Harold Shipman was the middle of 3 children born to Vera Shipman and Harold Shipman Sr on January 14th 1946 in Nottingham, England.

When Shipman was 17 years old, he witnessed his mother, Vera, dying of lung cancer. There was nothing the doctors could do other than make her comfortable in her final days and she was given large doses of morphine to help with the pain. Soon after his mothers’ death, he enrolled in Leeds University Medical School with hopes of becoming a doctor. While there he married his wife Primrose, and over the course of their marriage they had 4 children together.

On graduation from the University, Shipman got a job at Pontefract General Infirmary in West Yorkshire. This is where he is thought to have committed his first murder of a 4 year old girl. Susie Garfitt had pneumonia triggered by quadriplegia and cerebral palsy. Shipman told Susie’s mother to go to the hospital cafeteria to get a cup of tea while he cared for the girl. When her mother returned 10 minutes later, Susie was dead.

He went on to complete his internship with no suspicion in regards to Susie’s death and no further complications. He then went to work at a private practice in West Yorkshire where his new colleagues noticed copious amounts of Pethidine going missing. It was then found that Shipman was addicted to the drug, injecting himself daily with up to 600-700mg a day; so much that his veins were beginning to collapse. He was fined for obtaining drugs by deception and was found guilty on seven counts of forgery. Shipman agreed to start counselling and to go to rehab to avoid being struck off the medical register. Due to this, he was then able to join a medical practice in Hyde where he soon became a pillar of the community.

Hyde is a town on the outskirts of Manchester, and is likely most famous for the case of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley who committed the Moors murders.

Shipman set up his practice on Market Street which quickly gained over 3000 patients. He was known to be rude and arrogant to his colleagues, and his house was somewhat ‘spooky’, covered in ivy and weeds. His patients, however, adored him. They praised his bedside manner, and the relatives of his patients appreciated his candour. An example of his abrupt nature would be in February 1998, when the son-in-law of a 77 year old man asked him how long his father-in-law had left, and Shipman replied “I wouldn’t buy him any Easter eggs”.

Shipman was also appreciated by the community for his willingness to make house calls. It took locals decades to notice the correlation between the house calls and the sudden deaths. He would wait until the relatives left the room and then inject the patient with diamorphine hydrochloride. He even gave one patient 12000mg ; enough to kill 360 people. Because Shipman was already at the scene, he would offer to fill out the death certificate and advise the family against requesting a post mortem.

Shipman did have cooling off periods, although they never lasted too long. These would usually be when a patient didn’t die as he expected or if a nurse became suspicious of his activities. When he did begin to kill again, it would be gradual, usually with a terminally ill patient who was suspected to pass soon.

By 1997, Shipman was struggling with his restraint; that year he had killed 37 people which works out to 1 person every 10 or so days. He was reported to the police and the local coroner, however they deemed there wasn’t enough evidence to do anything at that time.

In 1998 he set his sights on who would become his final victim: Kathleen Grundy. It is unknown why but with this victim he made so many mistakes that everything finally came to light.

Like with 79.5% of Shipman’s victims, Kathleen Grundy was an older woman. At 81 years old, she enjoyed doing charity work in the town of Hyde and had a wide social circle. On June 23rd 1998, she went to have her ears syringed at her local GP practice, and Shipman offered a house call the following day to check up on her. 4 hours after the house call the next day, Kathleen’s friends found her sitting on the sofa, dead. The friends called Shipman back to the house and he concluded that she may have died of cardiac arrest. He called the coroner and wrote out the death certificate where he stated the official cause of death as ‘old age’.

Weeks before her death, Kathleen had supposedly rewritten her will, leaving everything to her doctor, Shipman, and writing out her daughter Angela Woodruff. On finding out this information, Angela went straight to the police and didn’t give up until they opened an investigation. Grundy’s estate was worth around $780,000. The mistake Shipman made was that he had written the will himself, on a typewriter that was found in the surgery, and he had left a fingerprint on the document.

The bodies of Shipman’s victims that were buried and not cremated were exhumed, and they were all found to have trace amounts of morphine in their systems. Kathleen was found to have a lethal amount of morphine in her liver.

Psychiatrists still don’t know why he forged the will. One theory is that he had lost touch with reality and thought himself to be untouchable. Another theory is that he wanted to be caught. By 1998 he was killing one patient a week and he may not have known how to stop.

He insisted he was innocent all the way through his trial, however in January 2000, he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. The day before his 58th birthday, Shipman hanged himself in his prison cell.

Shipman was convicted of 15 murders, however it is thought that he could have committed around 250 murders. By the time of his death he had been dubbed ‘the angel of death’.