Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time

by Nigel Cawthorne

  In 1974 he joined a medical practice in Todmorden in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. By this time he had two children. In this small Yorkshire town, Shipman blossomed. No longer the withdrawn loner, he was suddenly outgoing and became respected by both his patients and his fellow practitioners, who welcomed the up-to-date information they got from a young doctor, fresh from medical school. But the staff under him at the practice saw a different side of Shipman. He was often rude and liked to belittle his juniors, frequently berating them as ‘stupid’. He also had a way of manipulating the other doctors and the general opinion was that he was a control freak – though he was also seen as hard-working, enthusiastic and sociable.

  But soon problems surfaced. He began having blackouts. He told the other partners he suffered from epilepsy. However, the true reason for the blackouts was soon revealed. The practice’s receptionist Marjorie Walker discovered some discrepancies in the local chemists’ narcotics ledgers. The records showed that Shipman had been prescribing large amounts of pethidine – a morphine-like analgesic whose addictive properties are still in dispute – in the names of several patients and on behalf of the practice itself. These discrepancies were investigated by partner Dr John Dacre.

  The matter came to a head at a staff meeting. Partner Dr Michael Grieve recalled the scene: ‘We were sat round with Fred sitting on one side and up comes John on the opposite and says, “Now young Fred, can you explain this?”’

  Dacre then laid before Shipman all the evidence that he has been collecting. It clearly showed that Shipman had been prescribing pethidine to patients who never received it.

  ‘In fact, the pethidine had found its way into Fred’s very own veins,’ said Grieve.

  Realising his career was on the line, Shipman begged for a second chance. When this was refused, Shipman hurled his medical bag to the ground. His colleagues were shocked by this petulant outburst. Soon after, Shipman’s wife Primrose stormed into the room, screaming that her husband would never resign.

  ‘You’ll have to force him out!’ she shrieked.

  Indeed, that is what they did. Shipman left Todmorden and checked into a drug treatment centre in York. He was found guilty of forgery and prescription fraud, and was fined £600, but he was not struck off by the General Medical Council.

  ‘If Fred hadn’t, at that point, gone straight into hospital,’ said Grieve, ‘perhaps his sentence would have been more than just a fine. I think it’s perhaps the fact that he put his hand up and said “I need treatment” and went into hospital, and then the sick-doctor routine takes over.’

  This was probably also the reason he was not struck off the medical register.

  There is now some doubt that Shipman had been using all the pethidine himself and there are those who believe that Shipman had been using it to kill patients in Todmorden.

  Two years later, Shipmen got a post at the Donnybrook Medical Centre in Hyde, Greater Manchester, with surprising ease.

  ‘His approach was “I have had this problem, this conviction for abuse of pethidine”,’ said Dr Jeffery Moysey of the Donnybrook Centre. ‘“I have undergone treatment. I am now clean. All I can ask you to do is to trust me on that issue and to watch me”.’

  But they did not watch him closely enough. Again, he appeared to be a dedicated, hard-working doctor, who earned his colleagues’ respect and his patients’ trust. And, again, he was seen as bullying and abusive by those under him – though he was skilled at masking this in front of his peers. But this time there were no blackouts, and no suspicion of drug abuse. This left him free to kill.

  He stayed at the Donnybrook clinic for 16 years. Then in 1993, after falling out with the partners, he set up on his own as a GP with Primrose as his part-time receptionist. Such was his reputation in Hyde that he attracted a large number of patients. It is not known how many of them he killed.

  The first person to suspect that something was wrong was local undertaker Alan Massey. He noted that Shipman’s patients seemed to be dying at an unusually high rate. But there was also a curious pattern to their deaths and a strange similarity to the corpses when he called to collect them.

  ‘Dr Shipman’s always seem to be the same, or very similar,’ said Massey. ‘They could be sat in a chair, could be laid on the settee, but I would say ninety per cent were fully clothed. There was never anything in the house that I saw that indicated the person had been ill. It just seems the person, where they were, had died. There was something that didn’t quite fit.’

  The undertaker was so troubled that he questioned Shipman about it.

  ‘I asked him if there was any cause for concern,’ said Massey. ‘He just said: “No, there isn’t.”’

  Shipman showed Massey the book in which he recorded the details of death certificates he had issued. In it, he entered the cause of death and noted any causes for concern. He assured Massey that all the deaths were straightforward. There was nothing to worry about. Anybody who wanted to inspect the book had free access. As Shipman showed no unease when questioned, Massey was placated and took no further action. But his daughter, Debbie Brambroffe, who was also in the business, was not so easily mollified. She enlisted the support of Dr Susan Booth, who came from a nearby practice.

  By law a doctor from an unrelated practice must countersign cremation documents. The fee paid for this service is known cynically as ‘cash for ash’. So when Dr Booth turned up at the funeral parlour of countersign some of Shipman’s cremation forms, Brambroffe told her of her misgivings.

  ‘She was concerned about the number of deaths of Dr Shipman’s patients that they’d attended recently,’ said Dr Booth. ‘She was also puzzled by the way in which the patients were found. They were mostly female, living on their own, found dead sitting in a chair fully dressed – not in their night-clothes lying ill in bed.’

  Booth confided in her colleagues and one of them, Dr Linda Reynolds, contacted the coroner John Pollard. He, in turn, contracted the police. Shipman’s medical records were examined surreptitiously, but nothing untoward was found as the causes of death and treatments matched perfectly. What the police did not then know was that Shipman re-wrote his patients’ notes after he had killed them.

  Recently this preliminary investigation has been widely criticised as the police did not check to see whether Shipman had a criminal record. Nor did they consult the General Medical Council. Had they discovered Shipman’s history of drug abuse and forgery, they might have dug a little deeper and put an end to Shipman’s killing spree there and then.

  Shipman was eventually stopped by the dogged determination of Angela Woodruff, the daughter of Kathleen Grundy who died suddenly on 24 June 1998. A former mayor, Mrs Grundy was a tireless worker for local charities and a wealthy woman. Even though she was 81, she had boundless energy and her death came as a shock to the many people who knew her.

  When she failed to show at an Age Concern club where she helped serve meals to elderly pensioners, someone was sent to her home to find out if anything was wrong. They found her lying on a sofa, fully dressed. She was already dead, so they called her GP, Dr Shipman.

  It transpired that he had visited Mrs Grundy a few hours earlier, and was the last person to see her alive. The purpose of his visit, he said, had been to take blood samples for a study on ageing. Shipman then pronounced her dead and her daughter, Angela Woodruff, was contacted. Shipman assured Mrs Woodruff that a post-mortem was unnecessary as he had seen her mother shortly before her death.

  After Mrs Grundy was buried, Mrs Woodruff got a phone call from a firm of solicitors who claimed to have a copy of Mrs Grundy’s will. Woodruff was a solicitor herself and her firm had always handled her mother’s affairs. They held a will that Mrs Grundy had lodged with them in 1996.

  The moment Woodruff saw the new document, she knew it was a fake. It was a form that you can obtain from a post office or newsagents. And it was filled in sloppily, poorly worded and was badly typed.

  ‘My mother was a meticulously tidy person,’ sh
e said. ‘The thought of her signing a document which is so badly typed didn’t make any sense. The signature looked strange, it looked too big.’

  It also asked for the body to be cremated, which Woodruff knew was not her mother’s wish. And, tellingly, it left £386,000 to Dr Shipman.

  ‘It wasn’t a case of “Look, she’s not left me anything in her will,”’ Woodruff said. ‘But the concept of Mum signing a document leaving everything to her doctor was unbelievable.’

  The obvious conclusion was that Dr Shipman had murdered her mother for profit. Mrs Woodruff went to the Warwickshire police, who passed the investigation on to the Greater Manchester force where it ended up in the hands of Detective Superintendent Bernard Postles. Once he saw the new will, he agreed with Angela Woodruff’s conclusions.

  ‘You only have to look at it once and you start thinking it’s like something off a John Bull printing press,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to have twenty years as a detective to know it’s a fake.’

  A post-mortem was required to get conclusive proof that Kathleen Grundy had been murdered, so the police applied to the coroner for an exhumation order. Such orders are rare. The Greater Manchester Police is one of the largest police forces in the country. It was formed in 1974 and since then there had not been a single disinterment.

  ‘We did not have one officer who had ever taken part in an exhumation,’ said Detective Superintendent Postles. ‘We had to ask the National Crime Squad for advice.’

  By the end of the investigation of the Shipman case, Greater Manchester Police would be all too familiar with exhumation.

  Mrs Grundy’s body was disinterred one August night amid gusting wind and driving rain just five weeks after she had been buried in Hyde. The mud-streaked coffin was opened and hair and tissue samples were taken for analysis. At the same time, Shipman’s office and home were raided, so he had no chance to conceal or destroy any evidence. Shipman showed no surprise at this turn of events. Rather, he registered bemused contempt as the warrant was read.

  There were some odd things about Shipman’s home. The police found mysterious pieces of jewellery, presumable stolen from his victims, and the house was littered with newspapers and filthy old clothes. For a doctor’s home, it was little short of insanitary.

  One of the first things the police found was the typewriter Shipman had used to type the fraudulent will. Shipman said that Mrs Grundy sometimes borrowed it. However, Shipman’s fingerprints were found on the document, but there were none of Mrs Grundy’s fingerprints on it – and none belonging to those people who were purported to have witnessed it.

  When the toxicology reports came back from the lab, Detective Superintendent Postles realised that he had an open-and-shut case. The cause of death was an overdose of morphine. What’s more, death would have occurred within three hours of receiving the lethal injection.

  Postles was astounded. As a doctor, Shipman would have known morphine is one of the few poisons that remains easily identifiable in body tissue for centuries. There were plenty of other drugs that would have been lost against the background. For example, had Shipman used insulin, which the body produces naturally, to kill Mrs Grundy the case would have been impossible to prove. As it was, Shipman’s only defence was to claim that the respectable old lady was a junkie. Psychologists speculate that he wanted to be caught. Why type the forged will on his own typewriter? And why use a drug so easily traced? Others think he saw himself as invincible. As a doctor, he believed, his word would never be questioned.

  The publicity surrounding the Grundy case brought a torrent of phone calls from other relatives of Shipman’s patients who had died in similar circumstances. The police immediately broadened the scope of the investigation. A pattern quickly emerged. The cause of death recorded by Dr Shipman often bore no relation to the symptoms the patient had suffered prior to their demise and Shipman was usually present at the death or had visited the patient immediately before. He also urged families to cremate their dead. But clearly the police could only proceed with cases where the relatives had ignored this advice and had buried the body.

  In each case, Shipman also insisted that no further investigation into the cause of death was necessary. People trust their doctors. Even if they questioned him, Shipman could show that their loved one had died of a condition consistent with their medical history. His story would be backed by the computerised medical records he kept. Shipman would hurry to his office to rewrite immediately after he had killed one of his patients. Kathleen Grundy’s medical notes, for example, clearly showed that she was a morphine addict. This was clearly ludicrous. From the moment he asserted this, his credibility crumbled.

  Convinced of his superiority, Shipman claimed he was a computer expert, but he did not know was that his hard drive recorded every alteration he made to the patient’s record, along with the time it was made. The police called in their own experts to demonstrate that he had fabricated his patients’ medical histories after their deaths to cover his tracks.

  One of the earlier cases the police pursued was that of Winnifred Mellor, a healthy 73-year-old who played football with her grandchildren and was planning a trip to the Palestine when she died mysteriously at three in the afternoon on 11 May 1998 after a visit from Shipman.

  The police confronted Shipman with the fact that, soon after she was dead, he added to her notes that she had suffered ‘chest pains’ on 1 October 1997 – ten months earlier. Shipman claimed he had no recollection of making that alteration, but the police were able to point out that the addition had been made using his user name and his password.

  ‘It doesn’t alter the fact I can’t remember doing it’ was Shipman’s feeble reply.

  ‘You attended the house at three o’clock,’ said the officer interviewing him. ‘That’s when you murdered this lady. You went back to the surgery and immediately started altering this lady’s medical records. You tell me why you needed to do that.’

  ‘There’s no answer,’ said Shipman.

  In a further interview, Shipman was accused of killing Winnifred Mellor with a morphine overdose, then altering her records to show a history of angina.

  ‘The levels were such that this woman actually died from toxicity of morphine, not as you wrongly diagnosed,’ Shipman was told. ‘In plain speaking you murdered her. One feature of these statements from the family was they couldn’t believe their own mother had chest pains, angina and hadn’t been informed.’

  ‘By… by whom?’ asked Shipman.

  ‘By her,’ said the officer.

  ‘By her, thank you,’ said Shipman, sarcastically.

  ‘They also found it hard to believe because she didn’t have a history of chest complaints and heart disease and angina, did she, Doctor?’ the officer asked.

  ‘If it’s written on the records then she had the history and therefore…’

  ‘The simple truth is you’ve fabricated a history to cover what you’ve done,’ said the officer. ‘You’d murdered her and you make up a history of angina and chest pains so you could issue a death certificate and placate this poor woman’s family, didn’t you?’

  ‘No,’ said Shipman.

  ‘We’ve got a statement from a Detective Sergeant John Ashley, who works in the field of computers,’ the officer said. ‘He has made a thorough examination of your computer, doctor, and the medical records contained on it. What he’s found is that there are a number of entries that have been incorrectly placed on this record to falsely mislead and to indicate this woman had a history of angina and chest pains. What have you got to say about that, doctor?

  ‘Nothing,’ said Shipman.

  It was clear that he was not going to co-operate in any way with the police, who found him arrogant and supercilious throughout the investigation. Nevertheless, the evidence against him accumulated. He was charged with 15 counts of murder and one of forgery – over the will – and went to trial in Preston on 5 October 1999.

  Shipman’s defence counsel Nicola Davies, a 46
-year-old medical lawyer, began the proceedings with an application to have the case thrown out as Shipman could not receive a fair trial because of ‘inaccurate, misleading’ reporting of the case. Taking nearly two days, she reviewed the media coverage of some 150 patients’ cases, the investigation of Shipman himself and intense interest in the exhumations. Richard Henriques, for the crown, countered with the fact that the reports had alerted other families to the possible fate of their relatives.

  Ms Davies then asked for the court to hold three separate trials. She argued that the case of Kathleen Grundy should be prosecuted separately as it alone had any alleged motive – that of greed. A second trial should cover only patients who had been buried as only in these cases was there physical evidence of cause of morphine poisoning. A third trial, she said, should cover those who had been cremated, where no physical evidence existed.

  Henriques argued that the cases were inter-related and trying them together would present a comprehensive picture.

  Ms Davies petitioned for evidence showing how Shipman had accumulated stocks of morphine to be disallowed. In 28 cases, he had continued prescribing for patients after they had died, and kept the drugs for his murderous purposes. He also prescribed morphine to living patients who did not required strong painkillers.

  The judge, Mr Justice Forbes, denied all three petitions. The trial would continue with the original 16 charges on the indictment.

  On 11 October 1999, the jury was sworn in and the case for the prosecution was made by Richard Henriques. He was one of the top Britain’s barristers and had handled the 1993 Jamie Bulger trial, where two ten-year old boys were found guilty of kidnapping, torturing and murdering the two-year-old on Merseyside.

  Henriques’ opening statement in the Shipman case pulled no punches.

  ‘None of those buried – nor indeed cremated were prescribed morphine or diamorphine,’ he said. ‘All of them died most unexpectedly. All of them had seen Dr Shipman on the day of their death.’