Harold Shipman

Harold Shipman (born January 14, 1946, Nottingham, England—died January 13, 2004, Wakefield) was a British doctor who is one of the deadliest serial killers in history, believed to have murdered about 250 of his patients, according to an official inquiry into his crimes. In 2000 he was convicted on 15 counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison; four years later he died by suicide. Shipman’s murders raised troubling questions about the powers and responsibilities of the medical community in Britain and about the adequacy of procedures for certifying sudden death.

Life and crimes

Shipman was born into a working-class family in Manchester. A bright child, he became interested in medicine as he watched his mother receive morphine injections to ease the pain she suffered while dying of lung cancer. In 1966 Shipman married Primrose Oxtoby, and the couple later had four children.

In 1970 Shipman received a medical degree from Leeds University, and a few years later he became a general practitioner in Todmorden in Lancashire. In 1975, after it was discovered that he had written several fraudulent prescriptions for the opiate pethedine, to which he had become addicted, he was forced out of his practice and into drug rehabilitation.

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In 1977 Shipman found work as a general practitioner in the town of Hyde in Greater Manchester, where eventually he gained respectability and developed a thriving practice. Over the years, several people raised concerns about the number of elderly people who died in his care. In April 1998 the police closed an investigation after searching for several months and finding insufficient evidence.

Two months later one of his patients, an 81-year-old woman, was discovered dead in her home only hours after Shipman visited her. Her family was perplexed by the suddenness of her death (she had appeared to be in good health), by the fact that her will had been changed to benefit Shipman (it bequeathed her entire estate, valued at some £400,000, to him), and by Shipman’s insistence that no autopsy was necessary. The family went to the police, and an ensuing investigation uncovered 14 other suspicious deaths. It was determined that all of the deceased patients had received lethal doses of the painkiller diamorphine and that Shipman had signed a death certificate attributing the incident to natural causes.

Shipman was arrested, and in 2000 he was convicted on 15 counts of murder and one count of forgery and sentenced to life in prison. Primrose Shipman had supported her husband throughout the trial and visited him almost daily. In 2004 Harold Shipman died by suicide, hanging himself in his cell.

Number of victims and motive

A government inquiry was ordered to determine how many more patients Shipman may have murdered; in 2005 an official report found that he had killed an estimated 250 people beginning in 1971. His motives were unclear; some speculated that Shipman may have been seeking to avenge the death of his mother, while others suggested that he thought he was practicing euthanasia, removing from the population older people who might otherwise have become a burden to the health care system. A third possibility raised was that he derived pleasure from the knowledge that, as a doctor, he had the power of life or death over his patients and that killing was the means through which he expressed this power. Despite his forgery of the will of one of his victims, financial gain appears not to have been a serious motive.

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One key question that plagued investigators was how such a large number of deaths could have occurred without raising suspicions of foul play. This was all the more baffling because Shipman’s patients were normally healthy shortly before their encounters with him. The fact that Shipman took advantage of his patients’ trust in him as a doctor made his crimes particularly odious to the public.