Detective Superintendent Bernard Postles slightly shook his head while testifying at the Preston Crown Court. He was recounting how a patient known as Elaine Oswald spoke well of Dr Harold Shipman.
Harold had incidentally tried to kill Elaine by administering a lethal dose of diamorphine, the medical term for heroin.
Postles also detailed that 29-year-old Paul Spencer, a long-term patient of Harold’s, claimed that Harold’s practice had a year-long waiting list. The physician, the media would go on to call, ‘Dr. Death was clearly well-regarded.
A son of one of his patients, Mr Higginbottom, told police, “I remember the time Shipman gave to my Dad. He would come around at the drop of a hat. He was a marvellous GP apart from the fact that he killed my father.”
It is such testimonies that prompted the public’s collective incredulity when subsequent investigations revealed the seemingly docile Dr Harold Shipman to be one of Britain’s most Machiavellian serial killers.
Harold Shipman’s Early Years
Harold Frederick Shipman was born to working-class parents in Bestwood Council Estate, Nottingham, in 1946. His mother was a housewife, while his father drove trucks for a living. Harold attended the High Pavement Grammar School.
When he was 17, his mother, Vera Shipman, got lung cancer. Harold saw his family’s doctor repeatedly visit his home and inject morphine into his ailing parent.
His mother died in 1963, and two years later, Harold enrolled at Leeds University Medical School. While at Leeds, he met and married Primrose Oxtoby. She was 17 at the time.
After graduating from Leeds University, Harold Shipman joined Pontefract General Infirmary as a junior houseman. Later, in 1974, he left West Yorkshire and moved to the Pennines, where he joined a group medical practice.
In 1975, Harold Shipman admitted to having a drug habit after being detained for faking prescriptions to obtain pethidine, a synthetic opioid analgesic. When cornered, he claimed to have been taking them to treat his stress and depression.
Harold was ordered to undergo rehabilitation and fined £600 to reimburse the National Health Service. The General Medical Council cautioned him before permitting him to return to Durham to continue operating as a medical officer.
Harold Shipman later went to Greater Manchester and established his individual practice as a solo general practitioner.
The General Medical Council had permitted Harold to operate with no limitations on recommending controlled drugs to patients.
Harold nurtured his reputation as a steadfast, empathetic physician who cared earnestly for his aged patients. He even agreed to include house calls in his demanding schedule.
Harold Shipman’s Crime Spree
Police officers began to gain interest in Harold Shipman’s dealings in 1998. A fellow physician in Greater Manchester informed the local coroner about the oddly high number of patients who were dying under Shipman’s care.
Alan Massey, an undertaker, also noticed this as he was tasked with transporting the dead patients’ bodies.
Massey told the police that he noticed that most of those dead patients did not have wounds or symptoms characterizing brutal illnesses. Harold also administered large quantities of morphine in each case.
When Massey quizzed Harold about these facts, the physician produced death records that validated the need for high morphine doses.
The Greater Manchester police requested a local health establishment to confirm if the ’cause of death’ in the records of 19 deceased patients matched their medical notes before they passed away.
They did not seek to determine if Harold Shipman had committed crimes before, or even question the relatives of Harold’s deceased patients.
The medical adviser affiliated with the local health establishment contacted by the police was unaware of his history of forging medical records.
Harold often included false illnesses in his patients’ records to cover his crimes. This misled the medical adviser, and the Greater Manchester police determined there was no need for further inquiry.
On June 24, 81-year-old Kathleen Grundy, a patient of Harold Shipman, died. This former mayor of Hyde passed away after going to Harold’s practice to simply have her ears syringed.
Grundy, who served with multiple charities, was absent from one charity activity the day after visiting Harold’s practice. Colleagues would later find her deceased in her house.
When Harold was alerted, he drove to Kathleen Grundy’s home, examined her body, and declared she had experienced cardiac arrest. He also informed the coroner that he would write ‘old age’ as the main reason for this incident.
Kathleen Grundy had supposedly bestowed £350 000 to Harold in her written will. When Hamilton Ward, a group of Hyde solicitors, told Grundy’s daughter this, the shocked woman contacted the police.
It would later be found that Harold Shipman checked the “cremation option” box in Kathleen Grundy’s will after injecting her with a massive quantity of morphine.
Police investigators would find that by the time he killed Kathleen Grundy, Harold Shipman had been secretly murdering approximately one patient every seven days.
The Police Investigation
The Greater Manchester police officers began by inspecting the death certificates and former medical records of people who passed away while under his care.
A search of his professional practice and home yielded a typewriter that Harold had used to forge false causes of death and invented illnesses. There were also stacks of old medical records from deceased patients.
When they spoke with the despondent relatives of the physician’s victims, officers found that Kathleen Grundy was not the only deceased patient for whom Harold had recommended cremation.
Urging for the swift cremation of his victims would avert additional examinations into the real causes of his victims’ deaths.
Police officers realised that Harold painstakingly fabricated severe illnesses in most of his victims to rationalise the use of large quantities of morphine for each of their cases.
He was not computer-savvy enough to hide all digital traces of his crimes, though. Officers found every false change the diabolical physician had made to his victims’ medical charts and death records in his hard drive.
The records discovered by the officers proved that from 1971 to 1998, Harold Shipman had murdered 15 people in the 1970s when he functioned as a junior doctor, and an additional 235 people when he operated from his own practice.
Amazed at how Harold had deeply shaken the public’s trust in the general goodwill of physicians, the detective chief inspector affiliated with Greater Manchester’s police force, Mark Williams, noted that Harold enjoyed the power to determine when a person would die.
His method of operation was uncomplicated and exceptionally successful over more than two decades. Harold would persuade old female patients living alone to consent to several private consultations before recommending and injecting them with pharmaceutical heroin.
He claimed in their medical records that the large quantities of diamorphine were just part of standard medical treatment.
After poisoning his patients, Harold often stayed nearby until they passed away. He then coolly told their shocked relatives and family members that they had passed due to age-related natural causes.
In some cases, where the shocked relatives of his victims trusted him unquestioningly, Harold signed his victims’ death certificates and even checked the ‘cremation’ preference in their individual wills.
The fact that some of his victims were already experiencing declining health made it unlikely that local health authorities would demand autopsies. Using this method, Harold Shipman quietly murdered hundreds of people over decades.
His evil practice was abruptly brought to an end when he secretly altered Kathleen Grundy’s will to read that she had decided to bypass her children and confer the majority of her estate on him.
After Kathleen Grundy’s daughter, Angela Woodruff, reported Harold to the police and they found evidence of forged medical documents in his practice and home, they got a permit to exhume her body.
The medical examination of her remains showed the presence of large quantities of diamorphine. That piqued the officers’ interest, prompting them to get permits to disinter several more people who had passed away under Harold’s care.
Between September 21 and 23 in 1998, officers exhumed the bodies of Joan Melia, Winifred Mellor, and Bianka Pomfret, who died while under Harold’s care in June 1998, May 1998, and December 1997, respectively.
From October to early November in 1998, the officers exhumed the bodies of Ivy Lomas, Marie Quinn, and Irene Turner, who passed away while under Harold’s care in May 1997, November 1997, and July 1996, respectively.
From mid-November to December 1998, officers exhumed the bodies of Jean Lilley and Muriel Grimshaw, who died while under Harold’s care in April 1997 and July 1997, respectively.
Just as was the case with Kathleen Grundy’s body, police officers found evidence of high diamorphine levels in most of these exhumed bodies.
Court Trial
Britain’s medical fraternity was extremely shocked when the media revealed that Harold Shipman had a penchant for secret homicide.
Most respected physicians in the Greater Manchester region knew Harold as a popular doctor who had treated more than 3,000 people over the previous 20 years.
His court trial took place at Preston Crown Court between October 1999 and early 2000. The prosecution used testimonies of family members, death certificates, toxicology, and medical reports to prove Harold’s guilt.
For the duration of the trial, Harold’s wife Primrose maintained unwavering loyalty. She attended trial sessions daily and sat stoically in the public gallery.
He was charged with 15 counts of murder and one count of forging a will. Harold pleaded not guilty to all counts.
The prosecutor Richard Henriques emphasised how Harold always tried to ensure his victims did not receive postmortem investigations. He incessantly recommended cremation to hide the proof of his criminal activities.
Police investigations showed that Harold stashed high quantities of diamorphine in his practice and house. He had admitted to police officers that he did not have a license to obtain prescription drugs due to being previously convicted of mishandling drugs in the early 1970s.
Moreover, the examination of storage facilities and drug registers for general practice in Greater Manchester was not operational. Police officers did not find a system to track the disposal and use of prescription medicine distribution.
Meaning Harold could easily illegally acquire enough diamorphine to murder more than 200 persons.
Prosecutor Richard Henriques stressed that it would be highly unusual, in any circumstance, for 15 patients to suddenly pass away from natural causes on the specific day that each of them opted to visit a certain physician’s practice.
Family members and relatives of Harold’s victims gave jarring testimonies about the malevolent doctor’s character.
Victim Pamela Hillier’s daughter, Jacqueline Gee, recounted how Harold insinuated, after performing a short surgery on Pamela Hillier, that her mother was very ill and might pass away at any time.
Victim Irene Turner’s son-in-law, Michael Wodruff, remembered being told after his mother-in-law passed away that she had been ingesting a large quantity of pills daily. Hence, it was unnecessary to carry out a post-mortem.
When retelling how Harold Shipman falsified her mother’s will and transferred her £400,000 to his name, Angela Woodruff explained that the will was badly typed. It was as though it was done in a hurry.
Michael Allen, a handwriting specialist, had examined Kathleen Grundy’s will. He testified that the two signatures meant to confirm that Kathleen Grundy had left £400,000 to Harold were poor simulations of Kathleen Grundy’s signature.
Harold Shipman’s defence counsel asserted that he was being accused of murder based on unpredictable and defective scientific evidence.
Harold did not acknowledge his crimes or apologise for killing innocent people at any time during the trial. He would sometimes yawn when witnesses were being questioned about his activities.
He also scribbled on papers when listening to some witnesses. His composed features, even as his crimes were being described, added to the unnerving character of his crimes.
After 120 witnesses and a week of deliberations, a jury of five women and seven men found Harold Shipman guilty of killing 15 female patients from March 1995 to June 1998.
These victims included Maureen, 57, Marie Quinn, 67, Kathleen Wagstaff, 81, Joan Melia, 73, Marie West, 81, Pamela Hillier, 68, Bianka Pomfret, 49, Norah Nuttall, 65, Winifred Mellor, 73, Lizzie Adams, 77, Ivy Lomas, 63, Muriel Grimshaw, 76, Jean Lilley, 59, and Irene Turner, 67.
On January 31, 2000, the 54-year-old was also found guilty of killing Kathleen Grundy and falsifying her will. He received 15 life sentences and an additional four years for falsifying Mrs Grundy’s will.
The overseeing judge at the Preston Crown Court, Mr Justice Forbes, recommended that Shipman never be pardoned. He would serve this sentence at West Yorkshire’s high-security Wakefield Prison.
When Harold Shipman was in the fourth year of his sentence, he was discovered hanging in his cell on the early morning of January 13, 2004. At 8.10 am, Harold was pronounced dead after resuscitation efforts failed to revive him.
The Government-sponsored inquiry into Harold Shipman’s crimes
Following Harold’s conviction, the UK government announced an inquiry to be overseen by Dame Janet Smith, which was divided into two branches. The first branch would analyse the deaths of each of Harold’s victims.
The second branch would assess the mechanisms in place that facilitated Harold’s crimes. This inquiry established that 70-year-old Eva Lyons, whom Harold murdered in 1975, was his first victim.
Harold was then serving at Tordmorden’s Abraham Ormerod practice. That was a year before he was convicted of using falsified medical records and documents to acquire enough diamorphine to kill more than 350 persons.
The inquiry found that after rebranding as a general practitioner, Harold went on to murder 71 people in Donnebrook on Market Street. Of his victims, 44 were men, and 171 were women.
Harold’s youngest victim was Peter Lewis, who was 41 years old, while his oldest casualty was Anne Cooper, who was 93 at the time of her death. The inquiry made several conclusions and recommendations.
The first conclusion was that Harold Frederick Shipman murdered approximately 215 persons over more than two decades.
The inquiry also determined that Harold’s last three victims might have been rescued from his care if the Greater Manchester police officers had comprehensively investigated the local coroner’s concerns.
The third finding was that Harold escaped detection and arrest by erroneously writing in his victims’ death records that they had passed away from ‘natural causes’.
The inquiry’s fourth conclusion was a recommendation that stringent controls be enacted on the mass accumulation and distribution of medications such as diamorphine.
The last recommendation was that the General Medical Council (GMC) improve its monitoring of physicians and regulation of the drugs they dispense to patients. The inquiry maintained that this was of particular importance regarding newly graduated doctors.
Primrose had to flee the town of Hyde due to public fury and moved several times to escape media attention. She visited Harold almost every week while he was in prison.
Following his death, Primrose was largely cut out of her own family’s estate. Her mother, who despised Harold, cut Primrose out of the will just before she died to ensure she did not get a cent. Primrose has since retreated to a cottage in Yorkshire, out of the public limelight.
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