by Ray Black
Other witnesses came forward with solid testimonies. In the case of a widow named Annabella Kilgour, who died in 1950, a nurse came forward to say that she had been astonished by the high quantity of drugs that the doctor had injected into her before she fell into a fatal coma. She actually said to the doctor, ‘Do you realise, doctor, that you have killed her?’
Another case that was brought to the attention of the Yard was that of Hilda and Clara Neil-Miller. They were genteel, spinster sisters who had died in 1953 and 1954 respectively. Hilda had left everything to her sister who in turn left most of her estate to Dr. Adams. A guest who had been visiting the rest home where Clara died remembered that she had been concerned about the amount of time the doctor spent in Clara’s bedroom. He had remained in the room for around forty-five minutes, and she can remember being concerned because it seemed just too quiet. She said she opened the door and was horrified to see that the bedclothes had been pulled back and Clara’s nightdress had been folded across her body right up to her neck. It was a bitterly cold night and all the windows in the room had been flung open. The room was exceptionally cold and that was just how the doctor had left her.
So much had come out in their investigations that the Yard made a thorough dossier of their findings and submitted it to the Director of Public Prosecutions. It has been said that it was around 23cm thick.
Superintendent Hannam confided to a reporter that he was quite confident that Adams was a mass-murderer. ‘He has certainly killed fourteen people. If we had arrived on the scene years ago, I think I could have said he killed more.’ Hannam was positive that he could establish a homicidal pattern – making his victims dependent on drugs, influencing them to change their wills, then easing them out of life with an overdose. However although it all appeared to be clear cut it was going to be difficult to prove.
Hannam decided that his best course of action was to break Adams down gradually by a constant series of interviews. Throughout all the questioning Adams always portrayed himself as the caring family doctor, and often referred to the deceased as ‘his very dear patient’. All the while their were whispers and rumours spreading throughout the town and he became the subject of speculation and stares everywhere he went.
At 8.30 p.m. on Saturday, November 24, 1956, Hannam returned with a search warrant under the Dangerous Drugs Act. The doctor was wearing a dinner jacket and was on the point of leaving to chair a YMCA prize-giving ceremony. Hannam asked Adams if he could inspect the register for restricted drugs, which all doctors are required to keep. Adams replied that he didn’t know what he was talking about. He said he didn’t keep a register and then added that he very seldom used such drugs. Then Hannam produced a list of restricted drugs that Adams had prescribed for his patient, Mrs. Morrell. Although the woman had been dead for six years, the ledger from the chemist showed the massive doses of both morphine and heroin that had been administered to her.
When asked why he had given his patient such a high dose of toxic drugs, Adams replied: ‘Poor soul she was in terrible agony . . . Do you think it was too much?’
While his surgery was being searched, Adams sat slumped in his office chair, sobbing with his head in his hands. Then one of the police officers noticed that he was trying to slip something into one of his pockets. It turned out to be two bottles of morphine solution. The doctor was immediately arrested and taken to Eastbourne police station, and read thirteen minor charges.
THE TRIAL
The case was brought before Eastbourne magistrates on Monday morning, November 26. The doctor was granted bail and made to surrender his passport. Back in the police station, Adams said that he was worried that there might be other charges. Hannam told him that they were continuing their inquiries into the death of some of his rich patients, and in particular Mrs Morrell.
In the meantime Hannam, and an officer from Eastbourne, were summoned to the House of Commons. The Attorney General briefly quizzed his medical advisers on the effects of heroin and then told Hannam to go straight back to Eastbourne and arrest the doctor for the murder of Mrs. Edith Morrell.
Adams seemed both stunned and confused at the time of his arrest and did not seem to think that he could possibly be charged with murder. He was taken back to the police station cell where he was stripped and searched. The next day he was taken to the little court room at the town hall, which was packed with people to hear the remand proceedings. The charge of failing to keep a drugs register was tagged on to that of murder, and the doctor was quickly hustled away.
Eastbourne’s most notorious doctor was now housed in Brixton Prison in London. The trial itself began on March 18, 1957. At this trial devastating new evidence was introduced by the defence which fundamentally changed the whole nature of the case. The defence played a trump card when they produced medical records from Cheshire, which showed that it was not Dr. Adams who first introduced Mrs. Morrell to morphine, but another doctor after she had suffered a stroke in the year 1948.
The trial was to last for seventeen days, which was a record at that time, and saw numerous witnesses who were prepared to testify against Dr. Adams. Medical experts called by the Crown gave evidence that could further discredit the reputation of the doctor. It became a constant battle between the defence and the prosecution. The jury was sent out on April 3 to consider their verdict. They returned forty-four minutes later and delivered the verdict that he was ‘not guilty’. Any further charges against the doctor were subsequently dropped. The doctor, who was wearing a blue somewhat crumpled suit, stood up, bowed stiffly, took a deep breath, and said to the Judge ‘Thank you’. They were the first words he had spoken since his plea of innocence.
The doctor later pleaded guilty at Lewes Assizes to fourteen charges of professional misconduct and was fined a total of £2,400. Five months after the trial his licence was taken away which gave him the right to possess or supply dangerous drugs. In November he was brought before the Disciplinary Medical Council and his name was struck off the medical record.
REFUSING TO GIVE UP
The doctor refused to be humbled by the proceedings and, even though he had been stripped of his qualifications, continued to treat some of his loyal patients. What is even more astounding is the fact that he still continued to receive legacies. Adams gradually eased himself back into public life. In 1961, following several unsuccessful applications, Adams was restored to the medical register.
With renewed courage he now turned on to his accusers and filed a libel suit against the press which had so badly slandered his name. A settlement was reached in which thirteen newspapers agreed to pay an undisclosed, but substantial, amount of money for the excessive zeal with which they had publicized the case in the pre-trial phase.
The doctor spent the last twenty-two years of his life practising medicine in the town of Eastbourne, in fact from the same practice. On June 30, 1984, Bodkin Adams, now aged eighty-four, slipped at a hotel in Battle and fractured his hip. He died four days later.
He left an estate worth £402,970 and sums of between £500 and £5,000 were left to relatives and friends, including twenty women who had stood by him at the time of his trial.
DOCTOR HAROLD SHIPMAN
To endeavour to understand some of the motives behind Doctor Harold Shipman’s murders, it is worth taking a look at his childhood years. He was the middle one of three children, and affectionately known as Freddy by his adoring mother. He was definitely her favourite, and she did tend to over-protect him. At school he was rather a mediocre student who found it very difficult to make friends. His mother, Vera, always wanted to choose his friends for him and indeed tried to organize his personal life.
Freddy was devoted to his mother and was completely devastated when he discovered that she was suffering from lung cancer. He would rush home from school each day to make her a cup of tea, sit by her bedside and chat to her as she lay there in terrible pain. As a young boy, Freddy must have been amazed by the morphine administered to his mother by their fam
ily doctor, which gave his mother instant relief from her terrible suffering. As Freddy was at such an impressionable age, perhaps he decided then that he would like to use this magic potion to help other people who were suffering. His mother died in June 1963, when Freddy was seventeen.
When he was nineteen Shipman started at Leeds University medical school. He struggled academically, but eventually managed to obtain a degree and got his first job as a hospital intern. Although Shipman had never really had any girlfriends, he eventually found companionship in a girl named Primrose. She was three years his junior, and her background was very similar to that of Harold’s. Her mother had also restricted her friendships and tried to control her activities. Primrose, having never been very popular with the opposite sex, was delighted to have finally found a boyfriend. They married when Primrose was only seventeen and five months pregnant. It certainly could not be classed as a shotgun wedding, and there was no doubt that they had a deep and mutual affection for one another. Shipman settled down with his new wife and by 1974 he was a father of two. He took up his first role as a General Practitioner in the small Yorkshire town of Todmorden. In this North England setting, Shipman seemed change drastically he became an outgoing, respected member of the community. He fitted in well but did not suffer fools gladly, and was sometimes known to have angry outbursts with his staff if they made mistakes.
At home Primrose was a good mother and wife and everything seemed set for a rosy life for the Shipman family. But then in 1975, disaster struck, which was to change their destiny forever.
SUSPICIOUS SIGNS
It was the receptionist at the practice, Marjorie Walker, that noticed the first signs. There were some strange entries in the Drugs Ledger of a local pharmacist. It seemed that large quantities of pethidine – a morphine-like painkiller – had been ordered by the young doctor Shipman.
She brought the matter to the attention of the senior GP, Dr John Dacre, who investigated the matter. He found that Shipman had been ordering the drug for many of his patients, but it soon became apparent that they had never been prescribed or, indeed, had any need for pethidine. It was also around this time that Shipman, now aged twenty-nine, started to have blackouts. He told the rest of the staff that they were due to epilepsy and that he had it under control.
Dr Dacre confronted Shipman, who openly confessed that he had been injecting himself with the pethidine. He begged the doctor for another chance, but then his mood changed and he became angry. He stormed out of the surgery and threatened to resign. This was just a threat, he never did resign, but he was eventually forced out of the practice and ended up in a drug rehabilitation centre.
Shipman was prosecuted and was fined £600 for forgery and prescription fraud, but, ironically, he was allowed to continue practising as a GP.
By 1977, apparently cured of his addiction to pethidine, Shipman was offered a job at the Donneybrook Medical Centre in Hyde, a suburb of Manchester. He was completely open with his new colleagues and told them all about his past. He said, ‘All I can ask you to do is to trust me on that issue and to watch me’. Before long he had earned the trust and respect of both his work colleagues and his new patients. He was conscientious, hard-working, and had a wonderful manner with his patients. It was now apparent that Shipman had managed to put all his problems behind him and was ready to make a new start. But what wasn’t apparent was that over the next twenty years as a GP he was able to kill quite freely.
AN ESTIMATE OF 236 MURDERS
It has been estimated by the Department of Health that Harold Shipman managed to kill at least 236 of his patients between the years 1974 and 1998. It seems amazing that a doctor that had many more patients dying than any of his colleagues, could have gone unnoticed for so long.
Kathleen Grundy can probably be considered as Shipman’s last victim, but what he didn’t realise at the time was that he had made a fateful mistake. If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Grundy’s daughter, Angela Woodruff, Shipman would probably have been free to go on killing for many more years.
When Kathleen Grundy died at the age of eighty-one her daughter could easily have just thought of it as sad but inevitable. But, Mrs. Grundy, who was the former Mayor of Hyde, was healthy and energetic right up until her death on June 24, 1998, and so it came as somewhat of a shock. She was discovered by some friends who called on her when she failed to turn up at the Age Concern Club. She was just lying on her sofa at home and the last person to have seen her alive was Shipman, who had allegedly gone round to take some regular blood samples.
Shipman told Mrs. Woodruff that there would be no need for a post mortem as he had seen her mother shortly before she died. Angela, who was deeply distressed by her mother’s death, accepted his words, and her mother was buried in the local cemetery.
What did cause concern to Angela, though, was the fact that her mother had made a new will which left a total of £386,000 to none other than her family doctor. Apparently Shipman had forged Mrs. Grundy’s signature on her new will. Angela Woodruff was a solicitor, and was immediately alarmed as her mother had already made a will back in 1986, and this was lodged at her own law firm. When she discovered that a new will had been made without her being informed, she was of course very suspicious of foul play. She went to the police with her suspicions, and although Shipman was a respected doctor in the community, Detective Superintendent Bernard Postles agreed that it needed investigating.
When the will was studied it was obvious from the cheap nature and typing on the document, that the will had been drawn up by someone other than Kathleen Grundy. The further the investigating team delved into Shipman’s past history, the more and more information came to the fore regarding the doctor’s callous behaviour towards many of his patients. Postles ordered that they exhume the body of Kathleen Grundy so that it could be forensically examined.
Shipman himself was affronted by the investigations and continued to deny that he had done anything wrong. But gradually they were building more and more evidence against him. The police discovered at his house an old Brother typewriter which matched the type used on the counterfeit will. Realising, at once, that he was in a tight spot, Shipman made up a ridiculous story that he had loaned the typewriter to Mrs. Grundy. As news of the investigation became public knowledge, other doctors and various undertakers came with their suspicions regarding the high death rate among Shipman’s patients. The police went through all the death certificates in the doctor’s book and made a list of fifteen that they considered needed further investigation. Out of the fifteen victims on the list, nine had been buried and the other six cremated. More exhumations were ordered and gradually their research revealed Shipman’s method of working.
His modus operandi was to kill his victims, the majority of whom were quite elderly, with an injection of morphine. He would then return to his office to tamper with their medical reports on his computer, exaggerating about their exact state of health. In the case of Kathleen Grundy he had even backdated several entries to suggest that she had become addicted to morphine. He was able to stockpile large quantities of the drug because he would exaggerate the quantities required for his ‘terminally ill’ patients. He would always advise the relatives of the deceased to have the body cremated, and so as to not to alert too much suspicion on himself, he would rotate the signing of the cremation certificates among other doctors in the area. Obviously Shipman was unaware of modern technology, as he was quite shocked when he discovered that they were able to examine his computer hard drive and find out exactly when he had made any particular one entry. This piece of information alone, proved to be damning evidence when the case when to trial.
THE TRIAL
As a result of all the enquiries, the Manchester police arrested Harold Shipman on suspicion of murdering Mrs. Grundy. The Hyde doctor was tried at Preston Court in 1999. Shipman’s barrister, Nicola Davies, had several aborted tries to have the trial halted. First she stated that there had been inaccurate and misleading coverage in the press.
This didn’t work. Then she sought to have the case of Mrs. Grundy separated from the other murders, because this one alone had an obvious motive. This didn’t work. She also sought to persuade the judge to exclude the evidence about stockpiling morphine from the jury. This also failed.
Witness after witness – many of them relatives of the victims – took the stand and painted a picture of a callous and deceitful man who turned out to be a compulsive liar. Even though his defence did everything they could to portray him as a happily married man, a caring family doctor, a true professional, nothing they could say could break down the mountain of evidence that had built up against Shipman.
On January 31, 2000, the jury returned with a unanimous verdict. He was found guilty on all fifteen counts of murder and of forging Mrs. Grundy’s will. The judge handed out fifteen life sentences and told Shipman that he would be recommending to the home secretary that he never be released.
Since his sentencing, Harold Shipman has been in solitary confinement in the Frankland prison, near Durham. He is visited frequently by his wife, Primrose, and their four children. Primrose still adores her husband and has remained totally loyal to him, even though she must know more about his other victims as she has been working at the medical practice for quite a while. Neither Primrose or Shipman himself were prepared to cooperate with the ongoing investigation, and at no time has Shipman ever shown any remorse for what he had done.
AN ENQUIRY
The conviction of Harold Shipman for the murder of fifteen of his patients inevitably raised questions as to how it happened, could it happen again, or indeed how it could have been prevented. After all, there was not an entirely dissimilar case fifty years ago, in which Dr. Bodkin Adams was suspected of killing several of his patients. In response to these questions, the government decided to set up a public inquiry.