Fiendish Killers

by Anne Williams

  Within days Harris’s condition had deteriorated and he slipped into a deep coma. When Swango wrote ‘DO NOT RESUSCITATE’ on his chart, Mrs Harris demanded to know why, and Swango told her unemotionally, ‘his brain is virtually dead’.

  Mrs Harris attempted to sue the hospital for negligence, but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. However, things were soon to change for the over-confident Dr Swango.

  wanting answers

  Kristin’s parents were not prepared to lay back and accept their daughter’s suicide – they wanted some answers. They were convinced her death was due to the influence of Swango, someone who they had always considered to be an exceptionally evil man. They decided to contact some of Kristin’s nursing friends back in South Dakota. Her friends were horrified when they learned that Swango had been given another medical post and immediately went to the Dean of their hospital with their suspicions.

  The Dean immediately contacted the hospital where Swango was working and he was summoned to a meeting with Dr Miller. Miller pushed Swango about the real reason for his prison sentence, and eventually he admitted that it had not been for a fight but for suspicion of poisoning his fellow paramedics. Swango was immediately dismissed and the media had a heyday. Two doctors responsible for hiring Swango at the University of New York resigned and later told a reporter that ‘Swango was a charming, pathological liar’. However, before resigning Dr Cohen sent a letter to every medical school in the USA, warning them about the bogus doctor.

  Swango fled and, despite constant searching, the FBI were unable to track their suspect down. They assumed Swango had either taken his own life or, more likely, fled the country.

  life overseas

  Now that most of the hospitals in his own country had been warned about him, Swango had to take his skills overseas. In November 1994 he resurfaced in Zimbabwe, South Africa, working at the Mnene Hospital. This mission hospital thought they had an excellent catch, as American doctors were hard to come by. He had come armed with pages of forged papers, attesting to his outstanding work in the USA. However, his attitude of disdain and the onset of several mysterious deaths, caused the nuns at the hospital to raise the alarm. Swango’s cottage was searched and they found numerous syringes filled with liquid and bottles of substances that were unknown to the Zimbabwe doctors.

  Swango was arrested and accused of poisoning his patients, but he managed to escape before his trial date and fled from South Africa. A year-and-a-half later, Swango was heading for Saudi Arabia using false papers, with a stopover at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, Illinois. On June 27, 1997, Swango was finally apprehended by FBI officers and then escorted back to New York for trial.

  Three years later, on July 22, 2000, Michael Swango pleaded guilty to killing three patients and also to fraud. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, with no chance of ever receiving parole.

  Michael Swango openly admitted to inmates that he killed ‘for the pleasure of it’ and no one can be sure as to how many people died as a result of his medical ‘administerings’.

  Doctor Harold Shipman

  Like his predecessor Bodkin Adams, Dr Harold Shipman preyed on his elderly, vulnerable patients, who were mostly women who lived alone. Despite the fact that his patients were dying in unusually high numbers, Shipman was seen as an ‘angel of mercy’, for as long as he eased their suffering, his patients remained loyal to the end. Amazingly, Shipman was allowed to practice for over twenty-four years in which time it is estimated that he could have been responsible for as many as 236 deaths.

  the young freddy

  Known to his family as Freddy, the young Shipman was the middle one of three children and definitely his mother’s favourite. Born on June 14, 1946, Harold Frederick Shipman had a far from normal childhood, due to the overpowering nature of his mother, Vera. She had high hopes for her son and decided to take control of his life from an early age. She vetted his friends, what he wore and where he went. He was reasonably bright as a young student, but his real love was athletics, at which he excelled. His mother had instilled in him a sense of superiority, something which stopped him from forming any close relationships in his formative years.

  Shipman idolized his mother and was devastated when she was diagnosed with lung cancer. As soon as school was over he would rush home and make her a cup of tea, tears rolling down his cheeks as he watched her suffer. He would watch in fascination as their family doctor injected morphine into his mother’s veins, amazed as the pain quickly subsided from her body. The calming bedside manner of the doctor and the relief obtained from the ‘miracle morphine’ left an indelible image on the young teenager, and it was a scene he would recreate time and time again in his future years.

  Vera died in June 1963 when Shipman was only seventeen, leaving him with a tremendous sense of loss and for a while he struggled to find his way.

  medical school

  Two years after his mother’s death, Shipman was admitted to Leeds University medical school, after struggling first time round with the entrance exam. He found the academic life hard, but his grades were sufficient to earn him a degree and a hospital internship. His fellow students found him distant and many described him as ‘strange’, as he found it hard to form any deep relationships.

  Shipman finally found his soulmate in a girl called Primrose, who was three years his junior. He found her company comforting, sympathising with an upbringing similar to his own. Primrose, who described herself as no oil painting, was delighted to have finally found herself a boyfriend, and before long she found herself pregnant. The couple married when Primrose was just seventeen and by 1974, Shipman was a devoted father of two and a medical practitioner in the town of Todmorten, Yorkshire.

  Shipman seemed to blossom in his new post and became a respected member of the community. He was popular with his fellow doctors and patients, although occasionally the staff would see a different side of the young man when he would appear unnecessarily rude. Gradually Shipman became a control freak and seemed to have the knack of getting things done in his own way. Everything seemed set for the Shipman family to have a prosperous future, but then disaster struck in 1975.

  problems with drugs

  The once hardworking, enthusiastic young doctor suddenly slowed down when he started having blackouts. As a cover-up, he told his partners that he was suffering with epilepsy, but the truth came out when their receptionist, Marjorie Walker, noticed some unusual entries in the narcotics ledger. The records showed that Shipman had ordered an excessively large amount of pethidine in the names of several of his patients. When his partners started to investigate the patients on Shipman’s list, they soon discovered that they neither needed nor received the prescribed drug.

  When Dr John Dacre confronted his young partner, Shipman confessed to using the drug for his own purposes, but pleaded for a second chance. When his request was denied, Shipman lost his temper and flung his medical bag to the floor, threatening to resign. His partners were horrified at the change in Shipman – it was a side they had never seen before.

  When Shipman arrived home and told Primrose what had happened, she went to the surgery and stormed into the room where his partners were discussing the best way of getting rid of him. She yelled at the top of her voice that her husband would never resign, shouting ‘You’ll have to force him out!’ That is precisely what they did and Shipman was forced to go into a drug rehabilitation centre in 1975.

  Shipman was ultimately fined £600 for forging prescriptions but, amazingly, was not struck off the medical register. Two years later, apparently cured of his addiction to pethidine, Shipman was back in business as a family doctor.

  licence to kill

  Shipman accepted a position at the Donneybrook Medical Centre in Hyde, in the north of England. He was quite open about his previous abuse of pethidine, and asked his superiors to keep an eye on him. It is obvious from what happened over the next twenty years, that people did not watch him close enough. By allowing Shipman to continu
e as a medical practitioner, the authorities had plain and simply given him a licence to kill.

  It still seems incredible that one doctor could have so many patients dying under his care, without arousing any suspicion among his colleagues. Between the years 1974 and 1998 he was literally free to kill at random, and probably would have continued in this way had it not been for a woman called Angela Woodruff.

  a big mistake

  The sudden death of eighty-one-year-old Kathleen Grundy on June 24, 1998, came as a shock to anyone who knew the previously spritely old woman. A wealthy, former mayor of Hyde, Grundy was energetic and a tireless worker for local charities right up until the day she died. When she failed to turn up at the Age Concern club, where she used to help serve the meals, her friends suspected there was something wrong. They immediately called round to her home and found her lying, fully dressed on her sofa. When they realised she was dead they phoned her family doctor, Shipman.

  In fact, it turned out that Shipman had been the last person to see her alive. He had visited Grundy just a few hours earlier, allegedly to take routine blood samples. Shipman confirmed that Grundy was dead, and he phoned her daughter, Angela Woodruff, to break the sad news. Shipman told Woodruff that there was no need for a post-mortem because he had seen her shortly before she died.

  Mrs Woodruff was understandly upset at the death of her mother, but accepted the kind words of the doctor, and Kathleen Grundy’s body was laid to rest. Shipman was rubbing his hands together, realising he was about to profit from another death, unaware that he had made his first big mistake.

  a question of the will

  After the funeral, Woodruff received a worrying phone call from a firm of solicitors who claimed to have a copy of her mother’s will. Mrs Woodruff was a solicitor herself and as far as she was aware the original will made in 1986, was still lodged with her own law firm. She immediately became suspicious and made an appointment with the solicitors. The moment she set eyes on the badly-typed document, Angela Woodruff knew it was a fake. Knowing her mother so well, Woodruff knew she would never have signed a document that was so badly worded and on top of that the signature looked strange, somehow too big. Then she continued reading the document which stated that the sum of £386,000 had been left to none other than Dr Harold Shipman. She had always liked her mother’s doctor, but reluctantly she had to admit that it appeared as though Shipman had murdered her mother for profit.

  Mrs Woodruff took her suspicions and the will to Detective Superintendent Bernard Postles. His own investigation convinced him that Woodruff was right, saying that you only had to look at the document to know it was something ‘off a John Bull printing press’. As the police delved deeper into the life of Shipman, they uncovered numerous complaints about his callous attitude towards some of his patients. Postles decided to obtain an order to exhume the body of Kathleen Grundy. Although the body was exhumed during the night, the media were still alerted to a good story, and very soon the town of Hyde was swarming with members of the press.

  While the body of Grundy was being examined, the police searched Shipman’s house and discovered he owned an old Brother typewriter that matched the type used on the counterfeit will. When questioned about it, Shipman came up with the story that he had lent the typewriter to Mrs Grundy because she wanted to change her will.

  As news of the investigation leaked out, various doctors and undertakers came forward with their suspicions about the number of deaths among Shipman’s patients. Postles studied Shipman’s book of death certificates carefully and made a list of fifteen deaths that he felt should be further investigated. On the list nine had been buried and the other six cremated, something which Shipman tried to encourage the relatives to do, obviously to destroy any incriminating evidence.

  When the toxicology report was handed to Postles, he was quite shocked to find that the level of morphine in Grundy’s body was the cause of death. He was shocked because he felt that a doctor would surely have realised that morphine was one of the few poisons that could remain in the body tissue for many years. He had expected the results to show a high level of insulin, something which the body produces naturally, and which would be much harder to prove was a result of foul play.

  Postles soon realised that the case of Harold Shipman went far beyond one death, and the investigation was broadened immediately, with the nine other bodies being exhumed.

  When Shipman was questioned about the level of morphine found in Grundy’s body, he tried to imply that his patient was addicted to the drug, which he had tried to back-up by forging back entries in his drug records. Some people believed that Shipman saw himself as invincible, perhaps feeling that no one would ever doubt the word of a doctor, but his own arrogance and ignorance eventually turned out to be his downfall.

  the trial

  The trial began in October 1999 at Preston Crown Court. The Crown was represented by Richard Henriques QC, a prestigious barrister who had handled many sensitive and difficult trials. When he outlined the case to the jury he advised them to dismiss the theory of mercy killing as none of the victims had actually been suffering from a terminal illness. He claimed that Shipman had killed his patients simply because he enjoyed doing it and that sometimes there was an added bonus at the end. As the case continued, witness after witness, many of them relatives of Shipman’s victims, painted the picture of a callous and deceitful man, who didn’t know how to tell the truth.

  When the defence got their chance, they tried to portray Shipman as a kind and caring family doctor, pointing out that he was not some fiendish killer but a happily married man with four children. No matter how hard the defence tried, they just couldn’t make any headway due to the constantly mounting pile of evidence put forward by the prosecution.

  After an intense and gruelling trial, the jury returned their verdict on January 31, 2000, with a unanimous decision. Shipman was found guilty of all fifteen counts of murder and several cases of forgery. Mr Justice Forbes closed the case by saying:

  You murdered each and every one of your victims by a calculated and cold-blooded perversion of your medical skills, for your own evil and wicked purposes.

  The judge handed out fifteen life sentences with the recommendation that Harold Shipman should never be released.

  FOUND DEAD IN HIS CELL

  Harold Shipman took his own life on Tuesday, January 13, 2004, by hanging himself with his own bed sheet at Wakefield Prison. He died with the reputation of being one of the world’s most prolific serial killers with an estimated 236 deaths, using lethal injections of diamorphine. Although Shipman never publicly confessed – in fact he emphatically denied the allegations – a fellow inmate at Preston Prison said that the doctor had confessed to him that he had killed as many as 508 patients. Although many believed that he killed his wealthy patients for monetary gain, further investigations have shown that his motive seems to have been more to exercise control, similar to Dr Swango, who killed his patients because it gave him a thrill and a feeling of power. Shipman never showed any remorse or guilt for his crimes, which left many people angry that he had been allowed to take his own life. One thing that will always come to mind in the case of Harold Shipman, is how on earth a man in the public eye could be allowed to have such a free rein over such a long period of time, with such devastating results.

  PART SIX: Vampires

  Gilles de Rais

  Although the fictional image of a vampire is someone who drinks the blood of another, a vampire can also be described as a person who appears to gain energy and life-force out of killing and extracting blood, as in the case of Gilles de Rais and Elizabeth Bathory.

  Gilles de Rais, born in 1404, was a French noble, a brave young soldier and also a patron of the arts. Although he painted a fine figure, underneath was

  a far more sombre character, someone with a macabre fascination with children. He was convicted with the torture and rape of children between the ages of six and eighteen years, and it is thought that he lure
d as many as 200 innocent victims into his bedroom.

  a troubled childhood

  To try and understand a little more about Gilles de Rais it is important to know about his troubled childhood years. The marriage between Guy de Rais and Marie d’Craon was not a match made in heaven, but a union solely for financial and political gain. Gilles de Rais was born nine months after the wedding, and his brother, Rene, two years later. Having been born into one of the wealthiest families in France, Gilles was raised by a nursemaid and rarely got to see either of his parents. When he did, he was expected to behave more like an adult than a child, so many of the normal antics of a young boy were suppressed.

  In France, a boy reaches the ‘age of reason’ when he is seven, and the young Gilles was trained not only in the classic arts, but had to undergo military training as well.

  The death of three members of his family before he was eleven years old had a major effect on Gilles de Rais. The first was the death of his uncle Amaury d’Craon, who was the sole male heir to his grandfather Jean d’Craon. The second was the death of his mother in 1415 and finally his father, who died a short while later during a hunting trip.