When the notorious serial killer Harold Shipman was finally apprehended and charged, the community’s reaction was astonishing.
Harold Shipman is a name recognized across the UK as the English doctor who concealed his deadly actions in plain sight, potentially murdering as many as 260 patients, or more, over three decades from 1970 to 1998.
Growing up as ‘Fred’ in the 1950s, it wasn’t until over 50 years later that he acquired titles like ‘Doctor Death’ and ‘The Angel of Death’ for his horrific crimes.
However, not everyone believed in the general practitioner’s murderous motives.
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Criminologist professor David Wilson, speaking to LADBible Group’s Honesty Box, revealed that some of Shipman’s patients campaigned for his innocence, seemingly in shock and disbelief.
Wilson stated: “When Harold Shipman was first arrested and charged with murder, the other patients in his practice set up a ‘Harold Shipman legal fighting fund’ to pay for his legal expenses.”
Indeed, it was hard for the community to accept that their seemingly family-friendly GP from Nottingham was a serial killer among them, primarily targeting vulnerable, elderly women.
The investigation revealed that Shipman developed an obsession with death following his mother’s passing from lung cancer when he was 17.
Two years after she died, Shipman gained entry to Leeds University medical school, and by 1974, he was married with two children and entered his first medical practice.
In 1975, he was compelled to leave due to forging prescriptions for a painkiller for personal use but soon joined another medical center in Hyde, Greater Manchester, where he continued his practice throughout the 1980s without incident.
In 1998, another doctor raised concerns about the unusually high death rate among Shipman’s patients, and a taxi driver who had regularly transported elderly patients in good health suspected Shipman might be responsible for 21 deaths.
Initially, the police dismissed the case until Angela Woodruff, a solicitor whose 81-year-old mother, Kathleen Grundy, suspiciously died after Shipman visited her, raised concerns about a dubious will.
Grundy’s will unexpectedly left most of her estate to Shipman, prompting Woodruff to suspect her mother had been murdered for monetary gain.
A post-mortem on Grundy’s exhumed body confirmed she died of a morphine overdose coinciding with Shipman’s visit, and a subsequent police search of his home exposed the breadth of his horrific crimes.
Investigators uncovered medical records, a collection of jewelry, and an old typewriter used to forge the will, revealing he had altered medical records to obscure his actions.
In 2000, Shipman was convicted of 15 murders and one count of forgery, resulting in 15 life sentences and an additional four years for forgery. The judge imposed a ‘whole life sentence,’ eliminating any chance of parole.
When Shipman began his killing spree and the total number of his victims remain uncertain, though The Shipman Inquiry in 2002 estimated he killed between 200 and 284 people, possibly starting in his first GP position in 1975.
Shipman died by suicide on January 13, 2004, in his Wakefield prison cell at the age of 57.