Harold Shipman

His mother, Vera, died in 1963 from lung cancer, when he was 17. He studied at High Pavement Grammar School, Nottingham, then the University of Leeds medical school from 1963, and around this time met his future wife, Primrose (who was three years his junior).

They married in 1966, and she gave birth to their first child, Sarah, four months later. In total they had four children. In 1970 he graduated from Leeds and started work at Pontefract General Infirmary in Pontefract, a town southeast of Leeds. It was apparently at this time that he started killing patients.

In 1974 Shipman took his first GP position in Todmorden, 12 miles west of Halifax, West Yorkshire. In 1975 he was caught forging prescriptions of pethidine for his own use. Sent briefly to a drug rehabilitation clinic in York, he was pronounced clean, and after a brief spell as medical officer for Hatfield College, Durham, he became a GP at the Donneybrook Medical Centre in Hyde, Tameside, Greater Manchester in 1977.

Shipman continued working as a GP in Hyde throughout the 1980s, founding a clinic of his own in 1993, in Market Street. He became a respected member of the community.

In March 1998, Dr Linda Reynolds of the Brooke Surgery in Hyde, opposite Shipman's clinic, went to John Pollard, the coroner for the South Manchester district, with concerns about the high death rate among Shipman's patients (in particular the large number of cremation forms for elderly women that he had needed countersigned).

She said he was "killing" his patients, although she was not sure whether it was malpractice or malice. The matter was brought to the attention of the police, who were unable to find sufficient evidence to bring charges. (The Shipman Inquiry later blamed the police for assigning inexperienced officers to the case.) Between the time the investigation was abandoned on April 17 and Shipman's eventual arrest, he killed a further three people.^[1][2]

The last of these was the healthy and energetic Kathleen Grundy, a former Mayor of Hyde. On 24 June 1998, she was found dead at her home. The last person to see her alive had been Shipman, who later signed her death certificate.

Grundy's daughter, lawyer Angela Woodruff, became concerned when she was informed by solicitor Brian Burgess that a will had been made, apparently by her mother, which excluded her entirely and bequeathed £386,000 to Shipman. Woodruff went to the police, who began an investigation. Grundy's body was exhumed and examined, and found to contain traces of diamorphine. Shipman was arrested on 7 September 1998, and was found to own a typewriter of the type used to make the forged will.

After this, police looked at other deaths that Shipman had certified, and drew up a list of 15 specimen counts to investigate. A pattern emerged of him overdosing patients with diamorphine, signing their death certificates, and then forging medical records to indicate they were in poor health.

Shipman's trial, presided over by Justice Thayne John Forbes, began on 5 October 1999. Shipman was prosecuted for the murders of Marie West, Irene Turner, Lizzie Adams, Jean Lilley, Ivy Lomas, Jermaine Ankrah, Muriel Grimshaw, Marie Quinn, Kathleen Wagstaff, Bianka Pomfret, Naomi Nuttall, Pamela Hillier, Maureen Ward, Winifred Mellor, Joan Melia and Kathleen Grundy, over a period from 1995 to 1998.

After jury deliberations of six days, Shipman was convicted on 31 January 2000 of killing 15 patients with lethal injections of diamorphine. The trial judge sentenced him to 15 consecutive life sentences and recommended that he should never be released. Two years later the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett, agreed with this recommendation — just months before politicians lost their power to set minimum terms for murderers.

In February 2002, Shipman was formally struck off the GMC register.

Shipman consistently denied his guilt (his defence relying on disputing the forensic evidence against him), and never made any statements about his actions. His defence tried (and failed) to have the count of murder of Mrs Grundy, where a clear motive was alleged, tried separately from the others, where there appears to have been no strong motive.

Although there were many other cases that could have been brought to court, it was concluded that it would be hard to have a fair trial, in view of the enormous publicity surrounding the original trial; in any case, a further trial would be unnecessary, given the existing sentence. The Shipman Inquiry concluded that Shipman was probably responsible for about 500 deaths.

Some commentators have postulated that his murder of older women was somehow related to the painful experience of his mother dying when he was young, while others said the motive was an arrogant desire to control life and death. The Shipman Inquiry suggested that he liked to experiment with drugs.^[3]

Shipman was found hanged in his cell at 6:20am on 13 January, 2004, on the eve of his 58th birthday, and was pronounced dead at 8:10am. A Prison Service statement indicated that Shipman had hanged himself from the bars of his cell, using bed sheets. Some British tabloids expressed joy at his suicide and encouraged other serial killers to follow his example. The Sun in particular was criticised for its celebratory front page headline "Ship Ship hooray!" ^[4]

However, the victims' families said they felt "cheated", ^[5] as his suicide meant that they would never have the satisfaction of Shipman's confession, and answers as to why he had committed his crimes. The Home Secretary David Blunkett noted that celebration was tempting, saying: "You wake up and you receive a call telling you Shipman has topped himself and you think, is it too early to open a bottle? And then you discover that everybody's very upset that he's done it".^[6]

Shipman's motive for suicide was not established, although he had reportedly told his probation officer that he was considering suicide so that his widow could receive a National Health Service pension and lump sum, even though he had been stripped of his own pension.^[7] He died the day before his 58th birthday, and his wife received a full NHS pension. Had he been 60 or older when he died, his wife would not have received it.^[8] The FBI profiler John Douglas has asserted that serial killers are usually obsessed with manipulation and control, and killing themselves in police custody (or committing "suicide by cop") is their final gesture of controlling their life.^[9]

Questions were posed as to why he had not been on suicide watch at HMP Wakefield, even though he had been during earlier stays at HMP Manchester and HMP Frankland after threatening to kill himself.

Shortly after Shipman's death, Sir David Ramsbotham wrote an article in The Guardian newspaper which urged whole life sentencing to be eliminated and replaced by indefinite sentences. He said indefinite sentences would be a better option than whole life sentences because, while a prisoner might still never be released, they would always have the hope that it might happen.^[10]

It is unclear when Shipman started murdering people, or even how many he killed. A report into Shipman's activities submitted in July 2002 concluded that he had killed at least 215 of his patients between 1975 and 1998, during which time he had practised in Todmorden, West Yorkshire (1974–1975) and Hyde, Greater Manchester (1977–1998). Dame Janet Smith, the judge who submitted the report, admitted that many more suspicious deaths could not be definitively ascribed to him. Most of his victims were elderly women in good health.

In her sixth and final report, issued on 27 January 2005, Dame Janet Smith reported that she believed that Shipman had killed three patients, and she had serious suspicions about four further deaths including that of a four-year-old girl, during the early stage of his medical career at Pontefract General Hospital, West Yorkshire. Dame Janet concluded that the probable number of Shipman's victims between 1971 and 1998 was 250. In total, 459 people died while under his care. It is uncertain how many of these were Shipman's victims, as Shipman was often the only person to certify a death.^[11]

The Shipman Inquiry also made recommendations about changes to the structure of the General Medical Council.^[12]

Six doctors who had signed cremation forms for Shipman's victims were charged with misconduct by the General Medical Council, which claimed that they should have noticed the pattern between Shipman's home visits and his patients' deaths. All of these doctors were found not guilty. Shipman's widow, Primrose Shipman, was called to give evidence about two of the deaths during the inquiry. She maintained her husband's innocence both before and after the prosecution.

October 2005 saw a similar hearing against two doctors who worked at Tameside General Hospital in 1994, and had failed to detect that Shipman had deliberately administered a "grossly excessive" dose of morphine.^[13][14]

A further inquiry was held in 2005 into Shipman's suicide. It found that it "could not have been predicted or prevented", but that procedures should nonetheless be re-examined. ^[8]

In 2005, it transpired that Shipman might have stolen jewellery from his victims. Over £10,000 worth of jewellery had been found in his garage in 1998, and in March 2005, with Primrose Shipman pressing for it to be returned to her, police wrote to the families of Shipman's victims asking them to identify the jewellery.^[15][16]

Unidentified items were handed to the Asset Recovery Agency in May.^[17]In August the investigation ended, with sixty-six pieces returned to Primrose Shipman and thirty-three pieces, which Primrose confirmed were not hers, auctioned. The only piece actually returned to a family was a platinum-diamond ring, for which the family were able to provide a photograph as proof of ownership.

The proceeds of the auction went to Tameside Victim Support.^[18][19]

A memorial garden to Shipman's victims, called the Garden of Tranquillity, opened in Hyde Park in Hyde on 30 July 2005.^[20]

Shipman, a TV dramatisation of the case, was made in 2002 and starred James Bolam in title role.^[21]

In the American TV series Law & Order: Criminal Intent (season 3, episode 20, D.A.W.), main characters Robert Goren and Alexandra Eames investigate a doctor they suspect of being a serial killer. Many aspects of the case resemble that of Shipman, including his early drug addiction and the number of people he is suspected of killing. When he is confronted at a dinner party, one of the guests, wearing a beard and glasses, strongly resembles Shipman. Furthermore there is a red herring in the form of an orderly named "Hal Shipman".^[22]

• List of serial killers by number of victims
• John Bodkin Adams
• Michael Swango

• Shipman Inquiry
• BBC — The Shipman Murders
• List of suspected murders
• Caso abierto, Dr Death: The Shipman Case