GP cleared of hiring hitman to murder his finance adviser

A GP who blamed his financial adviser for causing him to lose £300,000 of his NHS pension was cleared yesterday of trying to hire a hitman to murder him.

But Dr David Crichton, 64, was found guilty of three charges of sending malicious communications during a ‘five-year vendetta’ when he bombarded Andrew Bolden with hundreds of emails, texts and calls.

The retired doctor was obsessed with suicide and spent up to 15 hours a day on the internet researching depression, hitmen and the criminal mind.

Crichton, pictured, was found not guilty of trying to hire a hitman to kill his adviser after he typed Mr Bolden’s details into a Bulgarian website called the ‘Chechen Mob’. He used a special browser to access the site on the ‘dark web’, but he did not pay the £3,800 fee and he did not speak to any contract killers.

Crichton, who suffers from depression, told Winchester Crown Court he filled in the online form to ‘ clear his head’ and had not intended for the hit to happen.

He sent frantic messages to Mr Bolden, including one on February 4, 2017, telling him: ‘I am contacting you out of desperation, I believe you are the only person who can help save my life.’

Crichton began having suicidal thoughts in 2012, said to have started after Mr Bolden, an adviser for Edinburgh-based private bank Brown Shipley, gave the GP paid-for advice on how to invest his £1.8million pension.

He missed tax deadlines and incurred a penalty of £300,000, with further bad decisions losing him more than £1million in total, he said.

After the financial regulator found Mr Bolden gave the correct advice, Crichton could not accept their decision.

Following a serious cycling accident in early 2017, he became a ‘shadow of his former self’, visiting up to 600 websites about suicide and crime every day on his iPad. He searched for ‘letter bomb’ and ‘what is the most efficient way to kill someone and not get caught’, the court heard.

Mr Justice Dingemans adjourned the case for sentencing while a pre-sentence report is prepared.