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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did and how. Episode 200 and... We draw close to the end of the saga of Doctor Death.
but before he meets his demise we will witness his crescendo of death enjoy this episode like all other sagas told by me would not be possible without my loyal patriones they are lisbeth cassandra russell lisa cody kathy james corbin kiley
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And of course, if you wish to donate $15 a month, that's only $7.50 per episode, you are more than welcome to join the ranks of the TSK Producers Club too. So don't miss out and join now. In the six years that he practiced at the surgery, Shipman killed a great many people.
Most of them, but not all, elderly. Most of them, but not all, living on their own. He got away with it, year after year, because of the way he selected his victims, and because he was in a position to cover up their deaths in ways that were never challenged. After all, he was the doctor, and in small English villages, everyone trusts their doctor.
The only rationale for his habit of killing in clusters appears to be the readiness of his supply of diamorphine. In other words, when there were gaps in the calendar of deaths in these early days, it was because he had run out of supplies. As soon as he acquired more, there were always several deaths in a close period of time.
Although his supply of diamorphine could not be easily tracked through his Donnybrook years, at the surgery it was possible for the shipment inquiry to document exactly when and where he was getting supplies, and to relate the ampoules of morphine he received directly to the murders that followed.
With the 14 ampoules he acquired between February and August 1993, he killed 13 patients. After August, he hit on a much better way of obtaining diamorphine. One of his patients, who had terminal cancer, was fitted with a syringe driver, a device which allows a regular supply of painkiller to be self-administered.
The patient, Raymond Jones, needed large amounts of diamorphine. After his death, Shipman took possession of the leftover drug, 20 to 30 ampoules, each containing 100 milligrams. They should have been returned to the pharmacy for destruction, but he kept them, and he kept a great deal more from other patients who were given syringe drivers. It was a breakthrough for him.
From November 1993 onwards, he was never short of supplies. Altogether, in 1994, he killed 11 patients. By 1995, the toll had risen to 30, and it was 30 again in 1996. Halfway through 1996, he had a diamorphine bonanza, landing an enormous haul after the death of a patient with
Cancer, he prescribed a massive amount, 12,000 milligrams, in the name of the patient, collected it himself, and kept it. It would have been enough to kill 360 healthy average-sized adults. He also became more sophisticated in his techniques for concealing what he was up to.
Already, one of the common factors found after several of his murders was that the central heating in the victim's home had been turned up high. This was probably an attempt to thwart any attempt by a pathologist to estimate the time of death. The heat results in more rapid onset of rigor mortis, but a slower drop in body temperature, both key factors in establishing time of death.
He was attempting to muddy the water in the event that a post-mortem was held. He also began to fill in more elaborate lies on the cremation forms. If he was forced to admit he had been present at the time of death, he would claim that others had also been there. If he was claiming to have visited the patient on the day of their death,
He would also claim that someone else had seen them alive between his visit and their death. It is not possible to detail all the sad personal stories of Shipman's victims. Even those who were old and ill had the right to live out their lives, and increasingly, although he still predominantly targeted the old, his victims were not, in fact, ill. But among the many tales, there are some that stand out.
In 1996 and 1997, he killed four patients who were immediate neighbors and good friends. Thomas and Elsie Cheetham, a married couple, lived next door to two bachelor brothers, Sidney and Kenneth Smith. The first to die was 76-year-old Sidney, followed three months later by 78-year-old Mr. Cheetham.
Two weeks later, 73-year-old Kenneth died. Four months later, Mrs. Cheetham was also murdered. Shipman was particularly vindictive towards patients who would not accept his advice. John Greenhalgh, who changed his mind after agreeing to Shipman's recommendation that he move into residential care, was murdered a few days later.
When Mrs. Lily Taylor refused to allow her husband, who had Alzheimer's, to go into a home, Shipman killed her, ensuring that her husband did end up where he had originally suggested he should be. There are several other examples of Shipman killing the healthier partner in a couple, a particularly cruel and sad act which invariably resulted in the surviving partner having to go into care.
He also appeared to enjoy killing the bereaved, killing the surviving partner within days or weeks of the death of their husband or wife. In 1997, a total of 37 patients died, two of them in their 40s and two of them in their 50s. Now, dear listener, I am 42 years old, so reading this puts quite the chill on my back.
The following year, 1998, was measuring up to be equally prolific. By the time he was stopped, in June, he had killed 18 people. For many months and years, the tide ran with Harold Fred Shipman. These were so-called perfect crimes.
apparently motiveless, with victims whose deaths, although a shock to those around them, were not questioned, committed by a murderer who had access to the means of killing, and who was, because of his position and because of his own reputation, as a particularly caring doctor above suspicion.
But there were in Hyde a few people who began to notice that there was a scourge at the heart of their close-knit community, that a terrible sequence of events was in progress. These people are the heroes of this saga, because without them it is possible that Dr. Shipman could still be at large, still be administering his unique brand of care in the community.
It is partly thanks to them and their watchfulness that Shipman was imprisoned. They may not, as individuals, have been able to stop his killing spree, but they made vital contributions to the build-up of evidence against him. John Shaw is a giant of a man, big in stature and big of heart. He retired at the age of 64 in the summer of 1999.
But for more than eleven years he was a taxi driver in Hyde. To the old ladies of Hyde his bulky frame was reassuring. He carried their shopping, changed light bulbs, fixed gates, and even on one occasion had to help one of his regulars out of a surgical corset he had taken her to the hospital to have fitted. In short, he was a lot more than a normal taxi driver. He was a friend.
his charges were very modest and he was used to the oddest of tips he'd been given pies cakes magazines tins of cat food he never minded after an eventful and at times sad life john had settled in middle age with his third wife cath into a contented routine ferrying his old ladies around and earning just enough to be comfortable
He enjoyed his work. He never had any hassle from his elderly customers. They never threw up all over the cab or refused to pay, although sometimes they clean forgot to pay, and John could never bring himself to ask for money. Kath would get a call an hour or so later from the elderly passenger, apologizing and promising to give John double the next week.
He was amused by them, fond of them. They were part of his life, as much as he was a part of theirs. In the card index system that Kath kept on the windowsill next to the phone in their cozy flat, there were a couple of hundred names, and he knew them all personally. From time to time, one of his old ladies would die. It was always a sad event, and sometimes John would have the time to go to the funeral.
When Renee Sparks died in October 1992, it was particularly poignant because she was arthritic. John always carried her bags into the kitchen for her after her regular Wednesday trip to the shops and knew her very well. At the time, John had no suspicions that there was anything amiss. But as the months and years wore on, he started to become uneasy. In later interviews, John stated, and I quote,
If you work with old people, you expect deaths, but not the sort of numbers I was getting. My list of regulars was being cut back all the time. It was not that I needed the business, because there were always more waiting to get on my list, but it began to feel wrong, and by 1995 I noticed that all those who were dying went to the same doctor. Dr. Shipman."
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This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. As a family man with three kids, I know firsthand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care. But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night.
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Visit BetterHelp.com slash SerialKiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash SerialKiller. John was getting upset about it, and he wanted to go to the police or to somebody in authority, but didn't know who. His wife Kath did not want him to do anything.
She said nobody would believe his suspicions against a doctor, especially a highly regarded and popular doctor. The couple thought that if John had it all wrong, and it seemed incredible that Shipman could be killing so many people, then he could be sued and ruined in court for defamation of character. John also thought about going to Shipman's surgery, confronting him, but decided against it.
Kath, too, was beginning to be upset, because she could see the effect on John. Not only was he losing valued friends and customers, but he was at a loss to know how to help, and was feeling guilty that he was doing nothing to stop the mounting death toll. Many times they came close to going to the police. Many times they held back because of the sheer enormity of what they knew they would be saying.
"'John even lost a customer after remarking when she said that she was going to see Shipman, and I quote, "'Well, I wouldn't go alone,' end quote. "'For this John was sharply rebuked, accused of being paranoid, and never booked again by that customer. "'I have not, dear listener, been able to ascertain if that customer was one of Shipman's victims or not.'"
Eventually John heard about the death of Kathleen Grundy, who was one of his regulars. He picked her up every fourth Sunday of the month to take her to a dance at Hyde Town Hall. The woman who told him had been speaking to Mrs. Grundy the evening before she died, and knew that all she was suffering from was indigestion. John asked, as he by then had grown used to, who her doctor had been.
When he heard that Shipman was Grundy's doctor, he made his mind up to seek out the police. The main undertaker firm in Hyde was also starting to be suspicious about the steady increase in local deaths. They also paid attention to how the victims were found. Almost all had been found sitting in an easy chair or on the sofa, fully clothed, and with their sleeves rolled up as if to receive an injection.
They knew of only one of the by then colloquially known shipment deaths that had been found in nightclothes, and that victim had died late at night.
At his computer keyboard on the 10th of December 1997, Dr. Harold Fred Shipman accessed a patient's records by using her surname, Pomfret, as a password, and then began to type, two-fingered, details of visits she had made to him over the previous weeks, complaining of chest pains.
As he wrote, 49-year-old Bianca Pomfret was propped in a chair, dead, at her home in Fountain Street. Nobody knew she was dead, except the man who had killed her, Dr. Shipman. He was covering his tracks, creating a false medical history. There was only one major problem, and one that Shipman, no more computer literate than most of his generation, did not predict.
the hard drive of his computer was making a permanent ineradicable time-dated copy of the words he was typing in the seventy minutes before bianca pomfret's body was discovered he made ten false entries dated back over the previous ten months
He had no idea that, just a few months later, a computer expert at Greater Manchester Police would read the evidence as damning as the swirl of a fingerprint. Police had by then begun in earnest to investigate the shipment murders. A major first step was the exhumation of several of the suspected victims. Twelve people, whose death was highly suspicious,
were exhumed, and it was quickly apparent that none of them had died according to what Dr. Shipman had written on their death certificate. In many of the bodies, it was also possible to identify the cause of death, an overdose of morphine. The drug morphine derives its name from the Roman god of dreams and sleep, Morpheus.
The Romans had appropriated the Greek god of the same realm, whose name is Unaeros. The only consolation for Shipman's many victims was that in most cases, their loved ones died a painless and quiet death. Following extensive investigations, police charged Shipman with 15 individual counts of murder on the 7th of September 1998,
as well as one count of forgery. Shipman's trial commenced in Preston Crown Court on the 5th of October 1999. Attempts by his defence counsel to have Shipman tried in three separate phases, i.e. cases with physical evidence, cases without, and the Grundy case, where the forgery differentiated it from other cases,
as well as to have damning evidence relating to Shipman's fraudulent accumulation of morphine and other drugs, were thrown out, and the trial proceeded on the sixteen charges included in the indictment. The prosecution asserted that Shipman had killed the fifteen patients because he enjoyed exercising control over life and death, and dismissed any claims that he had been acting compassionately.
as none of his victims were suffering a terminal illness. Angela Woodruff, Kathleen Grundy's daughter, appeared as first witness. Her forthright manner and account of her unremitting determination to get to the truth impressed the jury, and attempts by Shipman's defense to undermine her were largely unsuccessful.
Next up, the government pathologist led the court through the gruesome post-mortem findings, where morphine toxicity was the cause of death in most instances. Thereafter, fingerprint analysis of the forged will showed that Kathleen Grundy had never handled the will, and her signature was dismissed by a handwriting expert as a crude forgery.
A police computer analyst then testified how Shipman had altered his computer records to create symptoms that his dead patients never had, in most cases within hours of their deaths. As the trial progressed on to other victims and the accounts of their relatives, the pattern of Shipman's behavior became much clearer.
A lack of compassion, disregard for the wishes of attending relatives, and reluctance to attempt to revive patients were bad enough. But another fraud also came to light. He would pretend to call the emergency services in the presence of relatives, then cancel the call out when the patient was discovered to be dead. Telephone records showed that no actual calls were made.
Finally, evidence of his drug hoarding was introduced, with false prescribing to patients who did not require morphine, over-prescribing to others who did, as well as proof of his visits to the homes of the recently deceased to collect up unused drug supplies for quote-unquote disposal.
Shipman's haughty demeanor throughout the trial did nothing to assist his defense in painting a picture of a dedicated health-care professional of the old-fashioned variety, always putting the needs of others above his own. Despite their attempts, his arrogance and constantly changing stories, when caught out in obvious lies, did nothing to endear him to the jury.
Following a meticulous summation by the judge and a caution to the jury that no one had actually witnessed Shipman kill any of his patients, the jury were sufficiently convinced by the testimony and evidence presented, and unanimously found Shipman guilty on all charges. Fifteen counts of murder and one of forgery on the afternoon of the 31st of January, 2000.
The judge passed 15 life sentences, as well as a four-year sentence for forgery, which he commuted to a whole life sentence, effectively removing any possibility of parole. Shipman was incarcerated at Durham Prison. The fact that a doctor had killed 15 patients sent a shudder through the medical community.
But this was to prove insignificant in light of further investigations that delved more deeply into his patient case list history. A clinical audit, conducted by Professor Richard Baker of the University of Leicester, examined the number and pattern of deaths in Harold Shipman's practice and compared them with those of other practitioners.
It found that rates of death amongst his elderly patients were significantly higher, clustered at certain times of day, and that Shipman was in attendance in a disproportionately high number of cases. The audit goes on to estimate that he may have been responsible for the deaths of at least 236 patients over a 24-year period.
Separately, an inquiry commission chaired by High Court Judge Dame Janet Smith examined the records of 500 patients who died whilst in shipments care.
and the two-thousand-page report concluded that it was likely that he had murdered at least two hundred and eighteen of his patients, although this number was offered by Dame Janet as an estimation rather than a precise calculation, as certain cases presented insufficient evidence to allow for certainty.
The commission further speculated that Shipman might have been addicted to killing and was critical of police investigation procedures, claiming that the lack of experience of the investigating officers resulted in missed opportunities to bring Shipman to justice earlier. He may, in fact, have taken his first victim within months of obtaining his license to practice medicine.
67-year-old Margaret Thompson, who died in March 1971 whilst recovering from a stroke, but deaths prior to 1975 were never officially proven. He remained at Durham Prison throughout these investigations, maintaining his complete innocence, and was staunchly defended by his wife, primrose, and family. He was moved to Wakefield Prison in June 2003,
which made visits from his family easier. On the 13th of January 2004, Shipman was discovered at 6 a.m. hanging in his prison cell at Wakefield, having used bedsheets tied to the window bars of his cell to commit suicide.
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Next episode will feature a fresh new serial killer expose. So as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. What follows is a message to my dear Norwegian listeners in Norwegian. I remind you that my Norwegian-language podcast Seriemordepodden is available and listen to both on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other places you listen to podcasts. As they say in the radio country, follow along.