“I am a superior being”: how did the grisly crimes of “the death of the doctor”, the doctor who murdered more than 200 patients | the Chronicle

Any family in the world puts their “total confidence” in the hands of a doctor when it comes to achieving the well-being of a loved one, and more if it is a person of advanced age, but sometimes in the hands specialists They are not used to save a life but to take it away.

This is the story of Harold Frederick Shipman, called the “Doctor Death”, who was responsible for killing to more than 200 own patients, and is considered one of the worst British serial killers.

Born in the English town of Nottingham, Shipman’s childhood and teenage years went smoothly, and because his father (same name as him) was a truck driver, he spent a lot of time with his mother, Vera Brittan, but at 17 he lost it due to aggressive lung cancer, so it is believed that for to relieve this pain, he chose this career to save lives.

However, if from one terrible side he acquired the desire to be a medical professional, the dark side also appeared on the other, because in the last months of his mother’s life a young Frederick considered him as a doctor. his mother applied daily doses of morphine to him, this calmed the pain but did not prevent the progression of the disease. This point is important because the the use of morphine was the modus operandi that Shipman was to kill his patients in the future.

After his mother’s death, Shipman ventured into sports and medicine, in fact in 1965 he studied at Leeds Medical University where he met his wife, Primrose Oxtoby, with whom he eventually had four children.

But Shipman’s personality was strange, because while at home he was an angry and boring being, in the hospitals where he worked he was the opposite, a lovable and kind person to the patients, nurses and colleagues, that is, her life seemed to be a debate between “Doctor Jeckill and Mister Hyde”.

In 1974 he opened his own medical practice in the town of Todmorden, and it was here that he had his first incident with the law, as he was arrested by British police for forge fake prescriptions for morphine with patient names to be used for own consumption (He was injecting between 600 and 700 milligrams per day in his fight against depression). For this illicit, they fined him 600 pounds and had to be rehabilitated at a clinic in the City of York.

The alleged rehabilitation did not have the desired effect since in 1975, the “Doctor Death”, as the English media would later call him, he began his criminal career, and Eva Lyon He became his first victim on the long list which did not end until 1998.

On the operating mode, it was simple: chosen elderly patients (usually women over 75), went to their homes, gave them a high dose of morphine and therefore died, and in all cases, Shipman was alone with the victim so that there were no witnesses.

Sometimes he would leave the home and a family of the victim would tell him about the death, he would come back and issued the death certificate that seemed best to him and arguing that it was due to natural causes (stroke, cardiac arrest or any other episode), with which everything seemed to develop in a “Ordinary”.

As several families of the victims wanted to cremate the body, the gaze of a second professional was needed to confirm that the death was natural, and when someone arrived and saw Shipman’s signature on the death certificate, directly they gave the approval to the parents without observing the corpse, since the reputation of the future “Doctor Death” she was flawless and respected by her peers.

Harold Shipman: no more crimes on his own

Other crimes attributed to Shipman were those of Joseph bardley (1972) and that of Sarah marsland (86 years old in 1978), the latter case had the peculiarity that Shipman he also killed his daughter in 1998 (Irene Chapman). By the end of the 1970s, the doctor had killed five people.

The number of elderly deaths increased in the 1990s when Shipman opened his own practice on Market Street (in Hyde City), in which he had 3000 patients, what for him it was like “fish in a barrel”. In fact, the police report indicated years later, that from 1972 to 1997, Shipman killed 37 patients but certified the deaths of more than 500 patients, for which the number of victims was higher.

Suspicions about Shipman began in 1998, and were directed by a colleague of his, Dr. Linda reynolds, who worked at the Brooke Surgery Clinic (across from Shipman’s) and noticed the number of deceased patients her colleague had. He visited the coroner responsible for the South Manchester region, Jean Pollard, and told him about the number of cremations that existed in the bodies of Shipman’s patients, although how little evidence and how little strength they had, They didn’t make a hole in Shipman.

Months passed and three more people died at the hands of “Doctor Death”, however, on June 24, 1998, the decline of the health professional began. The death of Kathleen grundy (81 years old and former mayor of Hyde) died at her home after Shipman visited after the victim’s daughter Angela Woodruff (the only legitimate heir) went to a lawyer to review his mother’s will, but found in the last will that the old woman had disinherited him, and in his place all his money, some 386,000 pounds, would go to his doctor, Harold Shipman.

Complaint that ended in detention

The woman denounced the maneuver of the murderer and the commissioner Bernard Les Postes opened the investigation into the case, in which the body of the old woman was exhumed and the causes of death were analyzed, in which traces of morphine were found. After that, other bodies were unearthed and autopsies were carried out which revealed the same data, with which, the British police order released to arrest Shipman, situation that arose in September 1998.

In October 1999 the trial against him began, chaired by the judge Forbes, in which he would be prosecuted for the death of Irene Turner, Lizzie Adams, Joan Melia, Winifred Mellor, Muriel Grimshaw, Ivy lomas, Marie West, Kathleen Grundy, Jermaine Ankrah, Pamela Hillier Yes Jean Lilley, among others.

Harold Shipman: woe and death

Shipman was sentenced three months later to 15 consecutive life sentences for the crime of the 15 patients with morphine injections, when it was only the “the tip of the iceberg” at the level of delinquency, since after his release, the magistrate of the Supreme Court, Janet Smith, conducted a thorough investigation using the records of nearly 900 Shipman patients, and in July 2002, it was confirmed that the “Doctor Death” there was killed 215 patients since 1975.

On January 13, 2004, at the age of 57, Dr Harold Shipman was found dead in his cell at Wakefield Prison, hanging from the bars of his window with the sheets of his bed. If Shipman’s death caused a stir in British society by his actions and his own death, this was even more what happened later, when the widow of the “Doctor Death” He received a a financial compensation of 100,000 pounds and a life pension of 10,000 more, with which indignation was added to the pain and helplessness of the relatives of the victims, who to this day do not understand why their loved ones died at the hands of a doctor: the “Doctor Death”.

BY AG