Dr. Death | True Crime
Warning: This blog post contains sensitive content, please read our disclaimer
Dr. Death, a doctor and a serial killer between the mid 70′s and the late 90′s.
Harold Shipman, better known as Dr. Death, was an English doctor and is believed to be the most prolific serial killer in history with a count of 215 confirmed and identified victims and 250 victims in total.
Harold Shipman studied medicine at Leeds School of Medicine and graduated in 1970. He got his first job as a Doctor, General Practitioner, in 1974 at the Abraham Ormerod Medical Centre in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. He got his second job in 1977 at the Donneybrook Medical Center in Hyde.
It is stated that all of his murders had started in 1975, although at that time there were no detections of murder in his patients that passed away because most of them were already elderly and ill. His murders were not detected until 1998 when he murdered his last victim, Kathleen Grundy. Kathleen Grundy was found dead in her home on June 24, 1998, shortly after Harold Shipman had paid her a visit. Harold Shipman had signed her death certificate and claimed she had died of old age, but Kathleen’s daughter was concerned since her mother was not ill and was in good health at the time of the visit. It was also concerning that in Kathleen Grundy’s will she left nothing to her children, but left £386,000 to Harold Shipman. When the family solicitor was brought in he reported the will to the police who started an investigation.
In this investigation Kathleen Grundy’s body was exhumed and put through an autopsy because Harold Shipman never sent her for an autopsy. When the autopsy results were in they found traces of heroin, a type used for pain control in patients with cancer at that time, in her system. Harold Shipman then tried to claim that Kathleen was an addict and tried to prove this by showing them his entries about Kathleen in his medical journal. In time those entries were proved to be written after she had died.
Harold Shipman was arrested on September 7, 1998. He was found to have made a fake will for Kathleen Grundy using a typewriter to gain her money after he murdered her. Police also took the investigation further than Kathleen Grundy. The police had looked into the other death certificates that Harold Shipman had signed and found that he had murdered them as well, giving them lethal doses of deadly medications and adding fake medical records to try to make it look as if the patients had been in poor health before his murders, as if they died of old age and natural causes.
After being arrested Harold Shipman’s trial took over a year to begin. His trial began on October 5, 1999. Harold Shipman was charged with several murders between 1995 and 1998. The Victims: Marie West, Irene Turner, Lizzie Adams, Jean Lilley, Ivy Lomas, Muriel Grimshaw, Marie Quinn, Kathleen Wagstaff, Bianka Pomfret, Norah Nuttall, Pamela Hillier, Maureen Ward, Winifred Mellor, Joan Melia and Kathleen Grundy all by lethal injections of diamorphine. He was finally found guilty by a jury on January 31, 2000 of all 15 murders and one count of forgery for Kathleen Grundy’s will. Mr Justice Forbes sentence Harold Shipman to life imprisonment with no chance of release and four years for forging Kathleen Grundy’s will.
After Harold’s conviction, he was incarcerated at Wakefield Prison in West Yorkshire, England. He stayed there until he committed suicide on January 13, 2004, which was the day before his 58th birthday. He had hanged himself from the window bars of his cell using his bedsheets.
Harold Shipman is told to be the only Doctor in British medicine to be found guilty of murdering his patients. Over the years of investigation, they found 215 confirmed victims and believe his total victim count is 250. Most of his victims were elderly women over the age of 65 although his youngest confirmed victim of the 215 count was a 41-year-old male. Although these are the confirmed victims, there are rumors that there is unconfirmed victims that are younger than 41 but there is no current proof. The interesting thing about the possible 250 count is that he had 459 patients die while under his care, but again it isn’t confirmed who was an actual murder victim or was generally ill since these were said to be between 1971 and 1998. It seems no one will ever know the true amount, but to those victims we pay our respects to their tragic deaths.