Harold Frederick Shipman (14 January, 1946 – 13 January, 2004) was a British general practitioner who was the most prolific known serial killer in the history of Britain (and possibly the world).
He killed around 250 patients from the 1970s to 1998, in Hyde, Greater Manchester, mainly elderly women who lived alone and were otherwise in good health. He was eventually caught after he ineptly forged a new will in the name of one of his victims. He was convicted on 15 sample charges in 2000 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He committed suicide in 2004 at HMP Wakefield, West Yorkshire, without admitting to or explaining his crimes.
Early life
Shipman was born in Nottingham, the second of three children, and was known as Fred or Freddy to his family. His mother, Vera, died in 1963 from lung cancer, when he was 17. He went to University of Leeds medical school in 1965, and around this time, he met his future wife, Primrose (who was three years his junior).
They married in 1966, and Primrose 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 small town southeast of Leeds. It was apparently here that he started murdering people.
In 1974 Shipman took his first GP position in Todmorden, 12.5 miles west of Halifax, West Yorkshire. Soon after this, 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 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, on Market Street. He became a respected member of the community.
Detection
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 countersigning).
She said that 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 apportioned blame on 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 had killed a further three people [1][2].
The last of these was 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 discovered 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 was determined to contain traces of diamorphine (medical-grade heroin, legal for pain control in the UK). Shipman was arrested on 7 September 1998 and was found to own the Brother portable typewriter used to type 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 morphine, signing their death certificates, and then forging medical records to indicate they were in poor health.
Trial and imprisonment
Shipman's trial, presided over by Mr Justice Forbes, began on 5 October 1999. Shipman was prosecuted for the murders of Marie West, Irene Turner, Lizzie Adams, Jean Lilley, Ivy Lomas, 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 fifteen patients with lethal injections of diamorphine. The trial judge sentenced him to life imprisonment and recommended that he should never be released. In February 2002, Shipman was formally struck off the General Medical Council register.
Shipman was one of the last prisoners to receive a government-imposed tariff. In June 2002, the Home Secretary, in accordance with the trial judge's guidance, informed Shipman that he would never leave prison. He was also convicted for forging Grundy's will, and received a four-year sentence for this.
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 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 several hundred 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]
Suicide
Shipman was found hanged in his cell at 6:20 a.m. on 13 January 2004 on the eve of his 58th birthday, and was pronounced dead at 8:10 a.m. A Prison Service statement indicated that Shipman had hanged himself from the bars of his cell, using bed sheets. His death was greeted by a mixed reception from the world's media.
The "Daily Mirror" condemned Shipman as a 'cold coward' and said that he should not have been allowed to commit suicide.
"The Sun" informed its readers that they should be glad that Shipman has saved them the cost of keeping him locked up for years. Unable to disguise its glee, it ran the front page headline "Ship Ship Hooray" and named another prisoner (paedophile and murderer Roy Whiting) that it would like to see following Shipman's example.
David Ramsbottom wrote an article in "The Guardian" which spoke of the difficulties that whole life sentencing created, and how Shipman's whole life tariff undoubtedly contributed towards his suicide. He claimed that indefinite sentences would be better, because although a prisoner might still never be released, they would always have the hope that it would happen.
However, the victims' families said they felt "cheated", [4] 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. British 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".[5]
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.[6]
Questions were posed as to why he had not been on suicide watch at HMP Wakefield, even though he had been on suicide watch at earlier stays at HMP Manchester and HMP Frankland.
Aftermath
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 in charge of the inquiry, 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 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 unclear how many of these were Shipman's victims, as Shipman was often the only person to certify a death.[7]
The Shipman Inquiry also made recommendations about changes to the structure of the General Medical Council.[8]
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. Mrs. Shipman 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.[9][10]
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.[11]
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.[12][13]
Unidentified items were handed to the Asset Recovery Agency in May.[14] 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, which the family were able to provide a photograph of as proof of ownership.
The proceeds of the auction went to Tameside Victim Support.[15][16]
A memorial garden to Shipman's victims, called the Garden of Tranquillity, opened in Hyde Park in Hyde on 30 July 2005.[17]
Harold Shipman's was cremated even though his wife wanted him buried. The police convinced her that his grave would be targeted by the famillies and in the end she agreed to the cremation.