‘He realised he could kill, so he did’

The deadly career of Harold Shipman.

One Sunday in April 1984, Harold Shipman, a GP in the Manchester suburb of Hyde, was returning home for lunch after a morning house call when he decided to kill one of his patients.

Joseph Bardsley, was 83, ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog’, as his son-in-law John Hopwood would later describe him, with ‘absolutely nothing wrong with him mentally or physically’. But at some point in his visit, Shipman carefully and calculatedly injected Joseph with a fatal dose of diamorphine. He would write on the death certificate that Joseph had died of ‘old age’.

We will never know what explanation Shipman gave to Bardsley for administering the injection that would kill him. We can only be assured that Bardsley trusted Shipman, as his GP, to do his very best.

By the account of all his patients – all, that is to say, who survived – Harold Shipman was the perfect family doctor; an old-fashioned GP in the best possible sense of the term.

In an age when most doctors were tied to their surgeries, Shipman was always ready to visit his patients at home – particularly elderly, vulnerable women. He was ready to listen to their complaints, no matter how minor, was solicitous, caring and kind – ‘a patient’s dream’, as one would put it – right up to the moment that he murdered them.

By the time he murdered Joseph Bardsley, Shipman had already killed 13 people – and he would go on to kill many more. In January 2000 he was found guilty of the murder of 15 women, all of whom had been his trusting patients. But that number was merely the tip of a gruesome iceberg. Shipman is believed to have murdered more than 250 people – and there are possibly more that will never be known.

He has gone down in history as ‘the man who murdered old ladies’. But while the overwhelming majority of his victims were elderly women, his youngest was a man, 41-year-old Peter Lewis, who died in 1985.

Nor, as it has been often believed, were Shipman’s victims ‘close to death’ – as if he was simply an over-eager angel of mercy. While elderly, like Joseph Bardsley, for the most part they were fit and active with many years of life ahead of them.

In the years since Shipman hanged himself in his cell at Wakefield Prison, on 13 January 2004, one day before his 58th birthday, there have been scores of books, documentaries and articles attempting to venture inside the mind of Britain’s most prolific serial killer. But a new BBC documentary series, The Harold Shipman Files , takes a different approach, instead examining the social attitudes and systemic failings that enabled him to continue to kill so many, for so long.

‘The question people always ask about Harold Shipman is, how did he get away with it?’ says Chris Wilson, writer and director of the series. ‘The received wisdom is that it was because of the deference which people had towards him because he was a doctor. That’s partly true, but I think it’s also because he chose to kill mainly elderly people, and as a society we care less about older people. It’s a case of, “Oh well, good innings, never mind.”

‘But he didn’t have a particular thing for killing old people; he had a thing for killing, and elderly people were the easiest to kill. And the fact that he was a family doctor made it both easier for him to do it, and worse that he did it.’

The slow, painful death of his mother Vera at the age of 43 from lung cancer when he was 17 years old deeply affected Harold Shipman. The son of a Nottingham lorry driver, he had watched as her doctor administered morphine to ease her pain as she lay dying at home. The experience would later be held as a significant factor in forging a connection in Shipman’s mind between morphine and death.

Shipman was a loner and a plodder who had to work twice as hard as other students to pass his eleven-plus and the exams to graduate from the Leeds School of Medicine. In 1970 he began work as a junior houseman at the Pontefract General Infirmary, before moving in 1974 to a GP practice in the Yorkshire market town of Todmorden.

It was here, in 1976, that Shipman’s career was almost stopped in its tracks when he was convicted of obtaining by deception supplies of pethidine, a synthetic opioid used for pain relief. It was to feed his addiction to the drug, which he would explain to George Mckeating, the detective who arrested him, he had started taking to cope with depression. Mckeating says that Shipman was injecting between 600 and 700mg of pethidine a day – ‘that’s a big habit’. His veins were so collapsed, Mckeating adds, that he was reduced to injecting in his penis.

Shipman was treated at a rehabilitation centre and fined a total of £657.78. He might have expected the conviction to lead to him being struck off the medical register, but following favourable psychiatric reports, the General Medical Council let him off with a warning – a decision that Mckeating describes as ‘shocking’.

In 1977 Shipman started work as a GP at a group practice in Hyde, opening his own surgery in 1992. He would build up a thriving practice with more than 3,000 patients on his list.

When he was just 20, Shipman had married Primrose. The couple would go on to have a daughter and three sons. In Hyde, they settled in a modest semi-detached house notable for its shabbiness. Over the years the house grew more neglected. One police officer who visited at the time Shipman was being investigated described it as the sort of house where ‘you wiped your feet as you went out’.

Colleagues who worked with Shipman over the years would remember him as arrogant, supercilious and sarcastic to anyone who sought to question or challenge him. Mckeating describes an ego ‘as big as a bucket’. To his patients he was the complete opposite; kind, caring and solicitous – the very qualities that afforded him the opportunity to kill with impunity.

His first known victim in Hyde, six years before he went on to kill Joseph Bardsley, was 86-year-old Sarah Marsland, whom he murdered in her home in August 1978. (He would murder her daughter Irene Chapman 20 years later.) By the end of 1979 he had killed a further five people.

He developed a modus operandi: usually ‘popping in’ to check up on an elderly patient in the afternoon, between morning and evening surgery; administering a fatal injection, then calling a relative to explain that the patient had died suddenly. No need for an ambulance. Shipman, as the doctor who had ‘found’ the deceased, would be able to write the certificate listing cause of death as a heart attack, a stroke, natural causes.

To Peter Wagstaff, Shipman, who ministered to three generations of his family, was ‘the best doctor you could possibly have. Nothing was too much trouble for him,’ he tells me. ‘I can remember visiting him a long time before my mother died, and he said to me, have you thought your parents are getting a little elderly now? Have you given some thought to looking after them as they get older? And it was as if it came from his heart.’

On 9 December 1997, the day that Shipman murdered Peter’s 81-year-old mother, Kathleen, she had walked the half-mile from her home to the building society and back, and chatted happily to a neighbour before Shipman arrived unexpectedly at her home. An hour or so later, Peter received a message on his phone from Shipman telling him his mother was seriously ill and he should go home. He arrived to find she had died.

The following morning, Peter and his wife Angela visited Shipman at his surgery. ‘He looked us in the eye and said, “You do know she had heart problems?” We said, “No, we didn’t…”’

Shipman told them he had picked up a message from Kathleen, complaining of not feeling well, and arrived at her home to find her ‘grey and sweating’. He took her pulse, realised she was having heart failure and phoned for an ambulance. He then went downstairs, he said, to get his medical bag, and when he got back Kathleen had died. He then cancelled the ambulance.

At that time Peter had no reason to disbelieve him. But others in the town had begun to have suspicions about the unusually large numbers of Shipman’s elderly patients dying unexpectedly.

Chris Wilson says that in the course of researching his series, he was told that some

people in Hyde had half-jokingly referred to Shipman as ‘Dr Death’ ‘for years’.

In March 1998, three months after the death of Kathleen Wagstaff, another GP in Hyde, Dr Linda Reynolds, reported her concerns to the South Manchester Coroner that the death rate of Shipman’s patients appeared to be at least three times higher than at her own practice. Furthermore, there were striking similarities in the deaths: most involved elderly women, who were found dead at home, apparently alone, and fully dressed. They did not appear to have been ill.

Police conducted a confidential investigation into Shipman, but no charges were brought.

At the government inquiry into Shipman’s crimes following his conviction, the chair Dame Janet Smith criticised both the investigating officer, DI David Smith, for failing to explore records of comparative death rates, and Dr Alan Banks of the West Pennine Health Authority, who examined the medical records of patients who had died under Shipman and failed to notice the unusual pattern of death. Banks, Dame Janet said, was ‘simply unable to open his mind to the possibility that Shipman might have harmed a patient’.

Following Shipman’s reprieve by the GMC 22 years earlier, it was yet another institutional failing. He would be free to kill twice more before murdering his final victim, 81-year-old Kathleen Grundy, a former mayoress of Hyde, on 24 June 1998.

While Shipman may have pilfered a few items of jewellery from his victims, the motive, if motive there was, had never been financial. But in the case of Kathleen Grundy, Shipman forged a will naming him as her main beneficiary – a forgery so inept that criminologists have wondered whether it was an unconscious, or conscious, plea to be stopped.

A police investigation led to Kathleen’s body being exhumed in August 1998. A postmortem revealed the presence of diamorphine in her muscle tissue. And yet when word spread in the town that Shipman was under investigation, many of his patients still found it impossible to believe their doctor could have done anything wrong.

Peter Wagstaff visited Shipman at his surgery for a 50th birthday check-up. ‘I said, “How are you doing, Dr Shipman?” He said, “You’re looking at a man who’s trying to act normal and not break down in tears.” And he waved his arm to the wall, and it was absolutely plastered with letters of support. He talked about Mrs Grundy and said she hadn’t even had an aspirin.’

In September 1998, Shipman was arrested and charged with Kathleen Grundy’s murder.

It was only later, on reading that the bodies of three more of Shipman’s patients had been exhumed, that Wagstaff became suspicious.

‘I was thinking about everything he’d told me about my mother phoning him, and him calling an ambulance. So I phoned the ambulance service and asked if on 9 December there was an ambulance called to my mother’s address. They said no. I then phoned BT and asked for the list of all the calls my mother had made around the date she died. The post arrived and Angela opened it. She called me on my car phone, and she saw that there had been no phone calls to the surgery or for an ambulance. She just looked at it and said, “He’s done it.”

‘It was like, I can’t believe this… wanting not to believe it because you had such faith in him. Then to realise, everything he said was lies, and he was guilty. I’m not kidding when I say Angela and I said so many times, what a shame he won’t be our doctor when we reach old age.’ Peter shakes his head in disbelief.

Over the following months, as more bodies were exhumed, people began contacting the police about their own mothers, grandmothers and friends. The numbers of deaths being investigated quickly multiplied – 20, 40, 60…

By March 1999, police had evidence that Shipman had committed more than 150 murders. He was charged with a total of 15 murders committed between 1995 and 1998. Kathleen Wagstaff ’s was one of those.

At his trial, Shipman claimed that Kathleen had died in front of him and that he had tried for 10 minutes to resuscitate her. In a shameless attempt to win the jury’s sympathy, he broke down and cried, saying that her death had caused him particular distress. ‘The sheer wickedness of what you have done defies description,’ the judge told Shipman, sentencing him to 15 life sentences in January 2000. ‘It is shocking and beyond belief.’

The Shipman Inquiry, under Dame Janet Smith, spent two years investigating a total of 618 deaths that had occurred under Shipman, concluding that he had been responsible for the murder of 215 patients, with a further 45 deaths deemed suspicious.

The first case the inquiry concluded unequivocally was murder was that of Eva Lyons, when Shipman was a GP in Todmorden. Lyons was 70, and suffering from terminal cancer.

On 17 March 1975, Shipman turned up unannounced at 11pm, saying he was in the area and thought he’d look in on Eva. (She had been in hospital, but when her condition seemed to improve, she was allowed home.) Eva’s granddaughter, Debbie Bartlett, was 14 at the time. ‘He went in to see her,’ she tells me, ‘and he injected her in the back of the hand, in front of my grandfather, Dick, saying, “It’s just something for the pain.” Then there was some chit-chat, and he said, “I’ll just have a little check on her before I go.” And he did. And then he said, “I’m sorry to say she’s dead.”’

Eva’s daughter, Norma, would later recall her father telling her that it was as if Shipman ‘was announcing a bingo number or a football score’.

Over the years, Dick Lyons and Norma would sometimes wonder whether Shipman might have ‘helped Eva on her way’, but it was never discussed outside the home.

But 25 years after her death, with Shipman now in prison, Bartlett read in the newspaper about how the Shipman Inquiry was looking into his earlier activities. ‘I rang my mum immediately. And she said, “Don’t be stupid, Deborah, it was a young man.” The person we were seeing on the television was this old, bearded man, looking very smug and arrogant.

From below: Shipman graduating as a doctor in 1970; his GP practice in Hyde; Shipman in the early 1970s