GP cleared of trying to buy hitman on internet
But found guilty of vendetta against his financial 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 David Crichton, 64, was found guilty of sending malicious communications during a ‘five-year vendetta’ when he sent hundreds of emails, texts and calls to Andrew Bolden.
The retired doctor, originally from Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, was obsessed with suicide and spent up to 15 hours per day on the internet researching depression, hitmen and the criminal mind.
He boasted in court about his ‘qualification’ studying the criminal mind of Harold Shipman, the serial killer GP who murdered at least 15 patients in his care.
Crichton, who denied the charges against him, was found not guilty of trying to hire a hitman to kill Mr Bolden after he typed the pensions expert’s name and address 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.
He had first stumbled across hitman websites when looking into how they were allegedly planning to fund a hit on US President Donald Trump.
Crichton, who suffers from depression, told Winchester Crown Court he only filled in the online form to ‘clear his head’ and had not intended for a hit to happen.
The jury found him guilty of three charges of sending malicious communications involving two text messages and a phone call in early 2017. The maximum sentence for each of the three counts is 15 weeks in prison.
Mr Bolden said outside court yesterday: ‘The last few months have been a challenging time for myself, and especially for my family. We are pleased the matter has now been completed.’
Crichton sent Mr Bolden a text message on February 4, 2017, saying: ‘I am contacting you out of desperation, I believe you are the only person who can help save my life.’
The disgraced doctor then said his life was ‘at risk’ in a call he made to Mr Bolden, before sending another message on March 4, 2017, saying: ‘I remain desperate to speak to you and since you know my life is at risk I can’t believe you are obstructing me in this.’
Crichton, a father of three who said he had ‘Asperger’s and OCD-type thinking’, started having suicidal thoughts in 2012 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.
Crichton missed tax deadlines and incurred a penalty of £300,000. He said bad decisions lost him more than £1million in total and he complained to the financial regulator. However, Mr Bolden was found to have given correct advice.
After a serious cycling accident, the keen triathlete’s self-esteem plummeted. He obsessed about his own death and visited up to 600 websites about suicide, crime and selfhelp every day. In one search he asked: ‘Is hiring a hitman to kill you suicide or murder?’
At the time of the offences Crichton was working as a parttime locum doctor for the Army at Blandford Camp, Dorset.
The judge, Mr Justice Dingemans, adjourned the case for sentencing while a presentence report is prepared.
‘You know my life is at risk’