The experienced pathologist under the spotlight
RICHARD Shepherd has carried out 23,000 post-mortem examinations during his distinguished career, including working on the Hungerford massacre, the Clapham rail crash, the sex killing of Rachel Nickell and the death of Princess Diana.
He also worked on the Harold Shipman case, the murder of Jill Dando and the management of British fatalities following the 9/11 terror attacks in the US.
But it is in relation to one of his less famous cases – the relatively little-reported alleged murder of a vagrant in 1988 – that he now finds his conclusions under scrutiny.
Dr Shepherd, who retired from the official list of Home Officeapproved pathologists in 2017, has written a memoir, features regularly on TV and has done a lecture tour. In the past, he has been open about how his work affected his mental health.
He said: ‘I can’t grieve for 23,000 people but each one was taking a little piece of me at the time.
‘And there did come a point when a large rent happened in my life and I suffered a really nasty, acute episode of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder].
‘It was after the Bali bombings. They were the trigger.’
Dr Shepherd saved his controversial and now-disputed conclusion about Alexander Hardie having been killed by so- called ‘Burking’ – a suffocation technique named after 19th-century Scottish serial killers Burke and Hare – until the very end of his evidence at the 1989 trial of Clive Freeman.
He told jurors: ‘ The important part of this type of death is that the body has minimal or no resistance to the occlusion of the airways or the fixation of the chest. It is called Burking.’
In an interview with the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme, Dr Shepherd said he was ‘a strong believer truth is crucial’, adding: ‘If they [families] have the whole truth, it’s fine.
‘If it’s not the whole truth, they will discover a gap and not believe anything you say.’