The man dubbed Britain’s Worst Serial Killer (Image: ITV)
There’s nothing more terrifying than trusting someone else with your life or the lives of your loved ones. When we head to a restaurant, we trust our food will be cooked accordingly, when we take a flight, we trust the pilot will get us to our destination safely, and when we go to the doctor, we trust we will receive the correct treatment.
He was known as a family man, a trusted figure who appeared to live a quiet, ordinary life while raising four children. To neighbours and colleagues, there wasn’t much to suggest a darker reality. Yet over decades, suspicions grew when countless deaths shared a disturbing connection. Branded as “Doctor Death,” the man behind up to 215 murders is Harold Shipman.
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Harold Shipman was a dad of four (Image: Mirror)
‘The Family Man’
“Doctor Death”, or rather Harold “Fred” Shipman, was born in 1946 in Nottingham into a working-class family and grew up as the favoured child. “His domineering mother, Vera, instilled in him an early sense of superiority that tainted most of his later relationships, leaving him an isolated adolescent with few friends,” reported Biography.
After caring for her during her terminal illness, he became determined to pursue medicine, eventually entering Leeds University and training as a doctor. At the age of 19, he married Primrose Oxtoby, and together they went on to have four children.
The pair raised a family while he began his career as a general practitioner in Todmorden, Yorkshire, taking the position at the Abraham Ormerod Medical Centre. Shipman quickly earned the trust of patients and colleagues, presenting himself as a devoted family man and hardworking doctor, “although he had a reputation for arrogance amongst junior staff.”
Drug addiction
In 1975, Shipman’s addiction to the opiate pethidine came to light after he wrote multiple fraudulent prescriptions for himself while working as a doctor. He admitted to taking 600–700 milligrams daily, sometimes keeping the drugs meant for patients, reported The Guardian.
In 1976, he appeared in court, admitting charges of obtaining drugs by deception and forgery, receiving a £600 fine and NHS compensation, while authorities confirmed no patients had been harmed or denied necessary medication. His medical partnership was terminated, and he later secured a position in Durham without access to controlled drugs.
Prison staff feared Harold Shipman (Image: ITV)
Crimes
In 1977, Shipman found work as a general practitioner in Hyde, Greater Manchester. He gained respectability and developed a thriving practice, mainly serving the elderly. “Over the years, several people raised concerns about the number of people who died in his care,” shared Britannica.
However, according to BBC News, the 2,000-page inquiry into Shipman’s crimes identified his first victim as Eva Lyons, who was killed in March 1975, the day before her 71st birthday, while he was working at the Abraham Ormerod Medical Practice. It was then later in Hyde, working at the Donneybrook House group practice, that Shipman is believed to have killed 71 patients.
The remaining 143 victims were murdered after 1992, during his time as a solo general practitioner on Market Street. Most of his victims were elderly women who died after he administered lethal doses of diamorphine.
“He would call on his patient at home to treat a mild ailment, inject her with a deadly dose of morphine, alter her medical notes to suggest she’d been gravely ill, and then encourage the family to opt for a cremation over a burial to incinerate any evidence of his crimes,” reported ABC News.
On 31 January 2000, Shipman was first sentenced to 15 life terms for the murders of 15 patients. However, a later inquiry revealed he had likely killed at least 215 people between the 1970s and late 1990s. Harold Shipman then died on January 13, 2004, in HMP Wakefield after he was found in his cell.
Britain’s worst serial killer
While most serial killers seem to have a motivation for their murders, such as sex and money, as seen from other prolific killers like Rose West and Ed Gein, Shipman’s reasoning seemed unclear, as if he just “enjoyed choosing who lived and who died.”
He killed up to 215 people (Image: Getty)
“By the time he died in prison in January 2004, Shipman had earned himself a new nickname, ‘the angel of death’.” According to ABC News, during the trial, prosecutor Richard Henriques QC said: “He was exercising the ultimate power of controlling life and death and repeated it so often that he must have found the drama of taking life to his taste.”
True crime blogger Eleanor Neale branded him the “UK’s worst serial killer ever” in her YouTube video. People took to the comments to share their thoughts and stories on Shipman, with one stating: “He was even worse than the average serial killer because he was in a position of authority and his patients trusted him and he betrayed that trust in the worst way imaginable.”
A second viewer commented: “Doctors secretly being murderers is one of my biggest fears. I have a genetic incurable disease and always have to go to several doctors every month. Scary.”
Another shared: “He was my grandmother’s doctor and was in his victim range, my family think the only reason why he never tried to hurt my grandmother was that my grandfather was always with her when he visited their house.”
