'I want world to know that I'm innocent'

They are the type of photographs to be found in any living room. Except the girl in the picture is the tragic victim of an alleged crime that shocked Scotland - and her photograph was placed there by the woman convicted of poisoning her by pumping her full of enough salt to cause brain damage.

Hamilton was released from jail eight months ago after serving two years and eight months of her four-year sentence, still vociferously maintaining her innocence and more determined than ever to try to clear her name.

Soon she will return to court, to put herself once more in the dock at the Court of Appeal.

There her case will partly focus on the claim that formed the basis of the allegations against her - a report from discredited court "expert" Professor Sir Roy Meadow, which suggested she was suffering from Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy, a condition in which sufferers harm others to get attention. Hamilton argues that paediatrician Meadow - struck off by the General Medical Council after his misleading claims in the infamous Angela Cannings cot death case - never even met her.

Today she sits in the lounge of her home in Broomhouse Street South with her husband Neil by her side and gazes towards the photographs, a sheaf of letters from medical experts resting heavily on her lap.

Six years have passed since the couple were summoned to a hospital chapel just a short walk from where the girl in the picture lay hovering between life and death.

There, in the peace and quiet of a room set aside for contemplation and prayer, she found herself being accused of one of the most callous and harrowing of crimes imaginable. "The consultant wanted to see us," she says, a tremble in her voice as she relives the moment. "We knew it was serious and something bad because he took us to the chapel. He went over everything and said someone has been giving her high doses of sodium or salt.

"I was absolutely devastated. It was horrible."

Today Hamilton is a shadow of the woman who watched, shocked, as police led her husband away so they could be quizzed separately. "I've lost four stones," she says simply. "You could call it the Cornton Vale diet - that's what being in prison does to you."

Weight loss, a weak leg and damaged shoulder after receiving a severe beating just weeks after she arrived to begin her sentence, and a burning sense of injustice - this is just a tiny fraction of the legacy that Hamilton lives with as a result of that day in the hospital chapel in March 2000.

Now notorious throughout the country as Edinburgh's "salt poisoner", the softly spoken 42-year-old has seen her family ripped apart by the ensuing High Court trial. Her previously untainted character is now indelibly smeared by the appalling allegation that she callously injected a salt mixture into an already desperately sick little girl.

If she did it, then Susan Hamilton would surely deserve what she has ended up with - a criminal record for assault to the endangerment of life and the shame of having deliberately harmed a defenceless and vulnerable little girl to prey on her conscience for the rest of her life. But what if she didn't?

Hamilton, her slender frame and blonde bobbed hair rendering her almost unrecognisable as the tight-lipped tearful woman who left the High Court en route to prison, has been spurred on by a recent English case in which alleged salt poisoners Ian and Angela Gay's manslaughter conviction was quashed after lawyers argued their foster son was suffering from a rare sort of salt diabetes.

Already she has won a major victory when a letter finally arrived last Thursday confirming she has been granted Legal Aid to raise her appeal. Eventually she will parade in front of the Court of Appeal many of the same medical experts who helped the Gays convince judges that the case against them could not be trusted.

Like them, she will argue that a quirk of medical fate transpired to send the little girl's sodium levels soaring to such a dangerously high level that she eventually suffered a stroke that has left her brain damaged. And she will claim a controversial drug given by doctors to the sick child - Domperidone - has already been linked with other alleged salt poisoning cases.

"I fell apart," she whispers, recalling the moment in the chapel when she realised what was happening. "I felt the finger of blame was being pointed right at me. My husband and I had been told to come to the hospital. We'd been told already that the girl was allegedly dying upstairs.

"Suddenly Neil was taken away. I was kept and questioned, it was all: 'What is wrong with her?' All I could do was give straightforward answers. I couldn't tell them what I didn't know."

The little girl had posed a series of challenges for medics since before her second birthday. Originally thought to have a life-threatening genetic condition, she was later re-diagnosed as suffering from a gastroesophageal reflux disease and prescribed Domperidone, an anti-sickness drug outlawed in the United States and which has never been fully tested for use on children.

Indeed, she had already been in and out of hospital several times when her health suddenly deteriorated in March 2000.

After collapsing she was rushed to Edinburgh's Royal Hospital for Sick Children where Hamilton says she watched, horrified, as a doctor hooked the girl up to a saline solution moments before her little body was wracked by a stroke.

The suggestion that his wife could have possibly administered a potentially deadly dose of salt into a little girl's feeding tube never seemed a possibility to Neil.

"I know my wife," he says, leaning forward in his chair. "We have been married for nearly 18 years and we've got two children. My wife was devoted to the little girl concerned. This came down on us like a ton of bricks, it was like someone had ripped the soul out of my body.

"We have got a good, strong relationship and we were able to keep going through this. If she was down, I was able to pull her through it because I knew she didn't do anything wrong. I've never doubted her." Yet as the girl at the centre of the case gradually recovered - the Hamiltons claim her recovery coincided with her being taken off the controversial drug - the poisoning allegations gathered pace.

Hamilton's home was scoured by police, the High Court heard that a salt-encrusted syringe was later found in the kitchen, although the couple argue it had no fingerprint evidence on it and was not among the items photographed at the time by police investigators.

Still, it was six months before Hamilton learned she was being charged with attempted murder.

She said: "It was like there was this snowball effect, that once someone had made the suggestion of salt poisoning, everyone jumped on and it got bigger and bigger. No-one wanted to hear anything about what else might have happened."

During the three-week trial the jury heard the girl was fed by a tube through her nostril and down her throat until May 1995 when a tube was put directly into her stomach. The Crown claimed this allowed Hamilton to administer solutions containing large doses of salt from which the girl became ill on numerous occasions.

The jury was told that just two teaspoons of salt had left her permanently brain damaged.

It had sparked a raging thirst then uncontrollable diarrhoea as the salt passed through her digestive system. Her brain swelled until the pressure inside her skull caused convulsions and seizures.

Now in foster care, the little girl remains mildly brain damaged and will require some support for the rest of her life.

She attends a special needs school and her reading and writing levels are far below that expected of a normal teenager. Although capable of performing some basic functions, she will never be fully able to look after herself.

Hamilton was cleared of attempted murder but the jury convicted her, by a majority verdict, of a reduced charge of assaulting the youngster to her severe injury and danger of her life. So began her four-year prison sentence.

"I thought prison would be like Bad Girls on television," she recalls. "Lots of shouting and trouble. In fact I ended up meeting a lot of girls there who have become really good friends."

Still, the early days were traumatic. "I was totally devastated and in shock for weeks - then I got beaten up." The assault was so severe that Hamilton was left with nerve damage in her leg and a shoulder injury which requires surgery. "The assault made me quite suicidal. It made me realise that this was my life for the next few years and that I was going to have to get on with it.

"Yes I got taunted inside, but you learn to give it back because I knew in my heart that I hadn't done anything. I knew my husband was doing his best to tell everyone that I was innocent and I kept on thinking that my appeal would come up soon. I got that wrong," she sighs.

She became so focused on proving her innocence that she refused the opportunity of an early release date, choosing to serve a further eight months rather than accept parole with the suggestion that she was conceding her guilt.

Once released, she was determined to return to as normal a life as possible, refusing to hide away for fear of being stared at.

"Everyone I know has stood by me," she insists. "Okay I know that the net curtains twitch a bit when I walk past and it would be easier to hide at home and not go out, but I didn't do anything and I want the world to know that.

"I just want my name cleared," she adds, clutching the papers. "I want my life back because I don't have a life just now, it doesn't exist, it's a living nightmare."

Related topic

• Child salt poisoning trial
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