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00:10I'm David Wilson, emeritus professor of criminology, and for over 30 years I've
00:17investigated the phenomenon of murder and what it is that might motivate someone to kill.
00:26Every murder case is different, but time and again a deadly pattern emerges of warning signs and red flags.
00:40In this new series I investigate some of the UK's most harrowing murder cases to understand how and why these
00:50terrible crimes occur.
00:55This is Murder UK.
01:16A GP's surgery should be a place of safety and solace.
01:22It's where illnesses are treated and anxieties calmed.
01:27But back in 1998 in Hyde in Greater Manchester, a quiet practice was going to become the centre of international
01:37media attention.
01:40When trust is broken in a place designed to protect, the psychological fallout can be profound.
01:51I'm Stephen Wright, associate editor at the Daily Mail.
01:58Standing outside the Brooks surgery here in the market town of Hyde.
02:02In 1998 I was tipped off about a developing, a fastly developing crime story.
02:12At that surgery was a doctor called Dr Linda Reynolds, who concerns about the activities
02:21of a single practitioner doctor across the road, Harold Shipman.
02:31And her concerns really started because there was a relationship between her surgery,
02:38the Brooks surgery and Shipman's own surgery whereby doctors from each practice would sign cremation forms.
02:46It's very common if a patient is cremated for another local doctor to be asked to counter sign.
02:53So before somebody's cremated, you have to have two doctors sign the cremation certificate.
03:09In just three months from her GP surgery on one side of Market Street,
03:15Dr Linda Reynolds is asked to co-sign 16 cremation forms by the doctor across the road.
03:23Dr Harold Shipman.
03:2616 cremations within three months is a huge number for any practice, let alone a single-handed practice.
03:33But of course this actually was only the cremation forms and not death certificates from patients
03:39who then went on to be buried, or for instance, patients who were then admitted to hospital
03:44and where the hospital gave the death certificate.
03:47But Dr Shipman says he can explain why more of his patients die compared to other doctors.
03:56He believes he has medical omnipotence. In other words, as the doctor, he knows best and need not be questioned.
04:08From Shipman's point of view, there was nothing suspicious at all. I mean, his stance was that I'm an old
04:15-fashioned doctor.
04:15I don't like sending my patients off to hospital for treatment. I like to be by their bedside,
04:21given the one-to-one treatment, given the personal touch.
04:30They were mostly women of a certain age, they were mostly found dressed, and they were usually
04:37dying when Dr Shipman was there or shortly afterwards.
04:46And it's easy to see that this would have been interpreted as somebody incredibly dedicated.
04:54He wanted to be right there in their homes, holding their hands, not a distant doctor at a hospital,
05:02but right there in the community.
05:17By December 1997, 49-year-old Bianca Promfrit has been Shipman's patient for 15 years.
05:25She was a heavy smoker, suffered from bipolar, so depressive characteristics.
05:35She absolutely adored Shipman. He'd been treating her for 15 years or so.
05:41In December 1997, she had been feeling unwell, flu-type symptoms.
05:47Her son William discovered her on the sofa, so upright and dead.
05:53Holy unexpected. William calls Shipman. He knew that he had seen his mum before she died.
06:09If you look at the timeline of when these patients died, there was an extraordinary number
06:15who were dying in the middle of the afternoon. Now,
06:18GP's visiting times are between morning and evening surgery.
06:23Shipman reveals something which the family didn't know about.
06:28That Bianca, she had angina and that she died as a result of a blood clot to the heart.
06:36It's a real shock for them because she had basically been cared for by her family
06:42and they had no idea she supposedly had angina.
06:46Other patients of Dr Shipman's have died unexpectedly too, but no one raised the alarm because he was the doctor.
06:57It's a classic case of authority bias where those in positions of trust are rarely questioned.
07:06Brenda Ashworth was unwell. She did have a chest infection, but she was only 63 years old.
07:13Irene Turner, Marie Quinn and Ivy Lomas.
07:22Dorothy Andrew, she was not at death's door. In fact, her home visit,
07:26by Shipman, was to give her the results of a diabetes blood test.
07:33Older people die.
07:36Shakespeare said we had three score years and 10.
07:40And in a culture that's obsessed with youth, we tend not to notice older people.
07:46We tend not to become involved in their lives and we often don't make comment upon the fact that they
07:52die.
07:53But when Dr Linda Reynolds started to notice an increase, an unexpected increase,
08:01in the numbers of older people who were dying and an increasing number of them who were being cremated,
08:09she felt there was a pattern there that, well, frankly, gave her cause for concern.
08:17She didn't know whether he was incompetent, whether this was malpractice,
08:23but she did know that she was very suspicious of the number of patients who were dying.
08:32Dr Reynolds had a moral dilemma. She eventually was involved in alerting the local coroner,
08:40John Pollard, about the high number of deaths of Shipman's patients.
08:46Mr Pollard immediately saw this for what it was. It was a potentially grave situation.
08:52And he alerted the police.
09:08In 1998, Greater Manchester Police launched an inquiry,
09:13an investigation into the unexpected spike of deaths of elderly patients in the care of Dr Harold Shipman.
09:24And Detective Inspector David Smith is put in charge of inquiries.
09:29D.I. Smith was asked to look into the deaths and he collected all the death certificates and started an
09:36investigation.
09:37He asked another local doctor, Dr Banks, to look at the circumstances surrounding these deaths.
09:44You know, he had been asked to keep it discreet.
09:47D.I. Smith was a trusted GP. His word rarely questioned.
09:58With no post-mortems and no hard evidence, the case quickly collapsed.
10:05Within weeks, it was closed.
10:10He concluded there wasn't sufficient evidence to take it forward, that Shipman was a well-loved,
10:17well-respected figure in the community. There was no obvious motive, financial or otherwise.
10:27D.I. Smith was a well-loved, that's a good idea.
10:28His position as a doctor seems to make him beyond suspicion.
10:43It's in his late teens that Harold Shipman decides to become a doctor.
10:49D.I. Smith came from actually remarkably humble beginnings. He grew up on a council estate.
10:56His father was a lorry driver and he was one of three children.
11:02D.I. Smith was a housewife. He clearly didn't come from a very academic background, but he got into grammar
11:08school.
11:11Harold is the apple of his mother's eye, her golden child.
11:16And from early on, she sets him apart, feeding a quiet belief that he's smarter and destined for more.
11:24D.I. Smith has seemed to have instilled within Harold Shipman a sense of being something apart from other children,
11:33a sense of superiority. And he was her favourite as well.
11:40D.I. Smith is a very cruel disease. The life expectancy, particularly in 1963,
11:55would have been very short. She would almost certainly have been told at an early stage,
12:00there was nothing that could be done. She may well have effectively been sent home to die.
12:05D.I. Smith was very much involved in looking after his mother and was around when she was being given
12:11medication in their home.
12:16Vera Shipman dies on the 21st of June, 1963.
12:21D.I. Smith bears no doubt that this was experienced by Harold as a highly traumatic event. For a teenage
12:29boy to lose his mother, it's such an unexpected thing. And this would have been his first encounter with death.
12:38D.I. Smith wore a black armband to school in the wake of his mother's death. And he would go
12:45out running
12:46during the night to try and get rid of the stress and the anxiety and the depression.
12:52All we can say for certain is that he was utterly, utterly devastated by his mum's death.
12:59D.I. Smith, when Vera Shipman died, Harold was at her side, watching helplessly as cancer consumed his mother
13:12and morphine eased her passing. Now, psychologically, we might see this as a formative trauma. But without
13:19doubt, there seems to be some indication that within Harold himself, something had changed.
13:30D.I. Smith, perhaps he came to see death not as something to fear, but as something to manage,
13:35and morphine not as a last resort, but as a tool. Some call this traumatic reenactment,
13:44a compulsion to relive and control the trauma that once had left you powerless.
13:54D.I. Smith just two years after his mother's death, Harold Shipman applies for medical school.
14:02D.I. Smith's mother's illness seems to have diverted Harold's interest and attention very much towards
14:09more serious medical issues. I think Harold Shipman's move into medicine was a desire to regain the power
14:21that he feels has been completely taken away from him by what happened with his mother.
14:27D.I. Smith's mother. In his first year at medical school, Harold meets a girl.
14:32D.I. Smith's mother. Harold Shipman met Primrose, who became his wife,
14:37at a very early stage in medical school, probably in his first year. They met at a bus stop.
14:42D.I. Smith's mother. She was a window dresser in the local towns.
14:46D.I. Smith's mother. And they hit it off very quickly and conceived their first child,
14:52a daughter, out of wedlock and married quite quickly, a few months later.
14:59D.I. Smith's mother. In 1970, aged 24, Shipman is still grieving his mother,
15:07starting a career and suddenly facing the pressures of fatherhood. This early kind of compound stress
15:15can trigger deep psychological fractures in those who are already vulnerable.
15:22And it's amidst all this stress that Harold gets his first job as a hospital doctor.
15:30For a young man shaped by helplessness at his mother's bedside,
15:36now he holds the knowledge and controls the pain relief.
15:40D.I. Smith's mother. If you're a high-flying doctor, you'll often go to a teaching hospital.
15:45Instead, Harold Shipman went to Pontefract, which was a local, what we call district general hospital.
15:52When I was a junior doctor, I was working up to 110 hours a week. If you're doing a one
15:58in two,
15:59you'll be working every day, every weekday, plus every second night and every second weekend.
16:06They are gruelling, punishing hours.
16:10Shipman's shifts are made more punishing by a troubling pattern.
16:14A high number of deaths, and many of them happen when Harold's on duty. Patients who were stable suddenly decline,
16:24and morphine, the drug that once eased his mother's pain, becomes a recurring feature.
16:30At Pontefract, we're not only seeing an apparent inexplicable increase in the death rate.
16:36What we're also seeing, crucially, is that those deaths are happening at an alarming rate when Harold Shipman is actually
16:44present.
16:45At Pontefract, Shipman certifies 133 deaths in just four years.
16:54It's a striking number for a junior doctor, but it doesn't raise any alarm.
17:01In a busy hospital, in an era where death is rarely questioned, the volume is easy to overlook.
17:09It appears that 50% of the deaths that Harold Shipman was present at occurred between six o'clock in
17:20the evening and midnight.
17:25There were suspicious death rates while he was working in hospital.
17:32After completing his hospital training at Pontefract General Infirmary, however,
17:37Harold Shipman moves on.
17:43He landed at GP's job at a practice, Todmorden, in Yorkshire.
17:50That's, I think, what he wanted to do, to have that close relationship, interaction with patients in a doctor's surgery.
18:00Shipman had impressed at the interview because he was up-to-date with new equipment, new ways of thinking in
18:09medical treatment.
18:12He was thought to be a very competent GP.
18:15Interestingly, he was also thought to be very technically minded, and he helped to train other doctors in intravenous drug
18:23use.
18:26But wherever Harold Shipman goes, high death rates seem to follow.
18:34Harold Shipman, the youngest new doctor at Todmorden, is issuing the highest number of death certificates.
18:42Here she's five in 1974 and 17 in 1975.
18:57On January the 21st, 1975, three of Shipman's patients died while he was making bedside visits or shortly after.
19:06Elizabeth Pierce had been visited by Harold Shipman.
19:10She died suddenly, very shortly after a visit from him.
19:16Then we have Lily Crossley.
19:19She had a home visit.
19:21We do know that she was given an injection at about eight o'clock, and by nine o'clock, she
19:27was reported as dead.
19:33Finally, there was Robert Linyard.
19:35He'd also seen Harold Shipman.
19:37In fact, Harold Shipman phoned his daughter-in-law shortly after he'd visited to say that he'd died.
19:46In my entire career, I have never experienced or even heard of three patients in any practice dying in such
19:58a short space of time.
20:03The stress and pain caused by work gets to Harold Shipman.
20:08There were signs that Harold Shipman was addicted to very strong painkillers, in particular in this case,
20:15pethidine, which is a very strong painkiller from the morphine family.
20:19When you first take pethidine for the first time, you'll get a real high.
20:24It's what we call a state of euphoria.
20:26You are floating on a cloud.
20:30Maybe it's not just addiction, but a way to quiet the part of him
20:36that still feels.
20:38It also speaks of the sense of superiority, the sense of all-powerfulness that he believes he has
20:49to just write himself a prescription to go above and beyond the rules to completely ignore all the protocols.
21:06In February 1976, Harold Shipman was found guilty of forging NHS prescriptions and unlawfully obtaining drugs.
21:16For a man who saw himself as untouchable, this was the first serious crack in his carefully constructed facade.
21:27That point in the mid-70s, 1976, there was an opportunity to ban Shipman from the medical profession for life.
21:40But two psychiatrists came forward to support him, suggesting in general terms that he was suffering from an abnormality of
21:51the mind,
21:52which was temporary, and he deserved to be given a second chance.
21:55After completing a drugs rehabilitation course, Shipman moves on and finds work as a clinical medical officer
22:11with limited responsibilities in south-west Durham, before he moves on again.
22:20With no formal warning passed to future employers, his facade can be carefully rebuilt.
22:30He joins a group practice in Hyde in Greater Manchester.
22:34Joined a joint practice there, family moved to that town on the outskirts of Manchester.
22:40By all accounts, to begin with, he was very much part of the community and he was well-liked.
22:46He had a hundred people.
22:48At his 50th birthday, he joined the St John's Ambulance.
22:51He was a parent governor at the local school.
22:55Harold Shipman feels a sense of respect in Hyde.
23:00After the difficult events at Todd Morden, this is a new start for him.
23:06But he does make mistakes.
23:21There was a really curious, tragic incident involving one of his patients, a man called Pete Lewis.
23:29Lewis had achieved modest success.
23:31He was a pop star of sorts, was number one in the hit parades in Holland, famously,
23:38knocked the Beatles off the top spot.
23:40He was very ill.
23:42His stomach problems, not properly diagnosed by Shipman.
23:47It emerged that Pete Lewis had advanced cancer, which left him in agony.
23:53Pete Lewis was in a lot of pain and Shipman, for whatever reason, didn't diagnose it properly.
24:00Didn't seek the right attention.
24:02Dr Shipman is called to the home of 42-year-old Pete Lewis on New Year's Day.
24:12Shipman visited their home, and Pete Lewis was in agony, and Shipman asked Pete Lewis' wife to assist him as
24:22he injected him.
24:28There was no indication then that her husband was going to die, and she left the bedroom, went back in
24:35a short time later, and she saw Shipman with a sinister pose.
24:38He had his hands around her husband's neck.
24:43He said arrogantly, dismissively, that he was just trying to stop Pete Lewis from swallowing his son.
24:51Pete Lewis died.
24:53He died.
25:00Dr Shipman says Pete Lewis' death is as a result of heart failure and the stomach cancer he failed to
25:08diagnose.
25:09What seem like missed signs or poor decisions, in hindsight, point to something more deliberate.
25:16Over time, a darker pattern begins to take shape.
25:22A GP is a central part of a community.
25:25Nobody is immune from health problems, and he's the person with all the answers.
25:31In 1992, Dr Harold Shipman leaves Donnybrook medical practice in Hyde.
25:40Shipman invests a lot in his new practice in Hyde Town Centre.
25:46He no longer answers to anyone, and in that quiet autonomy, his reputation grows.
25:57He was regarded as a good, sound GP because of his investment in computers, in equipment,
26:06and people used to say that he had a good bedside manner, a good manner in the consulting room.
26:15There are some patients, however, that Dr Shipman just doesn't have any time for.
26:26Friends described 63-year-old widow Ivy Lomas as shy.
26:35Ivy Lomas was one of the most frequent patients to Harold Shipman's surgery here in Hyde,
26:42to such an extent that Shipman once joked that he'd have a seat reserved for her there.
26:48Ivy suffers from depression and chronic bronchitis.
26:59He'd seen her in the afternoon, and he saw her in the treatment room.
27:04He was apparently in there for about 20 minutes.
27:06Other patients were waiting outside. They were getting a bit restless.
27:10Harold just emerges from a routine consultation with her,
27:14to tell the receptionist that the ECG machine isn't working,
27:18when in fact, on closer examination, it's not working because Ivy is already dead.
27:28In fact, he saw a couple of patients after coming out,
27:32before going back and announcing Ivy Lomas to be dead.
27:36We can only imagine that she was already dead when he came out into his consulting room
27:41and called his next patient in for their consultation.
27:46It's highly unusual for patients to die in the doctor's surgery,
27:51But when first paramedics and later the police arrive, Shipman convinces them that Ivy died of natural causes.
28:02And after all, he is a trusted local GP.
28:06For Shipman, that trust is power.
28:10And when a patient becomes inconvenient or questioning,
28:14his quiet, clinical, but absolute need for control takes over.
28:21He had two or three complaints while he was in practice at Hyde, but nothing serious.
28:27There was no obvious motive, financial,
28:31otherwise, for him wanting to harm his patients.
28:35And nothing happened.
28:50My name's David Philip Woodruff, and Kathleen Grundy was my mother-in-law.
29:00David's mother-in-law, Kathleen Grundy, died on June the 24th, 1998.
29:06A few weeks later, David's wife, Angela, receives a phone call about her mother.
29:14Angela got this call from a solicitor in Hyde to say that he had been sent what purported to be
29:24a will of Kathleen's and read out what it said.
29:35Kathleen Grundy is a pillar of the local community, and after she dies, her will is found.
29:43To everybody's surprise, it turns out that over £300,000, which was the sum total of her estate,
29:51had been given not to her family, but to Dr Harold Shipman.
29:59It was a document that it would have been impossible to imagine and to the mother putting her name to
30:06it.
30:06It was badly typed onto a pro-formo will form, the sort of thing you can buy from a stationer's.
30:18And you could see that there was a misalignment in the uppercase G of Grundy,
30:23which was quite different in this so-called will and in all the other documents.
30:29So we thought there's something wrong here.
30:32There were two identified witnesses to this document, which gave their name and address.
30:40So we arranged to go and find out the circumstances in which they did this signing.
30:47On their way to Hyde, Angela and David discussed Kathleen and Dr Shipman.
30:56She often referred to him as being a very good doctor.
31:01We knew he'd visited her on the morning of her death.
31:05She had actually told her friend that she was with the year before,
31:09that he was coming to visit her, to take a blood sample.
31:14Her death came out of the blue completely.
31:17She had been just as fit and healthy as we'd known her for years.
31:22There was no reason at all why we would imagine that she was going to die.
31:34Angela and David knock on the doors of those who witnessed Kathleen's will.
31:42Knocked on the door of this first witness, who was a young woman,
31:49with her husband, and I said to her at the door, I said,
31:55I believe you've recently witnessed a will.
31:58And she said, oh, yes, the doctor's at Shipman's surgery.
32:03And I...
32:06It was a light bulb moment for me.
32:08It was the point at which I suddenly thought, my God, this is serious.
32:15If he's involved in this will, in presenting this will,
32:20and he visited Hanson's mother the day she died,
32:24and she died completely out of character,
32:27then maybe there's something criminal involved here.
32:33Well, the will was a clear evident of wrongdoing.
32:37By Shipman.
32:48When they got back to Warwickshire, Angela and David Woodruff reported their concerns
32:54about Kathleen Grundy's death and her will.
32:59Psychologists might call it moral intuition,
33:02the sense that something just doesn't add up.
33:06The fact that Angela was a solicitor meant that we had
33:11alternative ways of tackling the problem,
33:13but so she went and talked to the partner in the practice
33:19who dealt with criminal work.
33:22About two or three days later, we get a phone call
33:26from Greater Manchester Police, from two officers
33:31who were currently driving down the M6 to see us.
33:35I mean, they came in, and we had a cup of coffee, and they sat down.
33:39I mean, one of the first things they said was, um...
33:42One of them said to me,
33:44he's an evil bastard.
33:47And I thought, gosh,
33:50they've come to that conclusion very quickly.
33:54David and Angela don't know it,
33:57but the doctor, Kathleen Grundy, trusted and adored,
34:01this respected doctor in the local community,
34:05has been investigated by the police before.
34:11Dr Linda Reynolds had spotted this extraordinary coincidence
34:19that Shipman was so often at the bedside when someone died.
34:24I think the police gave Shipman too much credit for being a respected community figure,
34:29for being a respected doctor,
34:31and not going where the evidence should have taken them.
34:38This time, police search Dr Shipman's house.
34:43They find a typewriter.
34:46He owned a brother typewriter,
34:48which was very similar or appeared to be the same as the typewriter on which her will was written.
35:01Police learn more about Kathleen's movements and the days leading to her death.
35:06Kathleen Grundy attended Shipman's surgery to have her ears syringed.
35:11At that stage, she arranged to see her the following morning at her home as part of a research project.
35:19She was taking part in, so he was going to take a blood sample there.
35:22This blood sample was related to what he had told her in the preceding weeks,
35:29was that he had been in contact with people at the University of Manchester,
35:34who apparently were doing some survey, some research, into old people who were particularly fit and well.
35:45Shipman says Kathleen died of old age.
35:49To learn the truth, Greater Manchester police take an unprecedented decision.
36:02To prove that Kathleen Grundy had been murdered, killed unlawfully,
36:08the police had to exhume her remains from this graveyard here in Hyde.
36:15It's very rare for the police to seek and gain authority to dig up someone's remains,
36:22but this was the only way of proving beyond reasonable doubt, incontrovertibly, that she had been murdered.
36:33The post-mortem, the initial judgment was that Kathleen was very healthy.
36:40There was no obvious reason why she should have died by natural causes.
36:45The toxicology tests did prove that there were high levels, you know, fatal levels of diamorphine in her body.
36:56At that stage, it was a very clear case of murder.
37:01The exhumation of a body of a respected member of the community sent shockwaves through Hyde.
37:09You know, morphine and its stronger cousin diamorphine are readily available to doctors and in the wrong hands can be
37:19lethal.
37:20For a man like Shipman, the line between care and control has long since blurred.
37:26Every doctor will, when they're doing home visits, carry some ampoules of diamorphine with them in their doctor's bag,
37:34because it is the treatment of choice for somebody who's having a heart attack.
37:38So Harold Shipman would have had very easy access to this drug.
37:49Shipman attends a police interview.
38:09I'd wondered very seriously whether this lady was taking drugs other than which I'd described.
38:16Harold Shipman decided to give the suspicion that Kathleen Grundy was addicted to morphine
38:24and that Dr Shipman had known about it.
38:27Well, basically, he tried to claim that she was drug ahead.
38:32He really suggested not to us.
38:34I'm not suggesting anything.
38:36I'm just telling you my fears and worries of this lady at that time.
38:41Shipman's theories don't convince the police.
38:45He's charged with Kathleen Grundy's murder.
38:49And her death becomes a trigger.
38:53Rapidly after the suspicions are raised about Kathleen Grundy's death,
38:57We see lots of the other elderly ladies who've died from the town in recent times.
39:03We see their bodies being exhumed and examined.
39:07Police fear Dr Linda Reynolds was right all along.
39:13Greater Manchester police were aware that three people had died suspiciously
39:18since he was under investigation six months earlier.
39:21So they had reputational issues to deal with.
39:25Numerous bodies were exhumed in a small town where almost certainly most, if not all,
39:33of the members of the town knew at least one of the people whose bodies were being exhumed.
39:39That must have been incredibly stressful in itself.
39:47Between September and December 1998, a total of nine bodies are exhumed from Hyde Cemetery.
39:56Each is found to have lethal levels of morphine or diamorphine in their system.
40:03Clear evidence of foul play.
40:07We have a consultation that's going to be.
40:10Certainly.
40:12The time now by my watch is 17, 12 hours.
40:16I'm going to switch off the tape.
40:21Police believe they have evidence to charge Shipman with the murder of 15 patients in total.
40:28Whether driven by trauma, control or ego, Shipman exploited a system that gave him unchecked
40:37access to the vulnerable.
40:39And he used it to quietly tidy up lives he saw as complete.
40:52The trial of Harold Shipman took place in Preston, Preston Crown Court in the autumn of 1999.
41:00It started actually quite a remarkable achievement because there was 15 murder charges.
41:06I think that when the trial opened, the prosecution's opening statement by Sir Richard Henriquez,
41:14as he's known now, the evidence was damning.
41:19Painstakingly going through each of the murders and the coincidences.
41:26In court, Shipman pleads not guilty.
41:30He was enjoying being in the witness box giving evidence.
41:34He certainly didn't look like he was nervous about it.
41:38His trademark arrogance, I know better, I'm a good doctor, I'm a good person.
41:43He kept up that pretense at Preston Crown Court.
41:49The prosecution's case is that Shipman killed each victim by injecting them with morphine.
41:57Perhaps a throwback to his own mother's death when morphine was the only thing
42:03that eased her pain that eased her pain.
42:05The vast majority of these patients were killed with either diamorphine or morphine.
42:11Usually diamorphine because it's injectable, it works quickly.
42:15It would seem that he was setting up his diary, sometimes days in advance, to be alone with an intended
42:22target. Others seem to have been more spur of the moment because, you know, a patient might come in
42:28randomly to see him in the surgery.
42:30I don't remember ever having a patient die in my practice in 31 years as a GP.
42:38However, in Harold Shipman's case, it turned out there were not one, not two, but five patients.
42:50After four months, the jury make their decision.
42:56The jury was out for six days.
43:00He was getting increasingly anxious in court.
43:02So, on January the 31st, 2000, Harold Shipman is found guilty of 15 murders and of forging a patient's will.
43:13He's sentenced to a whole life order.
43:16There's no chance of parole.
43:19I think at the moment, at the actual instance, it had more of an impact on me because I was
43:25just shaking.
43:26I was like an uncontrollable shiver for several minutes.
43:36I think that was something which startled the country, startled our thinking about doctors.
43:44The fact that this was a possibility that alongside being a GP, you could also be a murderer.
43:55Future inquiries found Shipman may have killed up to 260 of his patients.
44:02His murders began at Pontefract General Infirmary.
44:07Opportunity quickly became method and habit and then finally compulsion.
44:13Even at the very start of his career, there were suspicious death rates while he was working in hospital.
44:20We know that he'd been getting away with murder since the mid-70s.
44:26Once you've broken that taboo of murder, I think we all realise that it becomes easier to do it.
44:32My God, he did it time and time again.
44:38On January the 13th, 2004, Harold Shipman died by suicide at Her Majesty's Prison Wakefield.
44:47Even in death, he exercised control, choosing his moment, denying answers and robbing victims' families of any final sense of
44:57justice or closure.
44:59I think this is a man who, actually, once he carried out the last clumsy murder of Kathleen Grundy,
45:06was essentially on a suicide mission from that point onwards.
45:15You cannot underestimate the impact that Harold Shipman's crimes had on the medical community.
45:22Patients are not going to remember that there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of GPs and doctors who
45:30are absolutely trustworthy.
45:36They're going to remember the one who was a mass murderer.
45:42Dr. Linda Reynolds, the GP who first raised suspicions about Shipman, died in May 2000,
45:49just weeks after Shipman's conviction for 15 murders.
45:55.
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