Serial Killer Doctors (3 page)
Right up to his death, he was still receiving legacies from grateful patients.
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Harold Shipman
The list of the world’s most prolific serial killers makes dreadful reading. It contains names such as Luis Alfredo Garavito, a Colombian who killed 138 street children in the nineteen-nineties, and his countryman, Pedro Alonso Lopez, who killed 110 young girls between 1969 and 1980. At the top of the list, however, and earning the unenviable title of the world’s most prolific serial killer, is the quiet, bearded Yorkshireman, Harold Shipman, responsible for the deaths of at least 218 of his patients. In fact, the enquiry that followed his conviction examined the cases of 500 of his patients and concluded that the death toll might even have been greater and in its report it stated that there was genuine suspicion that he had killed another 45, although there was insufficient evidence to establish real certainty. Some sources place the number of people who were killed by him closer to 1,000.
What drove a doctor to carry out such heinous acts over such a long period? There are many hypotheses. One is that he was, quite simply, a psychopath and his acts were no more than a manifestation of the classic tendency of the psychopath to control and manipulate. There is a view that it was a fascination with the power of drugs that led him to kill. He liked to experiment with them, this theory suggests, playing with the individual doses he gave his patients and seeing just how much they could take before the drugs proved fatal. Or perhaps it was a morbid fascination with death that caused him to bring it to so many people? Then again, Shipman had enjoyed a particularly complex relationship with his mother, Vera, watching her die from lung cancer while he was still a child. Perhaps the fact that he mainly targeted elderly ladies suggested that he was merely trying to recreate her death every time he killed a patient.
Indeed, the young Harold Shipman – or ‘Freddy’ as his mother called him – was certainly the favourite of her three children. Born Harold Frederick Shipman in 1946 in Nottingham, he was the second of four children. His father was a lorry driver and Vera, his mother, was a very fussy woman, especially where her children were concerned. In fact, there were many in the neighbourhood who considered her an out-and-out snob. Freddy, it would appear, inherited some of the airs and graces of his mother and is remembered as having a similarly superior air that alienated him from other children. It was not helped by the fact that his mother always made him wear a tie.
He worshipped Vera which made it all the more difficult for him when she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He would run home from school to make her a cup of tea and sit by her sick bed chatting about his day. He would undoubtedly have watched in morbid fascination as doctors came and went during his mother’s last months, injecting her with morphine to alleviate the pain from which she was suffering. It is hard not to imagine that this had some effect on the teenage boy and may have stirred in him the first notions of the kind of power doctors wield over their patients. Vera died in 1963 when he was seventeen.
Eventually, Shipman resolved to become a doctor but, an average student at school, it was always going to be a struggle. Undaunted, he succeeded in gaining entry to Leeds University Medical School on a scholarship, failing his exams first time round but scraping through when he sat them for a second time. He served an internship at Pontefract General Infirmary before taking his first position as a general practitioner at the Abraham Oremerod Medical Centre in the market town of Todmorden in Yorkshire.
At medical school, Shipman had, as ever, been a loner who found it hard to make friends and mix socially. It came as a complete surprise, therefore, when he met a girl named Primrose and married her. He was twenty and she was just seventeen, but, as she walked down the aisle, she was five months pregnant.
By the time he was twenty-eight, he was the father of two young children and a pillar of the community. His personality remained unaltered, though and he was often rude to those who worked with him and confrontational to the point where he humiliated people. To his fellow doctors in the practice, however, the new young practitioner appeared to be hardworking and enthusiastic.
It all changed when Shipman began to suffer from blackouts. When his concerned colleagues asked him about them, that he told them he suffered from epilepsy. Soon, however, the truth emerged when the receptionist at the medical centre noticed that entries in the controlled narcotics register showed that Shipman had regularly been prescribing large doses of pethidine – a morphine-like analgesic – to patients. He had also written large prescriptions for the drug that were to be stored at the clinic.
Without Shipman’s knowledge, an inquiry was held, uncovering the disturbing information that the patients to whom he had prescribed pethidine had not actually received it. It has to be concluded, therefore, that he was either self-injecting, or – a more disturbing thought – he had already begun to kill patients using the drug. They chose to believe that he was stealing it for his own use. He was forced to resign, fined £600 by the General Medial Council and briefly attended a drug rehabilitation centre in York. He had got off lightly.
Shipman took a position as medical officer at Hatfield College for a short while and did some temporary work for the National Coal Board before being accepted into the Donneybrook medical Centre in Hyde in Manchester in 1977, having convinced the doctors there that he was free of his drug problem.
He went to work and again convinced his fellow practitioners that he was dedicated, hardworking and community-minded. His patients liked and trusted him and his colleagues respected him. The scene was set for him to kill for the next twenty-four years. Only when he tried to forge the will of an elderly lady whom he had killed did his web of lies and death begin to unravel.
The first concerns emerged when local undertaker, Alan Massey became suspicious of the number of Dr Shipman’s patients that he seemed to be burying. Moreover, when he turned up to collect the bodies, they seemed to possess similarities, being seated in a chair or on a settee, but almost always fully clothed. There was never a sign in the house that the deceased had been ill.
He felt uneasy enough to pay Shipman a visit but was reassured by the answers the doctor gave him. Massey’s daughter Debbie Bramhoffe, also an undertaker, was far from reassured, however. She voiced her concerns to Dr Susan Booth who worked at a neighbouring practice. Dr Booth passed their concerns to her colleagues and one of them phoned the coroner who informed the police. Without his knowledge, Shipman’s records were examined but nothing untoward was discovered. The causes of death and the treatments he had advocated matched. What they did not know at the time, of course, is that Shipman always re-wrote a patient’s record after he had killed him or her. The investigation has since been criticized because officers failed to check for a criminal record or contact the General Medical Council. If they had done so, they would have learned of Shipman’s record of drug abuse and the forgery for which he had been punished in 1975.
Finally, though, Shipman’s deadly career was exposed by the determination of Angela Woodruff whose 81 year-old mother, Katherine Grundy, a former Lady Mayor of Hyde, was a patient of Shipman. Mrs Grundy was well off and still energetic to the point where she still carried out a great deal of charity work. One of her charitable acts was to help to serve meals to pensioners less able than herself at the local Age Concern club. She enjoyed it and the people she was helping enjoyed her company. So, when she failed to turn up at the club on June 24, 1998, people were concerned. Her friends drove round to her house where they found her lying on the sofa, dead. They put an emergency call through to her doctor, Harold Shipman who had already visited the house earlier that day, ostensibly to take blood samples for some research into the aging process. On his arrival, he pronounced Katherine Grundy dead and the dead woman’s daughter, Angela Woodruff was duly informed. Shipman told Mrs Woodruff that, as he had seen her mother just that morning, there would be no need for a post mortem.
Following her mother’s funeral, Angela Woodruff received some very upsetting news from the firm of solicitors that claimed to be handling her mother’s estate. The fact that they were dealing with it came as a surprise to her as she was herself a solicitor and had always handled her mother’s affairs. Her surprise was compounded, moreover, when she was told that in her will her mother had left £386,000 to Dr Harold Shipman.
Mrs Woodruff insisted on examining the will and what she found immediately aroused her suspicions. It was a shoddily typed document and, on close examination, the signature did not look like that of her mother. Katherine Grundy had been a meticulous woman who would never have been happy with such a document. Mrs Woodruff began to suspect that Harold Shipman had murdered her mother and forged the will in order to get his hands on her money. When she took the document to the police, they agreed with her that it looked like an amateurish fake.
Before Shipman knew what was happening and to prevent him from disposing of any evidence, Mrs Grundy’s body was exhumed for hair and tissue samples to be taken and analyzed. Officers also searched his home and his office at the clinic. Shipman is reported to have remained aloof and confident as the search proceeded, eyeing the police officers with the same quiet arrogance that he had demonstrated throughout his life.
When they asked him if he owned a typewriter, he produced an ancient portable machine. Realizing that they were searching for the typewriter that had been used to write Katherine Grundy’s will, he quickly told them that she had often borrowed it from him. When the machine was examined it was indeed found to be the one on which the offending document had been created.
When the samples taken from Mrs Grundy’s corpse were analyzed, high levels of morphine were found and it was concluded that she had actually died of an overdose of morphine. Shipman even tried to come up with a reason for this, claiming somewhat ridiculously that the former Lady Mayor of Hyde had been a morphine addict. He was arrested on September 7, 1998.
The grim realization that he was almost certainly responsible for many more murders began to sink in as police investigated the deaths he had certified. Examination of his computer’s hard disk clearly showed changes being made to patients’ records within hours of their deaths at his hands.
Harold Shipman’s trial began in Preston, Lancashire on October 5, 1999 and he faced fifteen charges of murder and one of forgery. When questioned about the blood samples he had taken from Katherine Grundy, he claimed he had lost them in his office and then when he found them they were no longer of any use and had thrown them away. He also claimed that he never carried morphine in his medical bag but a patient came forward to whom he had recently given a morphine injection during a house call.
Patients realized how close they had come to death. One man, suffering from cancer, had refused to allow Shipman to give him an injection because two of his relatives had died after treatment from him. He survived Shipman but later received the tragic news that his relatives had, indeed, been murdered by him.
On January 31, 2000, Harold Shipman was found guilty by a unanimous verdict. He received fifteen life sentences and four years for the charge of forgery.
He served only four years of his sentence. On January 13, 2004, he used his bed sheets to hang himself in his cell at Wakefield Prison. It was reported at the time that he had killed himself because if he had reached the age of sixty – he was 58 at the time – his wife would not receive the NHS pension to which she was entitled. Harold Shipman remained manipulative and controlling even in death.
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