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His patients loved him.
They said he was the best doctor they've ever had.
He sat with them, he listened, he made house calls without being asked, never seemed to rush.
And in the small town of Hyde, England, he was more than a family physician.
He was a fixture, a trusted presence in living rooms and bedside hospital beds for more than two decades.
But at the time, no one knew he was one of the most prolific serial killers in history.
This is the story of Harold Shipman.
Crime conspiracy cults, serial killers and murder all things that I love to consume, and I know you do too, you sick twerp.
Today we are talking about a highly requested serial killer.
So, without further ado, let's unbuckle our seat belts, go back to the highway, slam the brakes and bust through this windshield in.
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And let's get back to it.
Harold Frederick Shipman, nicknamed Fred, was born the second of three children on January 14th 1946 in Bestwood Nottingham, an estate sitting on the northern edge of the city with row after row of council houses built for working families after the war, with small gardens and thin walls.
And his father, Harold Senior, drove lorries, or in other words, he was driving trucks, basically.
And his mother, Vera, stayed home, tending to the house and children.
And she ran the household the way she ran everything, tightly.
And she would decide what the children wore, how they behaved, and who they spent time with.
Because in her mind, the Shipmans were not like other families on the estate.
They were better, but their money said otherwise.
But she didn't care what money said.
Her children's clothes were neat and the manners were sharp and they didn't play in the street with the other kids because Vera didn't allow it.
And Harold's father never seemed to push back.
He simply went to work and came home.
So whatever Vera decided about the house and the children, that was what happened.
Now, Harold was a quiet boy.
He did well enough in school, but not remarkably so.
And he kind of kept to himself.
And the other children on the estate did not know him because Vera had made sure of it, as we know.
And he passed the 11 plus exam and earned a placement at High Pavement Grammar School, which was a rather selective school.
And Vera was very proud.
And at high pavement, Harold worked hard.
And he was diligent, which made up for his apparent lack of brilliance.
But still, he finished outside the top of his class.
But on the rugby pitch, something else came out.
He was physical, sure of himself, confident in a way that never showed up anywhere else.
And the people who knew him during these years all said the same thing.
Harold kept his distance, but he wasn't mean about it.
He wasn't shy.
He simply didn't let anyone in.
He just had walls built up.
But when he did talk, there was something behind it that made people feel like he was looking past them.
You know, like a psychopath.
But as Harold grew into his teenage years, Vera would get sick, and the diagnosis was terminal lung cancer.
Yet she didn't go to the hospital.
She stayed home and the illness took its time, months of it.
A slow, visible decline inside the walls of that house in Bestwood.
And the family doctor began making regular visits.
And each time he came, carrying a bag and a syringe to administer morphine.
Because in 1960s Britain, this was how a dying person was cared for.
Basically just taking the edge off essentially, as you're just dying over months and months, maybe even years at a time.
Just terrible, what a terrible time.
The general practitioner came to the house, they pushed a needle into the patient's arm and for a while the suffering was lifted.
And Harold was in the room when the doctor arrived.
Not just once, but again and again.
And he watched the doctor come through the front door and he saw what happened when the morphine entered his mother's body.
The tension in her face just loosened and the pain let go.
And of all her children, Vera had given Harold the most.
The most attention, the most expectation, and the most of herself.
He was the one she chose to build something out of.
And when the school day ended, Harold went straight to her side and he took care of her, sitting with her and staying close.
But on June 21, 1963, Vera Shipman breathed her last breath at the age of 43.
And Harold was just 17 years old.
And he didn't cry where anyone could see.
And he didn't talk about her.
Whatever moved through him in the weeks and months that followed, he kept it sealed, locked up, as tightly as she raised him.
But the house had changed.
The person who once held everything together was now gone, and Harold Sr seemingly made no attempt to fill the clear void that Vera had left.
Because he never really shaped the family.
She did.
But time would pass and Harold Sr. would remarry.
And now it was just a house with people in it, essentially.
And Harold and his father had almost nothing to say to each other without the woman who had connected them.
So they were left not with a relationship, but essentially silence.
And something at this point would shift in Harold.
Something would shift when his mother was gone.
He just got harder and more focused.
And the ambition Vera had put into him sharpened and he decided to become a doctor.
So he applied to medical school, but he would be rejected.
His A-level results weren't quite good enough, so he took the exams again.
But of course, getting into medical school from a council estate in the 1960s was no easy task.
Nearly every medical student in Britain came from money and Harold had no money.
Basically no connections, no family legacy in the field.
But still he had that persistence and diligence from his childhood and that was basically all he had.
And his social life during these years was almost non-existent a few acquaintances, but no real friends.
He just kind of kept his own company.
And finally, in 1965, Harold was accepted into the School of Medicine at the University of Leeds.
And he packed his things and went, leaving Besswood behind him.
So it had been just over two short years since his mother's passing as Harold arrived at the University of Leeds.
And he was now 19 years old, carrying a council estate accent into a profession that did not hand out many seats to people like him.
Leeds had one of the bigger medical schools outside London.
And the program was five years long, to earn a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery or an MBCHB degree.
So it was rigorous and structured and designed to weed out anyone who could not keep up with the pace.
But Harold kept up with the pace.
He studied and attended lectures, and the other students saw what everyone else saw in him.
He kept to himself, choosing not to go out of his way to make friends.
Yet he now carried an air of arrogance, not necessarily hostile, just kind of removed, almost like his mother still whispered in his ear, getting the Ed Gein vibe, if you know what I mean, little mommy's boy.
This is never good in a psychopath, as we have learned.
But when he did talk, there was something in his tone that made people feel like he was looking down on them.
Just your classic, misogynistic, narcissistic psychopath, you know what I'm saying?
So naturally, few tried to get close.
But this was something he didn't seem to mind.
But it was during this time at Leeds that Harold would meet a young woman named Primrose May Oxtoby.
And at the time she was 17 years old and she had grown up in Weatherby, in a quiet market town in West Yorkshire.
And her parents were George and Edna Oxtoby.
Primrose was the youngest daughter in the family and she had grown up largely on her own because her mother had run a strict household that discouraged socializing.
Sound familiar?
And when Primrose finished school at 16, she went to work at a shop in town and she would not go to college.
So the two met at a bus stop where Harold was staying nearby Weatherby at the time.
And things between them seemed to just move quickly.
And Primrose would become pregnant at 17.
And on November 5th, 1966, they married at a registry office.
And it was just a quiet affair.
And Harold's father actually disapproved and their first child sarah, was born in 1967, while harold was in the second year of his medical school and primrose was now 18 years old.
Married to a medical student and raising a child, She had no degree, no career and virtually no life outside the one that she had just walked into.
And with her family, now her everything, she developed the habit of backing Harold completely.
But at university, nobody saw Harold the husband or Harold the father.
Whatever happened at home just stayed at home.
And the other students just saw someone who seemed older than he was.
He just appeared more serious somehow, as if weighed down by responsibilities they didn't share.
And, as a student, Harold continued to be what he had always been hardworking, diligent and competent.
And Harold finished his degree in 1970 at the age of 24, holding an MBCHB from Leeds.
So the working class kid from Bestwood was now a doctor, the very thing his mother had wanted most.
Now.
His first posting out of medical school was Pontefract General Infirmary, where he did his pre-registration house officer year.
And this was pretty unglamorous work, long shifts, low pay and the constant hum of a busy hospital.
And the General Medical Council formally registered him on August 5th 1971, meaning he was officially licensed to practice medicine in Britain.
And the colleagues who worked alongside him in these early years noted his competence.
He knew the medicine but he was short with people and he would talk to colleagues like they were beneath him.
On multiple occasions.
I was going to say, ah, you're a classic doctor, but that's not true.
I've met lots of doctors who are.
Very, very nice.
But you know, just like that classic, like Grey's Anatomy, senior doctor, just like I'm just like hoity-toity.
I'm better than all of you.
All of you are stupid.
You know, I don't even want to bother with any of you.
But the thing is, he's a new doctor here.
So that's just, it just seems crazy.
We love our first responders on this channel.
All right.
Massive respect.
And at home, his family was growing.
Eventually there would be four children Sarah Christopher, David and Sam, and Primrose stayed home with them and the family lived modestly.
And come 1974, Harold signed on at the Abraham Omerod Medical Practice in Todmorden, which sat in a valley where the Pennine Mountains towered on both sides straddling the line between West Yorkshire and Lancashire.
And it had been a mill town for as long as anyone could remember.
About 3,000 people were on the practice's books.
And it was a group practice.
And Harold was one of the multiple general practitioners working there.
And his patients were mill workers, pensioners and young families working people who had lived in these hills their whole lives.
And he settled in quickly.
Impatience took to him almost immediately, as he was thorough during appointments and he paid attention.
And he made house calls willingly without being pressed.
And in a place like Tadmorden, that mattered.
Because people depended on their local doctor in a way that was hard to overstate.
Because the nearest hospital was a ways away.
So trust wasn't given casually.
But once earned, it ran deep.
And Harold earned it.
And somewhere in those early months, in Todmorden, Harold began helping himself to pethidine.
Now.
Pethidine was a synthetic opioid and in the 1970s it was one of the most commonly used painkillers in British medicine.
General practitioners kept it on hand as a matter of routine, with virtually no system in place to watch how much of it a doctor was using.
And the drug would produce a warm rush of euphoria, dulling the user's pain and quieting the mind.
And when injected, the effect was immediate and consuming.
So Harold quickly developed the habit of using and he had a simple system to acquire his fix.
He put other people's names on the prescriptions patients who never asked for pethidine and never received a single dose.
And meanwhile he also inflated the practice's supply order to make sure there was always more than anyone could account for.
And the paperwork looked routine, just totally normal.
No one was checking closely enough to see that it was not.
Because on paper, no visible changes were seen in his work.
And he would still show up on time and he would still see patients and he still went home to Primrose and the children at the end of the day,
But underneath something was wrong, and Harold was spotted looking unwell on more than one occasion.
And once he went down completely, unable to function.
But these moments came and went, and no one connected them to anything larger.
Until someone finally looked at the books about a year and a half into Harold's time at the practice around the end of 1975.
And the controlled drug record showed far more pethidine moving through Harold's prescriptions than his patients could possibly require.
Prescriptions going out under the names of people who had no business being on pethidine.
And this observation made its way to the other doctors and the partners began looking closer and the truth was undeniable.
So the other doctors sat Harold down to lay out what they had found.
And the gap between what ordered and what was used was too wide for anyone to pretend it was not there.
And Harold admitted he had been taking pethidine.
I took a little bit of drugs while I was taking care of the patients.
What do you know?
I don't know why Harold is now from from New York City.
But anyway, but he would tell them that he wanted help for his problem.
And he asked for a chance to get better.
Because the moment he was pinned down, his defiance disappeared.
And he actually turned remorseful, or what appeared as remorseful, playing the part of someone who had tripped once and just needed a hand getting up.
And people believed him because he was very convincing.
He was a smart fella.
But he would still be pushed out of the practice.
Whether by resignation or dismissal depended on who told the story.
But the result was the same.
Harold was gone because what had happened at the practice was passed along the home office drugs branch.
And in February of 1976 Harold stood before a magistrate at Halifax Magistrates Court and the charges were obtaining pethidine by deception, unlawful possession of a controlled drug and forgery of prescription.
And the sentence was a fine of 600 pounds. and he paid it and would just walk out.
And Harold checked himself into The Retreat, a psychiatric hospital in York that ran a drug rehabilitation program, where he stayed through the winter of 1975 and into 1976, completing the program.
Despite his crimes and stay at rehab, the General Medical Council didn't take his license.
Bombastic side-eye right there to the Medical Council.
Nobody sent his case to the GMC's Professional Conduct Committee.
So he was not struck off the medical register.
A doctor had been convicted of a drug crime involving a controlled substance and the body responsible for protecting the public did nothing, which sounds like You know.
It sounds bad.
It's pretty bad.
But what happens after is significantly worse.
And it's because of this failure.
But this was due to the fact in 1976 a criminal conviction for drug offenses did not automatically trigger a GMC fitness to practice hearing.
So Harold passed through the gap.
And he remained, in the eyes of the law and the profession, a fully registered medical practitioner.
And Primrose stayed with him through all of it.
The confrontation, the criminal proceedings, the rehabilitation, and the return.
She did not leave and she did not waver.
The family remained intact.
Harold then landed a job in County Durham where he worked as a clinical medical officer for the local health authority, handling community health duties.
But the job did not last long.
By 1977 he applied for a new position and was accepted as a general practitioner at the Donnybrook Medical Center in Hyde, Greater Manchester, a town that had never heard of him and a practice that was willing to take a chance on a doctor with a difficult past.
Because, despite his new colleagues at Donnybrook knowing what had happened in Toddwarden, it didn't take long for Harold to become the most popular doctor in the building.
He was thorough spending real time with his patients, sitting with them, listening to their complaints, explaining what was happening inside their bodies, and he continued making house calls gladly, as he did before.
Word would get around, and more and more people asked to be on his books.
They wanted Harold over other doctors in the building and, furthering his connections, he got involved beyond the surgery walls and local medical committees brought him on and he joined community groups, including the Rochdale Canal Society.
And eventually, in 1992, Harold left Donnybrook to open his own solo practice at 21 Market Street in Hyde.
And in 1993 he started off strong with a client list of over 2000 people, many of which had followed him from Donnybrook.
And the move changed everything about how Harold operated.
Now there was no partners to review his prescriptions, no colleagues glancing at his patients' records, no one monitoring how he scheduled appointments or managed drug stock.
He controlled it all and was accountable to no one but himself.
All right, let's take a quick pause to set the scene.
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I'm exhausted from researching cases after cases after cases.
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But before Hyde, before Market Street, before any of it, there was Eva Lyons.
70 years old, living in Todmorden in early 1975.
So we're going back almost 20 years.
Terminally ill with cancer and Harold was her doctor.
On March 17th 1975 Harold visited Eva in her home and he tended to her, sat with her husband talking with him for a short while.
And by the time he left, Eva would be dead and her death certificate listed cancer as the cause and no one questioned it.
A dying woman had died and her body was cremated.
And then there was Mary West, who was an 81 year old widow.
And she lived alone in her home in Hyde and she didn't need anyone's help doing it.
She did have arthritis in her legs, her hips and her back, poor circulation and a new inhaler for asthma.
But none of it slowed her down, because she had a busy social life, ran a clothing shop in town and she was even planning to book herself a holiday at Butlin's.
And her son Christopher, had been staying with her for a few days and she seemed fine to him, in pretty good shape for 81 in fact.
But in late February she saw Harold about her arthritis and he prescribed his favorite pethidine tablets.
But they just made her feel worse, actually.
And by March 6, the pain was still bothering her, so she asked him to come to the house.
That morning, her good friend Marion Hadfield stopped by.
Mary had tea with them, and they sat together chatting, watching television, waiting for the doctor.
Harold arrived while Marion was upstairs using the bathroom.
When she came back down she heard voices in the living room so she waited in the kitchen, the kitchen looking surprised to see her, and he said Mary had passed on.
Marion asked if there was anything he could do, but Harold said it was too late.
She was gone.
And Marion walked into the living room to see Mary sitting in her chair, in the exact same position she had been for a short while before.
And she looked like she had just nodded off watching television.
But Harold wouldn't try to resuscitate her.
He simply checked her eyes.
No sign of life, he said.
And he told Marian he had only looked away for a moment to gather his things.
And when he looked back, Mary had collapsed and he called Mary's son, Christopher.
And the story then changed.
And he told Christopher he had taken his mother's blood pressure, went to put the machine back into his car.
And when he came back in, she was no longer living.
And when Christopher arrived, Harold told him it was a massive stroke.
And he said that he had expected this would happen at some point, because her arteries had begun hardening.
And in this case he didn't try to bring her back because she would have been a quote unquote vegetable.
And he did not say a postmortem examination should be done.
So three people heard three versions of how Mary West died.
And the only thing that stayed the same was the ending.
Harold filled out the death certificate with cause of death, cerebrovascular accident.
And on the cremation form, he wrote that a neighbor was present at the death.
An 81 year old widow with bad arteries and high blood pressure had died of a stroke in her living room.
And her doctor had been right there when it happened.
No one questioned it.
And then there was Irene Turner, who was 67 years old.
She had diabetes, arterial disease, breast cancer, and had a heart attack two years before.
But still, she kept herself busy.
And she got out regularly and stayed active.
And she had just come back from a week's holiday in Torquay.
And her friends and family all said the same thing.
Irene was doing well.
But after the holiday, she did pick up a cold.
And she was coughing up phlegm, vomiting even.
And her daughter Carol and son-in-law Michael told her to call the doctor.
So on July 11th, now 1996, Irene called Harold's surgery and asked for a visit.
And she stayed in bed telling Michael she wanted a meat and potato pie for lunch and requested he bring some over.
And as he dropped it off, she told him she would eat it once the doctor had left.
And at 2.15 in the afternoon, Irene called Michael again.
But Harold still hadn't shown up and she sounded like herself.
But this would be the last time anyone would hear her voice.
And at around 3.25 PM, a neighbor named Sheila Ward saw Harold sitting in his car on the street.
And he asked her to go into Irene's house.
But wait five minutes first, he said.
He didn't explain why.
Very extremely odd.
But go into her house.
But wait five minutes.
Give it five minutes to make sure. you're gonna get that she's probably passed away.
And when Sheila went in to check on her, Irene was dead in bed.
And she was on her back, head on the pillows, arms laid on top of the blankets, which were pulled smooth and straight up to her chest.
And Harold came in behind Sheila to tell her Irene had died of diabetes and it had spread all through her body and was already too late to take her to the hospital.
And he called Michael.
No need for a post-mortem, he said.
He had told Irene to go to the hospital, but she didn't want to, and he told another son-in-law, Alfred Isherwood, something different.
This time it was ischemic heart disease, a long convoluted explanation.
No pain, he would say, she just went in her sleep.
But then he took it a step further, blaming Irene And she had waited too long to call him and she would have survived if she had called him sooner.
He would say
And Alfred would think the situation was odd, but Irene had held Harold's opinions highly.
She always took his advice.
So if Harold had told her to go to the hospital as he said he did, she would have gone.
And Harold would fill out the death certificate with the wrong date, writing July 10th instead of July 11th, and claimed to sign it on July 10th.
And he listed the cause as circulatory failure with ischemic heart disease and diabetes underneath.
So just extremely odd in all these circumstances, lying about how they're dying to different people and not really caring because what are they going to do?
You know, he's a doctor and they were already sick and they died.
And that brings us to Lizzie Adams.
Now, Lizzie Adams lived alone and she was a widow and she had spent her career as a ballroom dancer.
And at 77, she was still at it.
And she still had a dancing partner.
And she had come back from a holiday in Malta with a group of friends.
And she was in remarkable shape for her age.
And she was home from Malta with a cold and a cough.
And the day after returning she spent the whole afternoon shopping in Stockport with her daughter, Doreen.
And by the end of the day, she was ready to rest and the cough was bothering her.
Doreen picked up an antibiotic from Harold's surgery and dropped it off at her mother's house.
So on Friday, February 28th 1997, the next morning Lizzie told Doreen the antibiotic quote unquote, nearly blew her head off.
And at 1210 she called the surgery and the receptionist wrote down her symptoms dizziness and nausea and just unsteady on her feet and she wanted a visit.
But she continued on with her day as normal.
And that morning she hand washed clothes and hung them dry and she started cooking her evening meal.
And when Harold arrived in the early afternoon, the ironing board was set up in the kitchen with the iron ready to go.
And sometime in the mid-afternoon Lizzie's friend William Cotlow arrived at the house, noticing the front door was unlocked.
And he found Harold in the front room, standing by a china cabinet, looking into it.
And Harold told him Lizzie had taken a bad turn and that he was arranging to get her to a hospital.
William walked through the back room and Lizzie was in her chair settled in like she had just closed her eyes for a minute.
And he took her hand and it was still warm.
And he turned to Harold saying, quote unquote, I think she fainted.
And Harold walked over saying, quote, she's gone, unquote, and he would cancel the ambulance.
And again, he did not examine her.
And Harold called the Thorley house and told Doreen's husband he had ordered an ambulance to take Lizzie to the hospital.
And then he called Doreen at work and said her mother needed to go to the hospital.
And he didn't tell either of them that she was already deceased.
And Doreen rushed to her mother's house and Lizzie was still in her chair, legs crossed, in a relaxing position.
And Harold abruptly told her that her mother had died of pneumonia.
And he said there was no need for a postmortem again because he had been present at the death.
How convenient.
And the next day, Lizzie's other daughter, Sonia, went to see Harold.
And he told her he had called an ambulance, but canceled it after Lizzie had died.
But no call to the ambulance service was ever made from that house.
And Harold filled out the death certificate with cause of death bronchopneumonia lasting 12 to 24 hours.
And on the cremation form he put the time of death at 250 in the afternoon, about 50 minutes after he arrived.
And he wrote that a neighbor, Mrs. Catlow, was there when she died as well.
And that brings us to Jean Lilly, who was 58 years old.
Her husband, Albert, drove long distance for a living.
And he kept a mobile phone on him at all times, never turned it off.
And Jean's health wasn't the best.
She did have heart disease, hypertension, and respiratory problems.
And she got around in a wheelchair anytime she went out.
But she managed at home.
And for a couple of days, she had a cold and a cough.
And on the morning of April 25th, 1997, Albert called her from the road to check in.
And she told him she had called the doctor and asked him to come by and she was currently waiting for him.
And her neighbor, Elizabeth Hunter, came by that morning as well.
And they had tea together and just chatted.
And Jean told her the same thing, that she wasn't feeling well and was just waiting for the doctor.
And from back at her own house, Elizabeth saw Harold show up around noon.
And 45 minutes later, she would see him leave.
And she headed over to check on Jean and found her on the sofa.
And she looked like she had just fallen asleep.
But when Elizabeth took her hand, it was ice cold.
So she would run outside to try to catch Harold, but he was already gone.
So she went back in and tried to bring Jean back, but there was nothing to be done.
Jean's lips were already blue.
And Elizabeth called the surgery and they told her to call for an ambulance.
And she did so at 119 in the afternoon.
And the paramedics arrived 10 minutes later to pronounce Jean as dead.
And they moved her body into the bedroom.
And then, Harold showed up, but he didn't go into the bedroom.
He didn't take a look at Jean.
He told the paramedics that he would handle the death certificate.
Jean had been ill for a very long time, and he had seen this coming.
And Elizabeth was just in tears.
And Harold was short with her not good bedside manner, as we know, telling her Jean had just had a bad heart.
And this was bound to happen soon.
And when he talked to Albert Jean's husband he said he had tried to get Jean to go to the hospital, but she just wouldn't go.
And he said he had been waiting for Albert to come home so he could talk her into it.
But by then it was too late and her heart gave out.
But Albert didn't buy it.
Jean had respected Harold fully.
She had always taken his advice before without hesitation.
If Harold had told her to go to the hospital, she would have gone.
And if she really wanted to talk it over, she would have picked up the phone and called Albert himself, because she knew his phone was always on.
But Harold filled out the death certificate.
Cause of death heart failure due to ischemic heart disease and hypertension.
And he was the last person with her before she passed.
And then there was Ivy Lomas, who was 63 years old.
She was not well because she had chronic lung disease, depression and anxiety.
And she had smoked 40 cigarettes a day for years and it had taken a toll.
Walking any distance winded her, and lifting anything with decent weight was just out of the question.
And a neighbor took her dog out every day because she wasn't able to do it herself.
And her adult son had a psychiatric illness and it weighed on her constantly.
Ivy was a regular at Harold's surgery.
And on the morning of May 29th 1997 she told a neighbor that she had pains in her chest and arms.
But she still went out that morning to arrange care for her son.
And in the afternoon she headed into Hyde for a four o'clock appointment with and.
She got there ahead of schedule looking a bit pale but on her feet nonetheless.
And she made it into the consulting room without help.
And after a short time Harold moved Ivy from his consulting room to the treatment room down the hall.
And about 10 minutes later, he appeared at reception looking red in the face.
And he told the waiting room he was sorry for the holdup, saying he had a problem with the ECG machine.
And then he called the next patient in.
And the next.
And the next.
And then he called in his receptionist, Carol Chapman, and he told her that he had been trying to take an ECG reading on Ivy, but thought the machine was just broken.
And then he realized Ivy had died.
He said he tried to bring her back, but couldn't, instructing Carol to contact Ivy's son, Jack.
But Carol couldn't reach him, so she called the police instead.
And when Constable Reed arrived, he found Ivy fully clothed on the treatment room bed.
And Harold told him he could certify the death as natural causes.
But Constable Reed was curious And he asked what had happened and Harold told him Ivy had come in about bronchial problems.
And after treating her he had shown her into the treatment room to rest and he kept working through his client list.
And when he checked on her 15 minutes later, she was just dead.
And he didn't try to resuscitate her, as she was quite beyond that, he would say.
And he also didn't call an ambulance either.
Now, Constable Reed couldn't believe what he was hearing.
And Harold joked in bad taste that Ivy had come to the surgery so often he had thought about having a seat specially saved just for her with a plaque.
And that evening, Ivy's daughter, Carol, went to see Harold and he gave her another version.
And this time he said that he had taken Ivy to the treatment room because he had to see another patient in the consulting room.
No mention of an ECG.
And he said when he went back to check on her she had gone blue around the mouth from a massive heart attack.
And he tried to revive her, but failed, which he did not tell the constable.
He said she died of a completely different reason and he did not try to resuscitate her.
So three people with three different stories.
And the only consistent thing was that Ivy was deceased.
But Harold signed the death certificate saying coronary thrombosis and her medical records contained almost no history of heart disease.
Just one written note from 1991 saying IHD, which is ischemic heart disease.
No medication for any heart condition, no prior complaints about her heart.
And then he would just go back to work.
And then we have Muriel Grimshaw.
Muriel was 76 years old.
And in very good health.
She would take medication for her blood pressure and got the occasional bout of back pain.
But that was about it.
She had had a flare up in May and solved it by buying a new bed.
And she saw her daughter, Anne, every Sunday and Thursday.
And they talked on the phone most other days.
So on Sunday, July 13, 1997, they went to church together.
And afterwards they sat at Muriel's house with a cup of coffee and made plans to have lunch on Wednesday.
And Muriel was well, and she was in great spirits.
And every Tuesday, Muriel went shopping with her friend Barbara Ryan.
And on the morning of July 15th, Barbara would knock on her door.
But there was nothing.
No movement inside.
Barbara contacted Anne and they let themselves in together.
Muriel was on top of the bed, still in her clothes she had worn that day.
And the television was playing to no one and the curtains were just left open.
Muriel always unplugged the television before bed and she never left it running.
And Anne called Harold and he came in and glanced at Muriel and stepped back.
And he would not even put a hand on her.
And he would place the time of death at about 530 the evening before and he told them it was peaceful and there was no need to involve the coroner and he didn't say what had killed her and he later signed the death certificate saying cause of death cerebrovascular accident with hypertension as the underlying condition.
And he wrote that he last saw Muriel alive on July 2nd.
But there was no record of any consultation on July 2nd.
And Anne said her mother hadn't seen Harold since May, but Harold's computer told a different story.
And on July 14th at 2.06 in the afternoon, an entry appeared in Muriel's records.
And it said only that he saw the patient in her own home.
And Harold claimed that he had stopped there around one o'clock and found her having a cup of tea.
Her back was fine, a routine check and nothing more.
But no one had asked him to come.
And Muriel hadn't called the surgery at all, and she hadn't requested a visit.
Harold just simply showed up at the home of a healthy 76 year old woman in the middle of a Monday afternoon and by tuesday morning she was dead.
And then there was mary quinn, who was 67 years old and she was divorced and she lived alone in hyde and her only son john, worked in japan.
But they talked often and he kept close tabs on her and mary had a condition called systemic sclerosis which affected her skin, her esophagus and small blood vessels in her fingers and toes.
And she took medication for her blood pressure.
But she was managing and her friends saw her regularly and she got on with her life.
But on the morning of November 24th, 1997, Mary attended a funeral in Hyde.
And friends who saw her said she looked fine.
And at around 2.30 in the afternoon, she picked up the phone and called John in Japan.
And they chatted and he heard nothing in her voice that really worried him.
But that phone call to Japan was the last anyone heard of Mary Quinn.
Harold told people that Mary had called the surgery at around 545 that evening, reporting weakness down her left side.
And he told her to leave the door unlocked and he would just let himself in.
Harold allegedly arrived at the house at around 6.15 after fighting through rush hour traffic.
And he let himself in and found Mary on the kitchen floor almost dead.
So he would check for a pulse and tested her reflexes.
And he said she was deeply unconscious and had a severe stroke.
And he decided not to resuscitate her because if he brought her back she would be brain damaged beyond repair.
So he waited a couple of minutes and she didn't move.
So he didn't call an ambulance and at 6 32 he contacted marie's friend, ellen hanratty listed as her emergency contact and he told ellen that marie had phoned the surgery saying she was having a stroke and was paralyzed down one side And he had rushed over.
But by the time he got there she was breathing her last.
And he was just too late.
And he told John and Marie's friend, Cecilia Adshead, the same thing for once.
And Harold signed the death certificate.
Cause of death cerebrovascular accident.
20 minutes duration.
And underlying causes were anxiety. arteriosclerosis and hypertension.
And the medical record showed a single entry from 1992 mentioning arteriosclerosis.
And there was no other reference to it anywhere in her records.
And then there's Kathleen Wagstaff.
So Laura Kathleen Wagstaff was 81 years old and she went by Kathleen and she was in good health.
She lived in a flat in Hyde and she still did her own shopping.
And she thought highly of her doctor.
And on the morning of December 9th, 1997, Kathleen went into Hyde to shop.
And it was a normal day and she felt fine.
And at around 145 in the afternoon, Harold left the surgery without telling anyone where he was going.
And a neighbor watched from across the way as Kathleen opened the door for him, and it was somewhere between 2 and 3 in the afternoon at this point.
But Kathleen wasn't expecting him, but she seemed happy he was there.
And another neighbor saw his car in the park, and 20 to 30 minutes later, they would see him again. then harold knocked on the neighbor's door telling them kathleen had died and he said he would let the family know and left and he called the wrong person first and told kathleen's daughter-in-law that her mother had died but it wasn't her mother it was her mother-in-law and he only realized the mistake when his receptionist corrected him Kathleen's son, Peter, went to the flat and found his mother in her chair, and she was tilted to one side, and there seemed to be some vomit on her.
And Harold told Peter that Kathleen had called the surgery after a visit citing chest pain.
And he had just been close by and came straight over.
And he said when he arrived, she just looked ill, gray, sweating, blue around the mouth.
And he said he walked her up to the flat and got her sitting down.
And he said her pulse was thready so he called an ambulance and then he went to get his bag from the car and when he came back she was dead.
So again he called off the ambulance and he told peter it was a heart attack quick, with no suffering, heart disease that could carry you off without warning.
And peter was shocked.
He had had no idea his mother had heart problems.
But Harold signed the death certificate.
Cause of death coronary thrombosis onset 30 minutes before death.
Underlying conditions, ischemic heart disease of 8 to 10 years.
And our medical records showed no sign of heart disease, though.
No medication for a heart condition.
Two readings of raised blood pressure, but nothing beyond that.
So it was extremely odd.
The entry describing the death was five words long.
Call, arrive, collapse, died, time.
And on the cremation form, Harold wrote that a neighbor was present at the death.
No neighbor was present.
And then there was Bianca Pomfret.
Bianca Pomfret was 49 years old, young, but she was divorced.
She lived alone and was under the care of consultant psychiatrist Dr. Alan Tate.
And she had a community mental health support worker who checked on her regularly.
And in the days before her death, friends noticed she had a congested cough and she was expecting a visit from the doctor.
So on the morning of December 10th 1997 her neighbor Paul Graham saw her looking out of her lounge window and she was up, she was awake and she was going about her day.
And at some point, Harold visited.
And he said Bianca had called the surgery that morning to say she was unwell and had chest pains.
And he said she had episodes like this before going back months.
And he said it sounded like angina and offer her medication for it.
But she refused because she was taking too many tablets already.
And he told her she should just see a cardiologist.
But she turned that down, too.
And he advised her to book an appointment for an ECG and then left.
And she came to the door to wave him off.
He said.
And at around 5 o'clock that afternoon, Susan Adshead, Bianca's mental health support worker, arrived for a visit.
And she knocked. but there was no answer.
And she looked through the window and saw Bianca was on the sofa.
And when Bianca's son William arrived, his mother was deceased and she was dressed for the day and her body was settled into the cushions, like she had just drifted off in her sleep.
A cup of coffee sat next to her, half drunk, and a cigarette had burned itself out in the ashtray and william called an ambulance and the paramedics called harold.
And harold arrived and told william he had visited bianca earlier that day for her chest pains and he told william and his wife that bianca had been suffering from angina for about 10 months.
And they were stunned.
They had no idea.
And Harold said her depression, her medication, and her smoking all played a part.
And then Harold went back to the surgery and sat down at his computer.
And he made several entries in Bianca's medical records.
One was for the visit that day and the others were backdated, spread across the previous nine months, and they described episodes of chest pain that were never reported.
Blood pressure readings he could not have possibly remembered, and notes like seems better designed to read as though they had been written at the time.
And the next day Harold called Dr Tate, Bianca's psychiatrist, And Dr Tate wrote down what Harold told him.
And it was, again, a completely different story.
And this time, Harold said he saw Bianca on December 8th, chest pains, possibly angina.
And he arranged an ECG, but the results weren't significant.
And he checked on her the following day and she seemed fine.
And on the 10th, he found her collapsed with a thready pulse.
She went into cardiac arrest and he resuscitated her and he used a defibrillator.
She would die anyway.
And none of that was what he told William.
But Harold signed the death certificate.
Cause of death coronary thrombosis with an underlying condition of ischemic heart disease.
And next there was Nora Nuttall.
Nora was 64 years old and she lived with her son Anthony, but was still independent, catching the bus and to hide most days to run errands and see friends.
And her medical history was complicated though, because rheumatic fever earlier in life had left her prone to heart valve problems and there was references to heart disease in her records.
But in spite of all of it, she lived her life.
But she would pick up a cough, and on the morning of January 26, 1998, she went into the surgery.
And Harold gave her cough medicine and told her to rest.
And friends who ran into her said she seemed like her usual self.
And Anthony got home from work at two and headed back out just before three to tend to his ponies.
But about 40 minutes later he returned to find Harold's car outside and Harold walking out of the front door.
And Harold told him his mother wasn't well and that he had called an ambulance, but he hadn't.
And Anthony ran inside and his mother was on her chair looking like she was sleeping.
And Harold came in behind him, pressed two fingers to her throat, pulled back one eyelid and said she's gone.
And he told Anthony he had just been close by when a call came in asking him to check on her.
But that was not true.
No one had called Harold.
He had just come on his own.
And he then picked up the phone and pretended to cancel an ambulance that was never coming.
It's left ventricle failure, he would tell Anthony.
And when the heart goes like that, you just black out.
20 minutes and it's over.
And there's nothing the paramedics could have done.
And Harold signed the death certificate.
Cause of death, left ventricular failure, 15 minutes duration.
Underlying cause, congestive heart failure, three years.
And on the cremation form, he wrote that her son was present when she died.
But as we know, he was not.
And then there was Pamela Hillier.
Pamela was a 68-year-old widow who walked her dog every morning and managed her own life without help.
And she took medication for high blood pressure, but was otherwise active and healthy.
A recently hurt knee had become painful when she drove.
So on the morning of February 9th 1998 she called the surgery and the receptionist wrote down one thing painful knee.
And her daughter, Jacqueline, spent the morning with her.
And when she left just before lunch, her mother was fine.
And at 107, they spoke on the phone and everything was normal.
And then Harold visited shortly after.
And by two o'clock, Jacqueline was getting no answer.
So a neighbor went in to check and found Pamela on the bedroom floor, face up, not moving.
And her account papers were on the table and her lunch was sitting untouched in the microwave.
And when Harold arrived, a paramedic told him the police would be notified, given it was a sudden death at home.
And Harold said that wouldn't be necessary.
She had simply just had a stroke.
And when Jacqueline's husband asked about a postmortem, Harold shut it down and he could tell from how she was lying.
He allegedly said, let's put it down to a stroke.
Let's put it down to a stroke.
You know, he's just like openly guessing.
I mean, we'll talk about what's really happening shortly, but it's just, it's disgusting.
The next day, Jacqueline and her brother Keith, came to see him and Keith pressed on why the blood pressure medication hadn't been increased.
And Harold said you needed three raised readings before adjusting the dose.
And Keith brought up the postmortem again, but Harold said it would be unpleasant.
She had died instantly.
No pain.
And Harold signed the death certificate.
Cause of death, cerebrovascular accident, underlying cause, hypertension of six years.
And then he went back to his computer.
He invented a consultation from February 5th with Pamela complaining of a weak leg and raised blood pressure.
And he created a second entry for the day of her death, noting dangerously high blood pressure and advising her to increase her medication and return on Friday.
But she never had the chance.
And then there was Maureen Ward.
Maureen Ward was 57 years old and packing up her life.
Boxes lined the walls of her flat in Ogden Court in Hyde and she was moving to Southport and had a Caribbean holiday booked for March 1st.
Breast cancer was behind her.
She was not winding down and that morning she had helped an elderly neighbor carry laundry and then headed into town to buy a new dress for her trip.
And at around 3 30 that afternoon harold knocked on the warden christine simpson's door and told her maureen was dead.
He had just come from her flat.
Christine was stunned.
And Harold said, Well, she did have a brain tumor, you know.
What?
And when Christine asked how he had gotten in, Harold said Maureen had left the lock on the snip, that he was dropping off an appointment letter for Stepping Hill Hospital.
Christine went to the flat and Maureen was on her bed, fully clothed eyes shut, her body, completely straight and tidy.
And in the kitchen, a tin of cat food was open on the counter with a spoon mid-scoop.
Back at the surgery, Harold told his receptionist, Carol, a different story entirely.
And he had been passing by and seen an ambulance outside.
The next day, he told staff yet another version.
He had gone to deliver an appointment letter and Carol pointed out that wasn't what he told her yesterday.
And Harold then sat at his computer and backdated entries across several months.
And in them, Maureen complained of headaches, blurred vision, and unsteadiness.
And he wrote that she had been found on the floor the week before, possibly thitting.
And her doctor at Stepping Hill confirmed she had never reported any of that.
And Harold signed the death certificate.
Cause of death carcinomatosis of eight weeks duration with a secondary tumor in the brain.
And on the cremation form, he wrote that the warden was present at the moment of death.
But as we know, she was not.
Harold was the only one there.
And next, there was Winifred Meller.
Now, Meller was 73 years old and young for it.
She volunteered at a local hospital, helped her church and kicked a ball around with her grandchildren in the garden and had a trip to the Holy Land.
She walked into Hyde most days with no trouble and her health was good.
But she did pick up a cold and her daughter Sheila had lunch with her but didn't think she seemed seriously ill.
The next morning, May 11th 1998, Mellor called the school to say she couldn't be in, then chatted normally with two friends on the phone and then walked to Hyde Market and had a cheerful conversation with another friend there.
And at around three o'clock, a neighbor called Gloria Ellis.
That is really weird.
Anyway, watched Harold's maroon car park outside and stay for about 20 minutes.
And after that, there was nothing.
And the afternoon passed with no word from Melor.
And at 630 that evening Harold knocked on Gloria's door and asked her and her husband to let them into Melor's house.
And he said he could see through the window that something was wrong.
So they went together and Malor was in her chair, head tilted to one side, a cup of coffee beside her, the shopping still bagged up in the kitchen, and she looked like she had just fallen asleep.
So Harold checked her wrist and eyes and she was gone.
And he was sharp with Gloria when she became distressed.
And he told Miller's daughters that their mother had suffered from angina since 1997 and had repeatedly refused treatment.
And he said she had called surgery in pain that afternoon, that he had rushed back but couldn't get in.
So he went to the neighbors for a key.
And he asked the daughters if they agreed he should write coronary thrombosis on the certificate and said nothing about a post-mortem.
And none of the daughters believed it at all because their mother told them everything.
If she had a vagina, they would have known.
And if Harold had told her to go to the hospital, she would have gone because she respected Harold.
And if she had been in pain all afternoon, she would have called one of them.
But instead, she had gone shopping.
They also noticed that Miller's sleeve was rolled up and there was a bruise on her arm.
But Harold signed the death certificate cause of death, coronary thrombosis.
And then there was Joan Melia.
Joan was 73 years old and healthy, though on June 11 1998 she was feeling tired and a little bit under the weather.
The next morning, her companion, Derek Steele, drove her to the surgery.
Harold prescribed her an antibiotic and wrote in her records that she had a chest infection.
But when Joan came out, she told Derek the doctor had said she had pleurisy and pneumonia.
And Derek was puzzled, because if she had pneumonia, surely she would have to go to the hospital.
But Harold was her doctor, so he took her home and left her to rest.
And that afternoon, he called and got no answer, so went to check.
And Joan was in her chair with her glasses on and a crossword on her knee, cold to the touch.
And it was clear she had got up at some point and went to the kitchen to make something to eat after he had left.
And Harold arrived at 5.54.
And he glanced at Joan, said the medication hadn't had time to work and told Derek he would handle the death certificate and was gone in five minutes.
Cause of death low-bore pneumonia of two to three days duration, with emphysema as an unrelated contributor condition.
And he said nothing about a post-mortem and continued on with his work.
And last, there was Kathleen Grundy.
Kathleen was 81 years old and in excellent health.
She volunteered at Werneth House, worked with age concern, and had a full social life.
She showed no signs of slowing down.
And Harold approached her about a research project on the aging process and supposedly run by Manchester University.
And he had needed her signature and a blood sample taken first thing in the morning.
So on June 23rd, she came to the surgery for an unrelated appointment.
And Harold told her he would come by at 830 the next morning to collect blood.
But there was no research project.
The next morning, June 24th 1998, Harold arrived at Kathleen's home and she would never show up at Werneth House that day.
And by midday two of her friends went to check on her and the door was unlocked and kathleen never left it unlocked and they found her on the sofa, fully dressed and cold.
And harold came to the house.
A quick look over cardiac arrest.
He said he called the coroner's office, agreed he could issue the certificate and wrote down old age is the cause of death.
And when two police officers arrive, Harold mentioned that he had called on her that morning because she was unwell but said nothing about a blood sample or a research project.
The officers saw nothing suspicious.
He told Kathleen's daughter Angela he had seen her for a routine thing and he was vague about it.
He mentioned possible indigestion, said he had arranged to collect blood the following morning but when he arrived she hadn't been dressed yet.
And he handed Angela the death certificate citing old age and she took it.
So fifth same paperwork with the same outcome.
And everyone believed him.
But what was really happening to all of these women?
See, Harold kept it simple because simple worked.
He carried diamorphine in his bag.
Now, diamorphine is pharmaceutical grade Heroin.
In medicine, it's used for severe pain, terminal cancer, end-of-life care.
And in the right dose, it quiets suffering.
And in the wrong one, it stops a heart.
And Harold knew the difference intimately because he had watched it work on his mother when he was 17 years old.
And he had prescribed it for dying patients and watched it ease them out.
And at some point he decided to use it on people who were not dying at all.
And the mechanics were unremarkable welcomed in because he was the doctor, and the doctor was always welcome, and he sat with the patient for a short while, long enough for everything to seem routine.
And then he reached into his bag and the injection site was usually the arm.
Dimorphine hits the bloodstream fast And within seconds the drug crosses into the brain and consciousness dims and breathing slows and the body starts to go still.
And most of his victims would not have known what was happening.
There was no dramatic collapse, no struggle, no cry for help.
A person who was talking one moment would just simply stop and their eyes would close and their body would settle into whatever position the chair gave them.
And this is what witnesses kept describing again and again without knowing what they were seeing.
She looked like she had nodded off.
He said she just went to sleep and she was sitting exactly the same way she had been a few minutes before.
That was the drug and that was Harold's method.
He would wait a short time, check for a pulse he already knew was gone, perhaps check the eyes.
Then he would put on the expression of a doctor who had just lost a patient to begin the performance.
He would explain things to whoever was nearby.
Her heart, her blood pressure, her arteries.
He had seen this coming.
There was nothing anyone could have done.
He would say the same lies, with the same calm authority that made everyone in Hyde trust him in the first place.
And then he would write the death certificate coronary thrombosis, cerebrovascular accident, left ventricle failure, old age.
The cause he chose didn't need to be consistent.
It only needed to sound plausible for someone of that age with that history.
And Harold knew his patients' histories because he wrote them and sometimes made them up.
And still, somehow, no one noticed.
And Harold killed for 23 years in the open, wearing a white coat, carrying a black bag and knocking on front doors like a vacuum salesman.
And every single person who opened that door trusted him.
And unfortunately the victim count was far, far more Loud wasn't a police officer or hospital administrator or anyone inside the medical establishment.
It was a woman working at a funeral home.
Frank Massey and Son was a family-run funeral director's firm in Hyde, and Deborah Massey was part of the operation.
She handled the dead for a living.
And so she knew what a normal caseload looked like.
And she knew that what was coming through her doors did not look normal.
She kept seeing the same thing.
Shipman's patients were showing up far too often, and most of them were women.
And most had died alone in their homes, found sitting upright in a chair or something similar or different, when they're lying down on their bed.
And Alan Massey, Deborah's father, who had been running funerals for years, saw it too.
The bodies were always dressed, always positioned in a chair and, over and over again, Harold had either been the last one through the door or the one who reported the death.
But the Masseys didn't have the authority to investigate a doctor, but they knew someone who might listen.
So Deborah brought her concerns to Dr Linda Reynolds, a general practitioner at the Brooks Surgery in Hyde.
And Dr. Reynolds listened and began to look at the numbers herself.
And on March 24 1998 Dr Reynolds contacted John Pollard, the South Manchester coroner, and she told him what the funeral directors had told her and what she herself had observed.
Too many of Harold's patients were dying.
And the pattern pointed to elderly women living on their own, turning up dead in their own homes.
And Harold was always somewhere at the edges.
Pollard passed it along to Greater Manchester Police, where it ended up with Detective Inspector David Smith working out of Stalley Bridge Criminal Investigation Department, or CID.
And the police looked into it and they examined the death of 19 of Harold's patients.
And they pulled the death statistics from other GP practices locally and nationally and measured heralds against them.
And Dr Alan Banks, medical advisor to the West Penean Health Authority, was asked to go through the clinical files.
And Banks' findings were cautious.
The numbers were much higher than they should have been.
But on paper, every death lined up with what Harold had written on the certificate.
Nothing in the files screamed murder.
And that was the problem because the records they were receiving were Harold's records.
The notes they were reading were the notes of Harold that he had written.
And the medical histories they were checking were the histories Harold had created.
So they were asking the fox to explain what had happened in the hen house, essentially.
And the fox had written a very convincing account.
Essentially, if that makes sense.
And at this point, not a single body had been pulled from the ground.
No independent doctor was brought in to give a second opinion, and the families of the dead were never contacted.
And Harold's controlled drug records went unexamined and nobody asked where he was getting his diamorphine or how much of it he had.
And unfortunately for the investigation, by April 1998, the whole thing ended.
Just one month of looking and the police just walked away.
Not enough evidence.
Case closed.
And Dr. Linda Reynolds had raised the alarm.
And Deborah and Alan Massey had seen what no one else was willing to see.
And the system had taken their concerns, weighed them against a killer's own paperwork and decided bah, everything's fine.
They're old.
Who cares?
Sick.
Just absolutely sick.
And whether Harold knew the police had been looking at him was unclear at this point, but the coroner, John Pollard, had started pushing harder on the death certificates Harold was filing.
And if Harold picked up on that at all, it made no difference.
And in the five months after the closed file, three women died.
Winifred Mellor on May 11th, Joan Melia on June 12th and Kathleen Grundy on June 24th the women we spoke about before.
So Harold had been killing successfully for 23 years without a single serious consequence, and he had simply walked into hundreds of homes, ended lives, signed certificates and walked out again.
He had never been charged or meaningfully investigated at this point and he had survived the one moment when someone finally looked in his direction.
But then he did something he had never done before, because when kathleen died, a document landed at a solicitor's office, hamilton ward.
A law firm received what appeared to be kathleen grundy's will, but the typing was kind of sloppy and the grammar everything she owned.
Around 386000 pounds to a single beneficiary, Harold Frederick Shipman.
And a copy reached Kathleen's daughter, Angela Woodruff.
Angela practiced law for a living and one look at the document told her everything she needed to know.
Something was very wrong, because her mother was precise about everything.
A will this careless certainly couldn't have come from her hand, and the idea that she would leave her entire fortune to her GP was absurd.
And the whole thing was wrong top to bottom.
And fraud wasn't the worst of what Angela suspected.
She believed Harold Shipman may have murdered her mother to get his hands on the money.
And about a month after her mother's funeral in late July 1998, Angela walked into the police station.
She handed the will to greater Manchester police and told them what she believed had happened.
And this time, Nobody closed the file.
Detective Superintendent Bernard Postles took charge of the investigation because he now had something the first inquiry had never had a forged document with a dead woman's name on it and a suspect who stood to profit.
Guy got greedy.
And on August 1st, 1998, the exhumation of Kathleen Grundy's body was ordered.
And this was where one decision changed everything, because Kathleen hadn't been cremated like the others, which meant her body was still there, holding evidence that Harold had had no way to reach her.
The lab results came back with a definitive answer.
Kathleen Grundy's body contained lethal levels of dimorphine, pharmaceutical heroin.
No doctor had ever prescribed it to her and she had never taken it on her own.
So there was no innocent explanation for why it was even in her tissue.
Yet it was clearly there.
And when forensic analysts examined the will, they matched it to a typewriter sitting inside Harold's surgery on Market Street and his fingerprints were lifted from the paper itself.
So in all his years of killing, Harold had never once tried to take money from a victim.
Every death before this one had been committed and walked away from with no financial connection or trail leading back to him.
But the will changed that.
He got sloppy and dumb and greedy and stupid because that's what he is.
He's scum.
And with the exhumation of Kathleen Grundy, confirming lethal levels of diamorphine in her body, Detective Superintendent Bernard pulled together a team of officers assigned to the case around the clock.
And the question was no longer whether Kathleen Grundy had been murdered.
The question was how many others had been too.
So Postles ordered more exhumations, and over the course of the criminal investigation 12 of Harold's former patients were pulled from the ground.
And one by one, the bodies went to the lab.
And for nine of them, the results came back the same.
When dimorphine breaks down inside the body, it leaves behind morphine.
And that morphine does not disappear after someone is buried.
And body after body showed morphine levels through the roof high enough to kill.
So these were women who had had no reason to have the drug in their system and it had not been prescribed to them and they were not using it.
And yet it was there soaked into the remains like a signature.
And at the same time, investigators began pulling apart Harold's patient records.
Because he had kept both handwritten notes and computerized system at the Market Street practice.
And the computer records were damning.
Because again, poor old man didn't know how to work a computer, didn't know how computers worked.
Poor guy, just kidding, fuck this guy.
And they found that Harold had been going back into patient files and changing them after the fact because he had been adding entries that did not exist at the time of treatment, fabricating symptoms and building fake paper trails so that when a healthy patient dropped dead, the records made it look like it had been coming for months.
And a patient who was healthy on Monday was given a backdated record showing chest pains and heart trouble, as though the writing had already been there.
But again, Harold didn't understand how computers work.
And the system logged a metadata The machine stamped the real date and time on everything.
So regardless of Harold's efforts, technology remembered what he tried to erase.
And the investigation also dug into the drug logs.
And every controlled substance record at Harold's surgery and pharmacies around Hyde was pulled and examined, discovering a stockpile built in plain sight.
And he wrote prescriptions for dying cancer patients massive amounts of diamorphine, far more than any person could ever use.
And when those patients passed away, whatever was left over went straight into Harold's bag.
And other times he put a patient's name on a prescription even though that person never saw a single dose.
And the excess again went straight into his bag and was carried right into the homes of the women who trusted him.
So this emerging pattern was undeniable.
The dead were overwhelmingly older women who lived by themselves.
And Harold was the last person through each of their doors.
And he was the last one there when they stopped breathing.
Not to mention, he signed the death certificates and ordered no post-mortem for any of them and would often recommend cremation, and he would move to the next name on his list.
So the investigation then expanded at a pace no one had anticipated.
Because once the first toxicology reports came back, the case blew wide open.
And dozens of deaths landed on the detective's desk in a matter of weeks.
And the names started to pile up.
And what had started with one suspicious will was turning into something British policing had rarely seen.
In Hyde, the mood turned as the investigation progressed and his patients pushed back, unable to accept the allegations they were hearing.
Not their doctor, he cared for them, he sat with them, he was kind.
And some even went on record for him standing up in front of cameras to say this just could not be true.
But as more bodies were exhumed and more names surfaced, that loyalty began to crack and family members started doing the math and the doctor who had comforted them after their loved ones had passed might have been the reason they were no longer there at all.
The horror was right there inside their own homes, sitting in the chair where their loved one had been found.
And the first time officers showed up at Market Street asking for Kathleen Grundy's file, Harold handed it over without breaking a sweat.
He was very cooperative, almost pleasant.
And he told the officers that Kathleen Grundy was a drug abuser.
Oh no, was that in her file too?
And even while under scrutiny, Harold kept the surgery open.
Patients came in and he treated them business as usual, but he carried on working as though the walls were not closing in on him, and they were closing in on him fast.
And he also did not try to run.
He didn't destroy records or take any visible steps to prepare for in the event he could be caught.
He seemed to believe his word would be enough, just as it always had been before.
And Primrose's wife stood by his side at every moment.
She wouldn't hear a word of it.
Her belief in his innocence was absolute and unwavering.
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And let's get back to the video.
But on September 7th 1998 officers from Greater Manchester Police arrived at Harold's door in Rowcross Green, a short drive from Hyde.
Harold was arrested on suspicion of murder of Kathleen Grundy and the forgery of her will.
At the time, search teams moved through both of his homes and Market Street Surgery.
Files, controlled substances, equipment, everything they could carry went into evidence bags.
But one item stood out. a typewriter sitting inside the house.
And forensic analysis confirmed it was the same machine that had typed Kathleen Grundy's fake will.
And in the interview room though, Harold stayed true to form when someone pushed back at him.
Just arrogant AF and evasive.
Just contemptuous.
And he denied everything.
Every death was natural.
Every certificate was accurate.
The will was genuine.
Kathleen Grundy had brought it to him herself.
The toxicology results were laid in front of him.
Lethal diamorphine in a woman who had never used the drug.
And to this, Harold had nothing.
Nothing to say.
No answers.
That held up.
The detectives laid out the deaths, name by name, and Harold sat there just with a blank expression.
It seemed as though they were wasting his time looking at the officers, the way he had always looked at people who questioned him.
Just like go away, little human.
I don't care what you have to say, that Kathleen Grundy was a drug user, but nothing in her medical history, her personal life or her reputation supported it.
It was a lie built on nothing, and Harold told it with the same steady confidence he had once used to tell families their mothers died of natural causes.
And Primrose was completely shocked by the arrest, but she still remained unwaveringly supportive.
Her husband was innocent.
Even any suggestion otherwise was absurd.
But Harold was charged with the murder of Kathleen Grundy and with forging her will.
So Harold was taken to HM Prison, Manchester, also called Strange Ways to Await Trial.
And it was one of the most notorious prisons in England.
And though he was a prisoner, he was not yet convicted, but the charges against him were growing.
And inside strange ways, Harold continued to carry himself with calm arrogance.
And he projected the image of a man who believed a mistake had been made and that lesser minds were responsible for it.
And he showed zero remorse.
And instead of distress, he radiated indignation.
And everyone around him heard the same thing.
He didn't do it.
There was no moment where his certainty wavered.
No crack that let anything human through.
And Primrose's wife visited and still believed him.
And she stood by her husband just as she had through every crisis since they were teenagers.
This was just a miscarriage of justice and nothing she heard would change that.
But while Harold sat in his cell, the investigation continued to expand.
There were more names and more cases, and prosecutors settled on 15 murder counts and a single forgery charge tied to Kathleen Grundy's will.
These 15 were not the only women Harold was suspected of killing, though.
They were just the ones prosecutors believed they could prove beyond any reasonable doubt.
Where bodies had been buried, not cremated.
Where the labs found poison in the remains and the facts around each death locked together.
Many other suspected victims had gone into the fire, and the fire left nothing to test, because he ordered cremations for a majority of them.
Hundreds, hundreds of women we're talking about, by the way.
So the families waited, and more than 12 months passed between harold's arrest and the opening of the trial, and some had watched their loved ones pulled from the earth so a pathologist could search for poison in their bones.
And others sat with a new and unbearable knowledge The death they had accepted, the grief they had processed, the funeral they had attended, all of it had been rewritten.
And it felt like losing someone twice.
So on October 5th 1999 in Preston Crown Court Lancashire, Harold stood trial.
The venue had been moved from manchester as the case was too large and too public for a local jury to be considered impartial.
The presiding judge was mr justice forbes that is the coolest name for a judge i've ever heard in my life.
Now, the prosecution was led by richard henrique qc.
Henrique laid out the case in four categories.
The first was toxicology.
Nine of Harold's former patients had been exhumed, with foul play confirmed and in body after body, lethal or dangerously elevated levels of morphine had been found, as we know.
And the second was the computer.
Harold's patients' records had been torn apart by forensic analysts and the metadata told a story.
Harold did not know it was writing, as we know.
He didn't know how computers worked, so it was clear he typed in stuff after the fact, like months before, to make it look like what.
How they died was what made sense, you know.
And the third was the will.
Kathleen Grundy's supposed last testament named Harold Frederick Shipman as the sole beneficiary of her small fortune, which made no sense.
And it was obviously typed by him, because they had forensic analysts.
Look at the typewriter.
And he clearly wrote it.
And the fourth was the pattern itself.
Deaths stacking up at a rate no coincidence could explain.
The same method repeated over and over, the same doctor at every center at every single one.
The defense was led by Nicola Davies QC. limited, you know?
The evidence is stacking up against Harold, alright?
But she changed the toxicology, arguing a buried body could generate morphine naturally as it decomposed.
Bitch, what?
And the Crown's forensic witnesses shut that down immediately.
And she suggested the women may have had access to opiates Harold knew nothing about.
There was no evidence to support it for any of the 15 victims at all.
And she challenged the computer evidence as sloppy record keeping.
The metadata said otherwise, though.
And Harold would eventually take the stand.
And his normally arrogant demeanor kind of seemed to crack.
And court adjourned twice due to emotional breakdowns.
And when he finally spoke, his voice trembled, which he attributed to medication.
And he insisted every patient had died of natural causes.
Every altered record was legitimate and the will was genuine.
And Kathleen had sometimes borrowed his typewriter.
Okay, whatever helps you sleep at night, bud.
But by the time he stepped down, the damage was already done.
And the trial ran 57 days, one of the longest murder cases an English court had ever seen.
And Harold sat through all of it, pen in hand, scribbling notes.
And he appeared unmoved, and at times he appeared bored.
And he watched evidence of what he had done to 15 women, presented in meticulous detail, and reacted as though it had nothing to do with him.
And on January 13, 2000, the jury was sent to deliberate.
And on January 31 2000 the jury returned a unanimous verdict guilty on all 15 counts of murder, guilty of forging the will of Kathleen Grundy.
And Mr Justice Forbes I love that name delivered the sentence 15 concurrent life sentences for additional years for the forgery and a recommendation that Harold Frederick Shipman never be released.
The judge spoke directly to him, saying you have finally been brought to justice by the verdict of this jury.
I have no doubt whatsoever that these are true verdicts.
The time has now come for me to pass sentence upon you for these wicked, wicked crimes.
Each of your victims was your patient.
You murdered each and every one of your victims by a calculated, cold blooded perversion of your medical skills for your own evil and wicked purposes.
You took advantage of and grossly abused their trust.
You were, after all, each victim's doctor.
I have little doubt that each of your victims smiled and thanked you as she submitted to your deadly ministrations.
And Harold listened to this and didn't even flinch.
And in the gallery the families broke with a sense of relief because someone had finally said out loud that what was done to their mothers and grandmothers and wives was not natural, was not peaceful and was not God's timing.
It was murder.
And underneath the relief, there was obviously grief.
And the verdict did not bring anyone back.
It only confirmed what was taken.
And the press just went wild with this.
And headlines focused on the deep betrayal of a trusted doctor.
And the outrage directed not only at Harold but at every institution that had failed to stop him, because there were so many failures that could have prevented this.
And calls for a formal public inquiry grew louder by the day, and Primrose Harold's wife was there every day in court, sometimes with their children beside her.
And as he was taken away, she smiled at him weakly.
And she would continue to maintain that Harold did not do this.
You know, near the start i was like ah, i feel bad.
You know he's really manipulative and all this stuff.
But like, if that evidence is shown to you, there's something wrong with you.
You know there's something wrong with you to not realize, oh hey, Maybe he did do it.
And the conviction may have answered 15 questions, but there were hundreds more.
Because, in the wake of the trial, Secretary of State for Health, Alan Milburn, announced a formal public inquiry into the full scope of what had actually happened.
Established on February 1st 2001.
It was initially private, but families and the press pushed back hard because what Harold did and what the system failed to prevent could not be examined behind closed doors.
And by September, 2001, the government listened and it became a full public inquiry.
And the families had forced the door to open, and the women appointed to lead it was Dame Janet Smith and a high court judge.
And the process took nearly four years and hundreds of witnesses gave testimony, and Janet Smith and her team combed through approximately 888 death certificates bearing Harold's signature, each one reviewed on its own evidence.
And the first report was published on July 19th 2002 and its findings made the 15 convictions look like the visible tip of something enormous.
There was an iceberg under these 15 victims, because there were at least 215 patients dead at Harold's hands across a span from 1975 to 1998.
Suspicion in an additional 45 cases So 171 confirmed victims were women and 44 were men.
And the youngest were Peter Lewis at 41 years old, killed in 1985.
And the oldest was Ann Cooper at 93 years old, killed in 1988.
And five more reports followed.
And the second report examined the police investigation and was blunt in its conclusion.
The 1998 inquiry had not been good enough and Harold could and should have been caught sooner.
And the third report turned to the NHS and the General Medical Council, neither of which had caught what was happening under their noses.
And the fourth report exposed the gaping holes in how controlled drugs were tracked, laying out step by step how Howard had stockpiled a lethal supply of diamorphine, while every safeguard just stayed silent.
And the fifth report pulled apart the complaint system, where the answer in Harold's case had always been the same.
Nothing, essentially.
And the sixth report asked the question that should have been asked decades earlier.
When someone died outside a hospital, who made sure the cause of death was real?
And Janet Smith's answer was to recommend scraping the coroner system entirely and replacing it with an independent medical examiner who did not rely on the word of a single doctor.
And for hundreds of families whose loved ones never made it to the courtroom, the inquiry provided the closest thing to an answer they would ever receive.
And Harold offered nothing during this.
He just sat in a cell and maintained the same silence he had kept since the verdict.
Now, after sentencing, Harold was moved to H.M.
Prison Franklin in County Durham, a Category A facility nicknamed, quote unquote, Monster Mansion for the caliber of men it housed.
And in June of 2002 a whole life tariff was formally confirmed and Harold would never be a free man again.
But inside he still found a way to play doctor, and other inmates came to him with their aches and questions and he obliged.
Prison officers saw the same man his colleagues in Hyde had seen, cunning and distant, still carrying himself like the smartest person in the room.
And his wife Primrose visited regularly.
Desperately in love with a man, she could not reconcile with what he had done.
And psychological assessments described him as controlling and emotionally cold, with no remorse or empathy.
And a familiar word kept appearing in reports arrogant.
No formal psychiatric diagnosis was ever made.
The pattern experts identified from the outside was consistent narcissism in unwavering belief in his superiority.
A need to control those four walls had done nothing to diminish, and in 2003 harold was transferred to hm prison, wakefield in west yorkshire, a high security facility housing some of the most dangerous criminals in the country.
But on the morning of January 13th 2004, a routine 5 am check found Harold in his bed, seemingly sleeping.
But at 620 am the officer returned and found Harold Shipman hanging from the bars of his cell window, courtesy of his bedsheets, and attempts to resuscitate him had failed.
And Harold Frederick Shipman was pronounced dead inside the prison.
And he was 57 years old.
And he left no note, no letter to Primrose or to his children, no confession and no explanation.
Whatever he knew, he took with him.
And Primrose was informed that morning.
The timing of his death carried an unexpected consequence.
Because had Harold reached 60, the pension rules would have worked differently.
Because he didn't, Primrose was entitled to receive a full NHS pension and a tax-free lump sum.
So there was unconfirmed reports that Primrose had begun to doubt Harold in his final moments.
And that made his death may have been partly motivated by ensuring she received that money verified in an official review led by prisons and probation.
Ombudsman Stephen Shaw, concluded that officers had followed every procedure correctly and that there were no warning signs.
And naturally, the public response was furious.
And Danny Melor, whose mother, Winifred Melor, was among the 15, spoke for many when he said quote I always harbored the remote possibility that one day I could confront him and ask him why now that's been taken away from me, unquote.
And Anne Alexander, the lawyer representing some 200 of Harold's victims, said her clients felt cheated.
And many had believed that one day he would explain what he did, and most importantly, why.
But that resolution would never come.
But Janet Smith would press forward and the last two reports were published after Harold was already in the ground.
And she acknowledged that, with Harold gone, the inquiry was all that remained and it was the only official record of what he had done.
The man who had killed more of his patients than any doctor in recorded history took the last thing he had left to the grave.
200 victims, no one will ever know if there were more.
But behind the numbers were real people.
Grandparents who kept their gardens tidy and their front steps swept.
Women who walked to the shop every morning because the routine gave the day its shape.
And they played games and they went to church and they doted on grandchildren who thought they would be around forever.
And they were people with plans and they certainly were not ready to go.
And the families they left behind carried something that would never fully heal.
Guilt first and the questions that refused to leave.
Should I have asked more questions?
Should I have pushed back?
Should I have known?
And then just anger at Harold, at every institution that stood by while he kept killing, at the investigation that came and went in 1998 and found nothing and underneath it all, a grief that was forced to happen twice.
And the families organized, demanded answers and pushed for systemic change and refused to let the government handle any of it quietly.
And they fought to have the inquiry held in the open and kept pressing until the laws changed.
And the town of Hyde set aside a space in Hyde Park in 2005 and called it the Garden of Tranquility, and arose for each of the 215 victims.
But Harold Frederick Shipman never confessed and he maintained his innocence from the moment he was arrested until he was found dead.
And during the trial, prosecutors put forward a theory that Harold got something out of holding the line between life and death, that the control itself was the reward.
And Dame Janet Smith never arrived at a single explanation.
She believed he started with patients who were already dying, people whose death he could frame as mercy, and that he genuinely believed he knew when the right time had come.
But she also found something darker than misplaced compassion.
A fascination with drugs.
A pattern of pushing doses past safe limits.
And some patients may not have been murdered at all, and they may have just been experiments.
And over time the boundaries just dissolved and the terminally ill gave way to the elderly, then to the healthy.
And then there was Vera the image of a 17-year-old boy watching a doctor push morphine into his dying mother's arm and seeing the pain just let go.
And the inquiry asked whether that moment had lodged something deep enough to become something else entirely.
Now, after the conviction, forensic psychiatrist, Dr Richard Badcock, evaluated Harold and found no psychosis and no diagnosable psychiatric illness.
What he identified instead were narcissistic personality traits, superiority, and lack of empathy.
And criminologist professor David Wilson proposed that every killing was the same scene played again his mother's death on repeat, with Harold casting himself as the man with the bag and the needle who walks through the door and decides when the pain stops.
A loop that never resolved run through in living room after living room for 23 years.
And the inquiry also noted that some victims appeared to have done something to get under his skin, suggesting some sort of narcissistic rage, a need to reassert dominance when someone challenged him even slightly.
And money entered the picture exactly one time.
And that's what got him caught, luckily.
But Day and Janet Smith's six reports did more than document what Harold had done.
They dismantled the systems that had allowed him to do it.
And she recommended removing the treating doctor from the death certification process entirely and replacing them with an independent medical examiner, like we talked about before.
And Parliament passed the Coroners and Justice Act in 2009.
But the system it created did not go live until September 9th, 2024.
Why is that taking so long?
So two full decades after the verdict and more than 20 years after the family started asking how it was allowed to happen.
And the fourth report's findings on controlled drug monitoring led directly to the Health Act 2006, which overhauled how those substances were regulated across the health system.
And the controlled drugs regulations of 2013 added another layer requiring healthcare organizations to appoint accountable officers and maintain running balances.
And the fifth report's conclusion that the GMC had failed led to a structural split between the body that investigated complaints and the body that decided outcomes.
Starting in December of 2012, every doctor in the country was required to prove competency once every five years.
Literally bare minimum.
I know stuff has to change, but it's crazy that that wasn't part of it.
Oh, my God.
You have to get old people to get new driver's license every some odd years.
But no, an old medical professional.
Bah!
Just give him the license.
It'll be all right for the rest of their lives.
It'll be fine.
Because before Shipman, no such requirement existed.
And the cremation regulations of 2008 made it harder for a single doctor to send a body to the furnace without independent scrutiny.
And solo GP practices were flagged as structurally dangerous.
And the NHS began steering away from them.
Every safeguard that was supposed to protect patients had failed for the same reason.
The assumption that a doctor would act in good faith.
But around the world the shipment case became a reference point for what broken systems look like and what they allow.
And the reforms are now in place.
But it took 215 deaths, maybe even more, over 23 years and a forged will typed on a surgery typewriter to build the world where those safeguards exist.
And even now, the question that started everything remains exactly where Harold left it.
Unanswered.
But that is the case of Harold Shipman.
What a monster.
Holy crap.
It's crazy, to just somebody you trust with your health and your well-being, to take a loved one's life or your life is just it's hard to wrap your head around.
But it is something that does happen.
There are many cases you guys have told me to cover where it is some sort of medical professional doing this, and I have other ones on the list to deep dive into.
But let me know if there are other people you want me to deep dive into.
I always read the comments, and until then, I will see your beautiful face.
All right?
Stay safe.
Love you.
Bye.
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