The notorious Doctor Death
Few people who picked up a newspaper on August 20, 1998, would have imagined that a name within its pages would soon become forever synonymous with mass murder.
In fact, many probably skimmed over the pages that told how a Manchester doctor was being quizzed over several deaths after a widow appeared to have changed her will just before she passed away.
But before long Harold Shipman was front page news around the world as the horrific extent of the family GP’s killing spree became clear.
A month later, Shipman was charged with the murder of Kathleen Grundy, a former mayoress of Hyde, Greater Manchester, after police discovered he had clumsily forged the 81-yearold’s will to leave everything to him. One by one, the bodies of other patients of the doctor were exhumed to reveal an astonishingly long line of victims stretching back decades.
Now infamous, Shipman is one of the murderers whose crimes are explored in Serial Killer Season, on the Really channel this month.
Once a pillar of the local community, the trusted doctor preyed mostly on women living alone, who may have been elderly but were not seriously ill, often killing them during home visits with fatal doses of diamorphine. ‘ENJOYED IT’
His eldest victim was a 93-year-old woman and the youngest a 41-year-old man.
On one occasion in 1995, Shipman had arrived at 81-year-old Marie West’s house while she was having tea with a friend, and killed her while the friend had gone upstairs to use the toilet, claiming she’d had a stroke and died.
At his trial in October 1999 for the murder of 15 patients, a jury heard how he killed because he “enjoyed” it.
Prosecutor Richard Henriques QC told Preston Crown Court: “He was exercising the ultimate power of controlling life and death and repeated the act so often he must have found the drama of taking life to his taste.”
But it was only after the trial, in which he was handed 15 life sentences, that a public inquiry heard just how many lives he may have taken – and Harold Shipman was revealed to be Britain’s most prolific serial killer.
It was concluded he was responsible for at least 215 victims, of which 171 were women and 44 were men. Five lived on the same street and another nine in the same sheltered housing complex. The day after his conviction, our sister paper the Daily Mirror dubbed Shipman ‘Dr Death’ and revealed how the coroner believed his actual number of victims could be many times higher – more than 1000.
His murder spree spanned more than 18 years. His first known victim, Eva Lyons, was killed the EVIL Shipman hanged himself at Wakefield jail in January 2004 day before her 71st birthday in March 1995. Another 71 patients were murdered during Shipman’s time at the Donneybrook House group practice in Hyde, and the remaining 143 after he became a solo GP in the town. Most chilling of all was the fact the wellrespected local GP was the last person anyone would have expected to have been a danger to them.
Even the way he killed, politely and clinically, set him apart from other infamous murderers like Fred and Rosemary West or the Yorkshire Ripper.
And no serial killer has managed to take as many lives as Harold Shipman, who as a trusted local GP had found the perfect disguise and alibi.
Dame Janet Smith, who led the public inquiry into the case, said the doctor’s betrayal of trust had been “unparalleled in history”.
She said: “The way in which Shipman could kill, face the relatives and walk away unsuspected would have been dismissed as fanciful if it had been described in a work of fiction.”
Even in jail, Dr Death managed to win the confidence of others and, as the Daily Mirror revealed in 2003, he was allowed to care for elderly inmates in the hospital wing at top security Frankland prison in Durham.
And even his own death seems to have been as calculated as those of the patients he killed.
Files released after he took his own life on January 13, 2004 revealed by committing suicide before his 60th birthday (he was 57), his wife Primrose would receive a £100,000 lump sum payout plus £10,000 a year pension.
His death also meant relatives of his victims would never know why he had murdered them.
Former Detective Chief Superintendent Bernard Postles, who led the Shipman investigation and retired in June 2003, said after his death: “My belief is that it was a power issue. It was the power over life and death.
“He’s the biggest serial killer this country has ever known, but as to what drove him to do it, that is something that we will never know.” Irene Turner, 67 Maureen Ward, 57 Lizzie Adams, 77 Winifred Mellor, 73 Kathleen Wagstaff, 81 Pamela Hillier, 68