Harold Shipman: History's Most Prolific Serial Killer? | World's Most Evil Killers | Real Crime

when 81 year old Kathleen Grundy was found lifeless in her home in Hyde greater Manchester England on the 24th of June 1998 no one could have foreseen that her death would lead to the unearthing of one of the world's most prolific serial killers this is not a man who's hiding in the Woodshed with an ax in his hand this is a man who is pretending to be helpful and consoling and compassionate a popular local doctor 52 year old Harold Shipman had been killing his elderly and vulnerable patients for over 25 years but somehow he'd remained completely undetected that generation particularly trusted doctors held them in great esteem and would have done anything they asked Shipman would eventually be found guilty of 15 murders but an inquiry after his incarceration would estimate the true number of victims to be well over 200. you know he was a doctor he had the power of a life and death and somehow he seemed to get some kick from exploiting that I mean it's very hard to imagine Harold Shipman the man nicknamed DrDeath had been unmasked as one of the world's most evil killers [Music] foreign [Music] was found guilty of killing 15 women in January 2000 the nation was in shock but investigators had merely scratched the surface of his murderous career who respected general practitioner who was once a pillar of the community in Hyde greater Manchester England had been christened doctor death by the British tabloids a 2002 inquiry into shipments crimes estimated that the number of deaths he was responsible for was at least 215. detective burn Apostles led the investigation into Britain's most prolific serial killer of all time I don't think that Shipman's victims knew that they were going to die as far as they were concerned quite often DrShipman was treating them so people would willingly roll up the sleeve and offer their arm to him and would probably be in the process of chatting to him whilst he was actually either administering the injection or taking a blood sample but in actual fight what he was doing was he was a ministering morphing in sufficient quantities to kill them journalist Michaela sitford was working for the Manchester Evening News when she first heard about the investigation into the family GP she went to visit him at his surgery when I first met Shipman I remember thinking how ready and weak his voice was and how small he was physically he wasn't imposing at all and and I knew from talking to people later on that he could be quite arrogant and high-handed he knew the effects he was having on people he was actually enjoying it at times and I just thought that was evil and cruel and he just broke the heart of a whole community us the inquiry went further because we started to investigate more deaths it was becoming Beyond what I could ever have believed it was going to become which is the largest serial killer this country has ever known Shipman's Story begins on January the 14th 1946 in Nottingham England the middle child of three grew up on a council estate in a working-class neighborhood Howard Shipman was one of the post-war Baby Boom generation and this was a real age of opportunity where working-class kids could become middle-class professionals so when he passed the 11 plus exam and went to grammar school his mother was very proud of him and she pushed him incredibly hard and I think the world's the expectation that Harold was the family's gateway to a middle-class life and I think that pressure that was always there for him really bore down on him quite heavily because he wasn't naturally clever he had to work incredibly hard to get where he got Shipman was particularly close to his mother Vera when we look back at the childhoods of serial killers we look at their relationships with their parents and very often we see an awful lot of abuse an awful lot of neglect but in this case it seems to be completely the opposite Harold Shipman seems to have been targeted by his mother for excessive praise and and really becoming very enmeshed and invested in him he identified with being her blue-eyed boy and I'm sure that Vera said to him persistently you're the one that's going to make the shipment name famous which in fact he did but for perhaps not the right reasons [Music] but when he was in his team she developed lung cancer and she would sit in the window waiting for him to return from school and he'd come in and make her a cup of tea and you know they'd have a sit in the chat about their day and she just looked forward to that moment in June 1963 43 year old Vera Shipman succumbed to cancer her doting son was devastated Harry Chapman's mother died when he was 17 and this was an incredibly traumatic event for him because his mother had played a very significant role in his life she was quite controlling she was quite domineering and she would always tell him what he should be doing and suddenly she's not there [Music] but significantly Shipman saw how the local GP administered diamorphine to his mother to help her pain it's also possible that and this is rather a gruesome way of putting it that shipment became fascinated with watching his mother die so you've got this this all-powerful GP who's come into the family home and taken control of of the situation and I think that perhaps did plants a bit of a seed for Harold Shipman there the fact that there's this individual who who comes in they have status they have power they have authority and nobody questions them and I think that's something that really did Lodge in his mind by the mid-60s shipment had left Nottingham and headed to Leeds to study medicine while living in Yorkshire the young student met his future wife Primrose was Shipman's landlady's daughter and he got pregnant and so they had to get married in Shipman's Carefree student days were over in 1970 Harold Shipman graduated from Leeds medical school and got a job at the pontefract general infirmary in West Yorkshire he was relatively recently married had one child and the other one was on the way but what no one knew at that point was that Shipman had a completely different agenda from the Hippocratic Oath he wanted to do harm after learning his trade in pontefract 28 year old Shipman moved out of a hospital environment to take a role as a general practitioner Shipman joined the todmund and group practice and his first job as a GP in 1974 and he was like a breath of fresh air he was young enthusiastic modern he had all these great ideas and they thought the world of him but there were concerns raised by a pharmacy nearby about the amount of pathodine that was being prescribed by him when an investigation was launched and Shipman was confronted he claimed to be suffering from depression and said he'd become reliant on injecting himself with pethidine an addictive opiate-based painkiller it is not at all uncommon for health care providers Physicians nurses and others that might have access to drugs to become addicted because it's right there shipment was basically writing and forging prescriptions for himself but what he would do would be make prescriptions out in the name of some of his patients when in actual fact they didn't need it and he would go and take the prescription to the to the pharmacy himself and draw it and use it himself when Shipman's addiction was discovered he resigned from the medical center where he worked he was fined 600 pounds by the General Medical Council but he wasn't struck off all he had to do was go and partake in in some drug rehabilitation and that was it and there was never really any follow-up to that so it was almost swept under the carpet I think the view was that he had a personal problem and that he wasn't actually a danger to anyone which was clearly wrong by 1977 31 year old Shipman was back practicing medicine across the pennines in Hyde greater Manchester he spent the next 15 years as a GP at Donnybrook house surgery where he built up a reputation as a trusted family physician he got a very good bedside manner a good ability to make people feel good about themselves and as a result he had a lot of patience they thought so much of him that when he moved from the Donnybrook group practice in Hyde to start his own single handy practice he poached 3 000 of them and there was a waiting list shipment began his new Venture at 21 Market Street just across the road from Donnybrook house in August 1992.

he was literally a pillar of the local community everybody knew who Harold Shipman was because he would go the extra mile with his patients he would spend time with them he would sit with them and have a cup of tea he didn't mind doing home visits so he gave off the impression that he was a GP who genuinely cared and I think that's what makes it all the more chilling when we look at what he went on to do for the next six years Shipman would continue to win praise from his patients as a well-respected and well-liked doctor despite being a killer disguised as a savior he forged an unblemished reputation as one of the most trusted GPS in Hyde greater Manchester England however by March 1998 suspicions had been raised about the 52 year old by another nearby doctor's surgery there was a new GP Linda Reynolds who joined the group practice across the road from shipmans and she'd noticed that they were signing many more death certificates for shipment than any other GP and when she researched it further she found that his death rate was three times that of any other doctor in town as a result of that the Mata was reported to the coroner the coroner reported it to the police and an investigation took place this first opportunity to stop Harold Shipman failed due to a lack of incriminating facts to support the allegations the police investigation only lasted for four weeks and it found that there was no evidence of wrongdoing on DrShipman's part so that was that it was to prove a tragedy because had they investigated shipment more carefully they would have at least have found more evidence that things were not exactly as they seemed the abandonment of that investigation was the Catalyst that saw shipment take that one step too far Shipman had escaped unpunished for now but it was only a temporary reprieve his real downfall began with the death of the former mayor s of Hyde Kathleen Grundy just like Shipman the sprightly 81 year old was well known and popular in the small town cutting Grundy was found dead on the 24th of June 1998 my two friends who called after she didn't turn up to the lodge Club she ran with them the door was shut but not locked and they walked in a Founder lay on the settee fully dressed on the day of her death Harold Shipman had visited Kathleen to carry out a blood test the news of her passing came as a total shock to Kathleen's family including her daughter Angela and son-in-law Phil Woodruff she distorted by expectation of how an 81 year old should be because she was just incredibly fed she was remarkably energetic Kathleen had spoken to her son-in-law about DrShipman during visits to Angela and Phil's Home in Warwickshire she thought she was a very good doctor she'd I think consciously moved herself onto his list and encouraged various people other people to do so after Kathleen's death Phil finally got to meet this celebrated doctor but was far from impressed with shipment I mean when we went to see Shipman immediately after she died he he inferred that she'd been very frail and infirm and not well and that she died from old age and we knew that was complete nonsense he was not very sympathetic he was rather um I I don't exactly know how to describe it but you know on the basis of Kathleen's report of him as such a nice chap um he seemed sort of rather cold and rather um detached should I say so it was a bit strange despite the family's concerns Shipman had already filed Kathleen's death certificate it was clear that Chipman was trying to avoid an autopsy I was naive enough to think that that was for our benefit not for his so rather stupidly we went along with that and then of course up turns this this so-called will which was just ridiculous I mean um I mean not only the content but but the way it was done it was it was badly typed on typewriter on a a pro former you know the sort of thing you buy from the stations and it just was not caffeine style at all she had a much more kind of professional approach if she'd really wanted to produce a will that we didn't know about and that would be very hard to imagine she would have probably handwritten it because she had beautiful handwriting not only did the scruffy looking document appear hurried it also omitted Angela and Phil the will instead instructed that all of Kathleen Grandy's assets should be left to Harold Shipman Angela I mean obviously she was destroyed I mean she was going to say well look um he can have it he can have it you know and I said that's ridiculous that's not your mother's will in the world Kathleen said that she wanted to leave all of her money and her belongings to her GP to reward him for all of the care that he's given to me and the people of Hyde now that really didn't ring true with Kathleen's family and also in the will it said my family don't need this money they don't have a kind of urgency for it so it really was highly suspicious we initially looked at the signature and compared it with a signature on I think we had a driving license of hers it was similar but clearly not the same the alignment of the capital G was was wrong Phil and Angela decided to play detectives they were certain something was amiss with the will their initial Port of Call was to the witnesses who'd countersigned the document both of whom were patients of DrHarold Shipman we showed her the signature and so on and she said well it looks like my signature but that's not the way I write my address and she said she didn't know what the document was she did just send the document it was a similar story with a second apparent Witness I showed him not the whole document but just the bit but the signature on and his wife or partner so looked over his shoulder and she said well that's not the way you sound your name um because it was a big flourish underneath the signature and as I understood it that was all not what he would normally have done so we realized that there was something seriously wrong despite second guessing themselves Phil and his wife Angela a solicitor had begun to believe not only that Shipman had forged Kathleen's will but that he may well have murdered her at that point we realized that we needed to involve police but we didn't really think it was terribly realistic to sort of wander into high police station and say oh by the way we think that DrShipman has killed her mother-in-law so Angela talked to one of her Partners who did criminal work and he of course had contacts in the police in Warwickshire after putting their concerns in writing and handing it over to the local authorities the complaint soon found its way to Greater Manchester police having received the report of concern Greta Manchester police launched an inquiry uh what they quickly established was that the signatures on the will and on the letter were forgeries forensic scientists were able to tell just by the way that the signature didn't flow that it was a forgery in itself they were also able to say the same about the signature on the letter that accompanied the will that purported to have been made by somebody called Jay Smith again because the signature didn't flow it was possible to say that that was a forgery the will and accompanying letter was sent off for forensic testing and the results linked shipment to the documents what we did find was that the letter and the will had been typed on a typewriter a portable typewriter and when we began the inquiry and executed a warrant at DrShipman's surgery we seized a typewriter from there it turned out that the typewriter from DrShipman's surgery had been the one that had been used to type the letter in the will when they asked shipment about the typewriter and the will he said that Kathleen grundier borrowed the typewriter off him and yet there were no fingerprints on there from her was was somewhat incredulous wasn't it really the the thought that the GP is lending the typewriter to a patient he really is clutching at straws at this point in time but he's so arrogant that he thinks people will believe him Shipman was still free to practice medicine as the investigation continued around him the police knew they needed some hard evidence to prove Kathleen Grundy's death was suspicious which led to a difficult decision being made no post-mortem had taken place before she had been buried because DrShipman had issued a death certificate which would therefore preclude the need for it but the concerns about the beneficiary of the well-being DrShipman the timing of the well-being coming to light all led me to suspect that something wasn't right here and so on the 29th of July I went to see the local coroner John Pollard and made application for a warrant to exhume the body of Kathleen Grande detectives broke the news to Angela and Phil they both sat on the sofa over behind me and side by side and told us what was what which is basically that they've been talking to the coroner and got this permission to exhume Kathleen's body and in Shipman's mind after he gave him the drugs and after the person died and after the person was buried he thought he's home free who's going to exhume the body it almost never happens but they did in this case and that's how they got him on the 1st of August 1998 Kathleen Grundy's body was exhumed the post-mortem findings by Pathologists stunned investigators at first they said that they believed that there were opiates in the body but with some more sophisticated testing they were able to say that it would be morphine that had been found in cutling Grande's body that in itself was a surprise to us Kathleen Grande had not been suffering from any condition which necessitated her being prescribed dimorphine and she had been Fit and Well up until the days before her death the post-mortem results were staggering but they were only possible due to Kathleen's family going against their late mothers apparent wishes to fight will had a box ticked where um Kathleen Grundy seemingly stated she wanted to be cremated and obviously this would have removed any physical evidence that shipment had killed her but Angela wanted Kathleen to be buried near her brother and her parents and it's because of this that she was buried rather than cremated if Kathleen Grande had been cremated then of course there would have been no remains to be exhumed there would have been no opportunity to examine tissue and we would not have discovered that she had died from a a massive dose of dimorphine the net was closing in on Shipman but he remained a free man detectives at greater Manchester police were trying to keep the investigation Under Wraps but the Press were about to discover what was happening I first heard about Harold Shipman in August 1998 our news desk at the Manchester Evening News had got a call overnight and that Kathleen Grundy had died and her doctor has been investigated for her murder so I rang the police to see if we could get some background on this there is no doubt that the reporter who raised those queries Michaela siffford had most of the story and she then embarked on publishing that story as a result of the public becoming aware then there raised concerns by ringing the police about the circumstances of the death of their loved ones as well in some cases they'd Harvard these concerns for years but had been reluctant to raise them with the police because they didn't want to challenge what their GP said but once this came to light we started to investigate those deaths as well they came back to me with this statement saying they were investigating 20 deaths and if those 20 deaths were all true that made shipment Britain's biggest serial killer time was running out for the popular doctor with evidence mounting up against him the police finally decided to take action five weeks after the exhumation of Kathleen Grundy on the 7th of September 1998 Shipman was ordered to speak with Detectives Shipman was arrested by appointment which sounds like a strange thing to do Harold Shipman was aware of our inquiry there was no surprise element here there was no early morning raid like you see on films and the television until consequently he came to the police station with a solicitor to answer questions there's no doubt that he was confident that he was going to walk out of that police station after a few hours on the day Shipman was arrested my colleague Chris gleeve and I waited outside Ashton police station where he was due to turn up to be interviewed and as we're walking along shipment turned back and faced us and he held his arms out almost you know like Christ on the cross and said go and then take my picture and and Chris did and that was the last time shipment was seen outside of custody detectives questioned shipment about the death of 81 year old Kathleen Grundy part of the interview involved DrShipman telling outright lies he sought to um bamboozle the interviewing officers with medical terms he tried to put across that he was intellectually superior to the officers but as far as I was concerned this was a fairly simple issue who'd been the last person that had been in the presence of Catalina Grande what condition was she in when he left her what was the cause of death and who was most likely to have administered that cause of death and with every one of those questions you boil down to the answer being DrShipman the interviewing officers presented shipment with evidence of the will tampering DrShipman denied that he'd ever seen the will he'd ever been in its presence but what we did find was that his fingerprint was on the back of the will which made it difficult for him to continue with that claim detectives knew that Shipman had visited Kathleen on the day of her death to carry out a blood test but there appeared to be no proof of it ever taking place Kathleen Grundy's blood sample that he's had to take didn't exist it had never been received at the Pathology Lab it still wasn't lying in his surgery weeks and weeks later where was it and he couldn't explain those types of things we concluded at the end of the interview that there was sufficient evidence to charge him with catling Grundy's murder and that's what we did [Music] the police knew they had a strong case against Shipman but they were certain that if he'd killed Kathleen Grundy it was possible he'd killed others in order to build the case against shipment the police needed to get a different type of evidence and that would involve exhuming some of the bodies of Harold Shipman's recent victims to see whether there was substances in those bodies that really shouldn't be there the excumations began on the 21st of September 1998. we then exhumed the three bodies of Bianca palm fruit Winifred Miller and John Melia over three days we got DrRutherford to conduct post-mortem examinations on each of them and we sent samples off for examination on each of those people DrShipman had issued a death certificate and each of those death certificates suggested that they had died from heart attacks but there was no evidence of that when DrRutherford carried out the examination between October and December 1998 another five bodies were exhumed making nine in total Kathleen Grundy may have been killed for financial gain but it was becoming apparent that Harold Shipman had used his position of power to murder the people who trusted him the most just because he could quite often DrShipman would turn up out of the blue people had not sent for him and within a very short time after they've been in his presence they were found dead and they were found dead in odd places they were sat up in chairs fully dressed not in a scene of disarray as if they'd fallen over as if they'd knocked anything over most of Shipman's victims were found sitting in the chair a cup of tea by the side almost recreating the scene that used to greet shipment when he came home from school with his mother waiting in the window while he made her a cup of tea and looking for him and waiting for him to come home from school shipment is not a doctor doctors are people that try to heal others that try to cure others Shipman's a murderer his goal for the greater part of his career was to kill patients and he did it for his own gratification and that's what makes it so chilling this was a man who was destroying people's lives for his own amusement as if you were catching butterflies or crushing insects one of the exhumed victims 73 year old Winifred Miller had supposedly died of heart related problems but Pathologists found no proof of that in the post-mortem as inquiries developed it proved that an examination of the computer showed that DrShipman in actual fact had created a false record to indicate that she had been suffering from angina over a period of time in order for him to cover up the fact that he had administered an injection to her which had resulted in her death we thought that they were dying and the drug he used and the strength he used it out would just send them very quickly to sleep and you know that's what you would hope but I think the last words might have been thank you doctor doctoring medical records became a common theme in the investigation into shipment so for example Maureen Ward who he killed when she was just 57 he changed her medical records to make her look like she had cancer when she'd actually became the all clear by Hospital doctors and although on first appearance it would appear that he'd made these weeks before computer expert that we utilized when he had a look at them he was able to examine the transaction logging within the computer system and he was able to determine that they'd actually been made after he'd been along and murdered these people by the 5th of October 1998 Shipman had been in custody for almost a month as detectives continued to interview the doctor cracks in his coal demeanor began to show at the end of the second interview when the computer records showed what Shipman was really up to in no uncertain detail Shipman asked for a break in the interview and as soon as the police left he fell to his knees sobbing he knew it was over there's no doubt that he had come to realize that virtually the game was up that he had got no answers to these questions where we were presenting him with documents and he just couldn't explain things away by February 1999 53 year old Harold Shipman had been charged with the murder of 15 women ranging in age from 49 to 81. post-mortem some nine exhumed bodies confirmed they were poisoned while circumstantial evidence linked the doctor to six other victims all of whom were cremated despite all the evidence that suggested Shipman was a callous killer it was difficult to comprehend even for a seasoned Detective there's no doubt that on a day-to-day basis myself and my Deputy questioned ourselves about whether we were interpreting this evidence in the correct way did we have this wrong was there another explanation for this but the more evidence we uncovered the more it corroborated previous evidence and there was only one answer that we could come to and that was the fact that DrShipman had killed these people the trial of DrHarold Shipman began on the 5th of October 1999 at Preston Crown Court the entire nation wanted Justice served upon the man the papers were calling doctor death the 53 year old general practitioner pleaded not guilty to 15 counts of murder and one count of forging the will of Kathleen Grundy the earliest killing that of 81 year old Maria West dated back to March 1995.

[Music] it's important that all cases that go to court have a realistic chance of a conviction so the threshold for evidence even for a charge to be bought is quite high and we have to remember that in this case some of these murders were years and years old the quality of the evidence would have declined to such a degree that it would be very very difficult to secure a conviction for murder so there were only 15 counts of murder in this particular trial but that was just the tip of the iceberg of the 15 counts of murder nine of the bodies had been exhumed but prosecutors were confident they could still get a guilty verdict on the others six of Shipman's victims were cremated but the police were still able to prove that Shipman killed them this again is down to the computerized medical records being changed added to which there were witness statements and one of the most moving things about the court case was that there were so many ordinary people who'd never seen the inside of a core room in their lives and they were having to stand there and give their evidence and remember their last moments with their loved ones and it was because of their strength and their ability to give that evidence and remember what they needed to remember that Shipman was caught and stopped Phil Woodruff the son-in-law of Shipman's final victim Kathleen Grundy was often in the courtroom during the three-month trial he did come over it's very arrogant yes he was very full of himself and I think that I mean that that was obviously part of his image that he created and hide that he was a wonderful doctor and I think he took great pleasure in in presenting himself that's in this way so so yeah he had an open of himself it was an attitude that would be his undoing when Shipman came under intense questioning from head prosecutor Sir Richard henriquez he buckled he was a worm wriggling on the end of a hook because with each question that was put to him he was really uncomfortable at trying to find answers to some of the questions and some of the answers that he gave were pretty ridiculous and he appeared to be thinking of some of the answers whilst he was stood in the witness box it was another example of his arrogance he appeared to decide that he was going to go toe-to-toe with one of the lead embarrasses in the country and it wasn't it wasn't a good idea on the 31st of January 2000 Harold shepman was found guilty of all 15 murders and of forging the will of Kathleen Grundy he was sentenced to life in prison much to the relief of his victims family members as each verdict of guilty was read out there'd be like a fresh wave of soft sobbing or gasps and it kind of built up it was really filling the air of the the courthouse it's one of the most moving things I've ever seen Harold Shipman was convicted of all 15 murders and was sentenced to life in prison and you would say to to a degree justice has been done here but actually for all of the other victims whose murders were not um having charges associated with them this is is something that it is kind of incomplete I think that the families of these victims don't feel that they got Justice in September 2000 an investigation was ordered to delve deeper into the career of Harold Shipman high court judge Dame Janet Smith led the inquiry I think the shipment inquiry was a brilliant Legacy for the families of Shipman's victims they worked really hard they fought for a public inquiry because for years a doctor had been able to carry on or noticed killing people because of the secrecy and the reverence around the medical profession it was important to them that somebody carried out that examination and came to some sort of verdict about what had happened and that's exactly what the public inquiry did and I think that in itself gave some families the reassurance that they'd done what they could to to find out what the true circumstances were the results of the initial inquiry were released in July 2002 and the findings stunned the world the shipment inquiry has found that he is definitely responsible for 250 murders but there could be as many as 260. having said that not every death will have been picked up and I think there are many more than 260. with so many victims in such a small area it was perhaps inevitable that the inquiry would reveal some families have lost several relatives at the hands of Shipman Phil Woodruff lost three members of his extended family one of them had only signed on to Shipman's patient list after a glowing recommendation from Kathleen Grundy I don't exactly know how many people she recommended him to but she certainly recommended him to her sister-in-law Elsie glad I remember when Angela said to me about her mother well you know old people don't die just like that and I said well they do look at Auntie Elsie right so my example was actually of somebody else killed by human the inquiry discovered it was not just women but men who were victims of shipment too as a result of the report Shipman was given a whole life tariff which meant he would never be released from prison although given a chance to confess to his numerous murders Shipman rejected the opportunity to speak with Detectives so they went to interview him they decided to video that interview and what that video depicts is DrShipman standing up turning his chair away from them and just turning his back to them so that although they ask him the questions he refuses to answer and he also refuses to look at them and he never actually disclosed what had occurred in relation to many of those offenses before his his death in a heartless move Shipman decided to take all his secrets to the Grave Shipman committed suicide and by hanging in prison on the 13th of January 2004 and it was the day before his 58th birthday so again it was Shipman being in control and doing what he wanted and playing God deciding who lived and who died and when and when you have someone like Shipman with his arrogance in prison I'm not surprised at all that he committed suicide I I would be shocked if he was going to live in prison living the life of an inmate he couldn't do it he was two grandiose too narcissistic way too arrogant and he just killed himself Harold Shipman never showed any remorse for the murder of all these people he never discussed his involvement in the deaths he never apologized to any of the families and he decided to take the circumstances and what had happened with him when he committed suicide even in death Shipman continued to haunt the country a sixth and final report was published by the inquiry in January 2005.