that his illness was terminal. But she had never expected it to be so soon.
When she went to visit him on the day before he died at his home in Eldon, near Newton Aycliffe, where Martin had his surgery, her father was installing an electric socket for a new remote control mechanical bed which was due to be delivered the next day. Martin arrived and said he was going to inject Mr Moss with morphine because "he was having trouble with his breathing".
"I found it very hard to believe because I had just been inside with him. He was not having trouble breathing. He was just my normal dad."
She continued not to question the morphine doses, she said, because Martin disturbed her on his evening visit by discussing funeral arrangements and rigor mortis. She told the court: "I was upset because he had just told me that my father was dying and then he started babbling on about rigor mortis. Who would want to know about rigor mortis when they have just been told that their father's dying?"
Ms Moss went to the police after publicity surrounding the death of another of Martin's alleged victims, Harry Gittins, 74, of Newton Aycliffe, in January 2004. The bodies of Mr Gittins and Mr Moss were exhumed, along with that of another alleged victim, 74-year-old Stanley Weldon of Bishop Auckland, who also died in March 2003.
Martin denies murdering the three men. Now 71, he retired to Penmaenmawr, north Wales, after working for many years as a GP in Newton Aycliffe.
The court was told earlier by Robert Smith QC, prosecuting, that the GP had killed the patients because he had made up his own mind that "their time had come to die".
In fact, Mr Moss and Mr Gittins had serious cancer and Mr Weldon was suffering from senile dementia, but none of them were imminently in danger of death from natural causes.
The trial continues.
