Harold Frederick Shipman, born in 1946 in Nottingham England was born into a working-class family, but would go on to become one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers.
At a young age, Shipman’s mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and given morphine to cope with the pain; the administration of the drug prompted his interest in medicine, leading him to pursue a medical career. Shipman attended Leeds University medical school and went on to become a family practitioner. Initially, he did well, married and would go on to have four children, however, he became addicted to the painkiller pethidine. Eventually caught forging prescriptions for the drug by his colleagues, he was forced out of his practice. After spending time in a drug rehabilitation program, he was deemed clean and went on in the hopes of continuing his medical career.
In 1977, he landed a job as a family doctor at the Donneybrook Medical Center in Hyde, Greater Manchester, where he cared for many elderly members of the community. Generally well-liked and respected among his colleagues, there was little suspicion of foul play when elderly patients began dying under his care. On two occasions, the local undertaker and a medical colleague did raise concern over Shipman’s patients’ unusually high death rate, but despite police investigation, Shipman’s records were in order and he was cleared. Later on, it was found that Shipman had indeed altered these medical records, but at the time the investigation was not conducted thoroughly enough.
In 1998, another of Shipman’s patients, 81-year old widow Kathleen Grundy, was pronounced dead after a visit from him.; however, Grundy’s daughter, Angela Woodruff, a lawyer, did not accept Shipman’s explanation as easily as many. Her suspicion grew for multiple reasons, first due to the suddenness of her mother’s death given her good health, second due to Shipman’s insistence on not conducting an autopsy, and third, due to her mother’s will. Woodruff was shocked to discover that in light of her wealthy mother’s death, a will existed naming Shipman the inheritor of her estate, valued at about £400,000. She quickly contacted the local police after coming to the conclusion that Shipman had forged the document and then killed her mother to benefit from her death. Upon investigation, it was found that Grundy had indeed died due to a morphine overdose that had been administered within hours of her death. Alongside other discovered evidence, Shipman was convicted in 2000 on 15 counts of murder and one count of forgery. Sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, Shipman ended up committing suicide in 2004.
With the government order to delve further into Shipman’s career, it was later discovered that Shipman had killed at least 215 of his patients but as many as 250. Most of these murders were carried out by the injection of a lethal dose of morphine which Shipman covered up by recording the deaths as the result of ‘natural causes’. There are different theories explaining his motive for killing so many individuals, one attributing his killings to pleasure of the power over life he held as a doctor, and another connecting them to his mother’s death by morphine early in his life. Regardless, the sheer number of people that died by his hand easily made him one of the world’s most prolific and notorious serial killers.
In hindsight, many wonder how Shipman was able to murder so many individuals with such little suspicion and questions raised especially considering that most of his patients were in good health prior to Shipman’s visits and died shortly after. In many ways, his doctor status protected him, allowing him to take advantage of the public’s trust in him without any misgivings. His abuse of power as a medical profession makes his crimes particularly horrid and abominable. Finally, it is frustrating to think that he may have been stopped earlier had proper procedure been executed at the first signs of foul play.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harold-Shipman
https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/harold-shipman
I’ve always found that some of the scariest killers are those who got away with it for so long, and are in a trusted position like a doctor. I was shocked when I saw the number 250 as his possible kill count – it’s crazy to me that it went on for so long with no one noticing it. Again though, when you’re in such a position that people give you trust over their health, you can probably get away with a lot if that’s what you want to do. It’s still almost unfathomable though.
Hey Sophia! Wow. This guy was legit crazy and, as a fellow true crime junkie, I am devastated to learn how many people he murdered — that’s one of the highest numbers I’ve ever seen. I am also frustrated, like you, about the lack of proper investigative and medical procedures that, had they been in place, might’ve prevented him from continuing as long as he did. In many instances, we find the fault of these institutions as a significant causal factor in a serial killer’s success. We’ve got to do better, even when we normally place high trust in individuals like doctors. Great work researching and explaining this!
I think that in most cases, prolific serial killers are able to go undiscovered for so long because they prey on demographics which are largely ignored by society (the elderly, homeless, prostitutes, etc.). It’s especially disturbing in this case because he was obviously in a position of power and was afforded a high degree of trust, which he betrayed countless times.
It is definitely unsettling that a doctor, who is required to file detailed reports on the deaths of all his patients, was able to go on for so long without being caught. I have almost no knowledge of the medical process, but it seems concerning that no one got suspicious sooner. He must have been very good at falsifying records and then also convincing people not to do autopsies. Either way, great work on this blog!
I would have never thought of a doctor being a serial killer. You always think that doctors are there to take care of you, but he just went rogue and gave the back to his oath of saving lives. Also, I cannot believe he killed 251 people. That is just crazy.