New superstore covers site of town’s dark past

A NEW Aldi supermarket opened last week on a long-disused plot of land in a town centre.

For Todmorden’s older residents, though, the site has a darker significance.

It was, until March 2016, the site of the Abraham Ormerod Medical Centre. The long since disused centre had been a doctors’ surgery like any other; former patients recall it being brightly decorated inside.

But for 18 months it was where GP and Britain’s most prolific serial killer Harold Shipman practised.

It is believed Shipman began murdering patients as a junior doctor at Pontefract General Infirmary between 1971 and 1974.

In March 1974, Shipman joined the Abraham Ormerod Medical Centre as a GP. And according to villagers old enough to remember him,

Shipman was well-liked. Shipman treated a wound for former patient Robert when he was a boy. “He sewed me up”, Robert, 56, said.

His friend Michael, 65, added Shipman seemed like a ‘nice guy’ until decades later when the GP’s crimes were revealed.

Shipman murdered approximately 250 of his patients, most of whom he killed during his time as a GP in Hyde, Greater Manchester, between 1977 and 1998.

But the doctor, who killed himself in his cell at Wakefield Prison in 2004, also killed in Todmorden before he was sacked for forging prescriptions to feed his opiate addiction. The first Shipman Report, published in 2002, concluded Shipman had murdered 70-year-old Eva Lyons at her Todmorden home in March 1975.

Shipman is also suspected to have murdered six other Todmorden patients - Lily Crossley, Robert Lingard, Elizabeth Pearce, Edith Roberts, Jane Rowland and Albert Redvers Williams, all aged between 62 and 84 - during his time in the town.

Nearly half a century later, memories of this dark and tragic episode in Todmorden’s history have faded but they haven’t been forgotten.

Robert said: “I don’t think people talk about it any more.”

John, 69, was a patient at the Abraham Ormerod centre when Shipman was a doctor there, although he saw a different GP.

He said: “There’s a dry sense of humour in Todmorden and they take the p*** out of him.”