Dr Death: Modern History's Worst Serial Killer

hello everybody welcome back to episode 2 of the casual criminalist my name is simon your host here on the channel what happens is we have a very dark criminal story obviously as the casual criminalist that's exactly what you expected this one has been put together by our fantastic writer callum i'm gonna take you through it i'm gonna add some commentary if i feel like it and generally well this one's really grim it's it's all about dr harold shipman who bears a lot of talk about you know serial killers and when we think of serial killers who comes to mind you know ted bundy ed gean john wayne gacy these kind of guys who are like are forefronts in our mind of serial killing there was a recent report and update on harold shipman and callum i guess we'll get into it later you know as we go through the script today about just so many people he killed and i don't think there's really any spoilers here because this is the casual criminals people died um people killed he killed more people than possibly any other serial killer so that's dr harold shipman i remember this story coming out early 2000s late 90s i guess we'll find out and it was i don't think i quite appreciated at the time the scope of this guy's crimes and maybe the justice system didn't either so let's jump in let's get on with our story i'm gonna have a sip of coffee [Music] outside of your family and close friends who do you trust the most take a second and think maybe it's your kid's favorite school teacher maybe the nice old lady who lives next door maybe it's your local police although that last one really depends on where you live indeed i'm recording this in 2020 and i'm obviously british i tend to think you know our police they don't have guns generally like they're people who had asked for directions on the street that's kind of been other than when i once accidentally bought something that was stolen uh that's kind of my limits of interaction with the police oh my my uncle's a detective or was a detective before he retired so that's about it um but obviously this is 2020. if you're in america you probably have a really different opinion of the police because that's pretty intense um i'll better uh let's continue i'll bet that a fair few of you thought of your local doctor instead picture him now late middle age thin and gray hair warm fatherly smile thick rimmed glasses tilted slightly to the side and an unwavering air of comfort comforting competence hanging around him and to top it all off this person has dedicated their entire life to the very specific task of making sure you don't die see unless you're harold shipman in which case well you know we're gonna find out what surely this person surely with this person there's no safer hands to be in well actually as it turns out the friendly face you're picturing right now could actually be that of a cold-blooded killer not just any old killer this was one of the most gruesomely prolific killers to ever operate in the uk indeed calamari just had i think to operate anywhere in the world whose decades-long killing spree claimed the rise of a veritable pile of victims in what must be one of the most flagrant violations of the hittographic hippocratic oath in history his legacy of unassuming terror sent shockwaves through the entirety of british society and caused an overhaul in the health system aimed at making sure that nothing like this could ever happen again national health service workers of a particular generation will shiver when they hear the name harold shippen so what was mr shipman doing was he killing people for medical researchers allah burke and hare who were two scottish people i believe who were killing people and then selling the bodies to medical researchers because getting bodies for autopsies and stuff like that was very difficult back in the day i think i've done a video about this on my today found out your youtube channel um if you'd like me to cover on casual criminals though and you know a more laid-back style like this a bit more longer in depth let me know and it shall be done stalking the streets with his knight at night with a scalpel creating his own frankenstein's monsters in the clinic supply closet well as it turns out the reality was actually far more insidious than any of that to get to the bottom of it all let's rewind to the mid-1990s acid washed jeans were all the rage the backstreet boys battered it out with the spice girls for the top spots in the charts i'm glad music moved on from that and a certain dr shipman was plying his noble trade down in the in the town of hyde near manchester i don't know hyde but i certainly have heard of manchester that's a very large city after a decade of working in the donnybrook medical center he had gathered the funds to start his own clinic on market street in 1992 cementing his position as a familiar friendly face around town known as fred to his friends wait wasn't his name harold he was the picture of professionalism a real family man with four children to his wife primrose twenty and all observers fred seemed like a decent guy someone you'd say hello to down the pub someone you'd happily take your kids to for treatment the one who sat by your grandmother's bedside during her final moments even had the beard and bill to make a pretty convincing shopping center santa claus if he ever fancied the gig yeah the doctor's side gig santa at the mall everything seemed fine in the leafy town of hyde until march of 1998 when a local undertaker noticed a worrying trend deborah massey had spent her whole working life around death so she knew a thing or two about it and as she went about her morbid business she realized that a certain name kept popping up over and over again on the death certificates of her dearly departed clients particularly the elderly women after presumably spending hours deciphering the incomprehensible scroll that is doctor's handwriting she discovered the name belonged to our plucky hero dr shipman even in jest i don't think we should call him a hero callum yes it seemed to her that old harold had a higher kill count than your average call of duty player almost all down to natural causes which meant one of three things either he was the unluckiest doctor in all of manchester he wasn't he was just some incompetent guy who nicked a lab coat and made a medical degree on photoshop he wasn't or something much more sinister was going on that's the one the number of deaths wasn't the only red flag either shipman's patience also had an unusually high rate of cremation that's never good like what happened to the body ah we it was cremated really quickly afterwards because the body was filled with poison never a good sign on top of that most of the newly deads were found in the exact same position at home sat in a slightly reclined position on the sofa fully clothed so we have a local doctor with a power over life and death in his hands who seems biased in favor of the latter and he recommends incineration as the best method of burial to his elderly patients families that's enough red flags to carpet a mansion though why you'd be carpeting a mansion with flags well i guess you just have a weird house column needless to say massey didn't just give shipment the benefit of the doubt she spoke to her father who confronted the doctor directly about the stats but he reassured them that there was nothing to be worried about old ladies die it's just a fact of life yeah but so many die with you harold fred whatever your name is he couldn't save everyone there must at least have been a part of them that just wanted to accept this excuse and move on surely this round-faced little local man couldn't have intentionally killed anyone surely not nonetheless massey brought her worries to another gp right across the street from shipments clinic who already had some suspicions of their own on account of all the cremation forms that would be they were being asked to counter sign after double checking the stats which revealed a 10 times higher death rate than average the gp contacted the district coroner and now the noose was tightening if harold really was the killer which some suspected he might be then surely this was the end of his grisly career the long arm of the law had finally caught up with him and justice was well and truly oh wait no that's what callum writes here and it is like yeah i mean there's a good 10 pages here left to go so and also you know spoilers from the beginning we know he killed a lot of a lot more people so um yeah let's crack on no actually the subsequent investigation turned up no evidence of wrongdoing apparently the rookie police sent to investigate the mata were perfectly happy to buy the plain bad luck excuse and closed the case in the middle of april less than a month after it began they hadn't dug into shipments patchy past at all but to be fair the records of all his deceased patients did seem to set a reasonable precedent for the ways in which they die patients diagnosed as having heart conditions would pass away from heart attacks those who had a history of liver cirrhosis would succumb to liver failure the files all seemed pretty clear-cut yeah but he's also making the files it's like oh yeah the woman with a heart heart disease died of a heart attack uh the only evidence of that is the fact that he wrote a heart attack on her death certificate or whatever and then very quickly had the body destroyed so harold returned to work just as before and the old dears of the town entrusted their lives to him as they had for decades the reporter who first broke the story of dr death miguela sitford of the manchester evening news later visited him at his clinic in 2020 she recounted when i approached shipman still working at his surgery and asked him to reassure his patients he was innocent of any wrongdoing he declined in a thin reedy voice his beady pale eyes staring at me through his glasses as i left an old lady in the waiting room tutted at me for daring to question him that's right like a cow rolling its eyes at the vegans picketing the abattoir the old woman in the waiting room got annoyed at sitford for harassing poor harold with no regard for the danger she might have been in i guess it's easier to believe that some faceless bureaucrats in the nhs made a mistake rather than face the fact that your much-loved family doctor might have killed some of your best friends yeah this trust that people have like once you've built up that trust over a while i mean it's gonna be really hard to tell people otherwise it was this the steadfast trust of the hyde community indeed built up over years and years of calamine same page years and years of loyal service which allowed chipman to kill a further three more victims in the following months oh i'm sorry was that a spoiler were you waiting for the big twist where it turns out paul harold was actually framed by a nefarious coroner or the victim of some conspiracy by rival clinics no no he was absolutely guilty incredibly guilty but trust me the real shocks are still to come yeah again i apologize for the spoilers right at the beginning of the show but no harold shipman was he killed many people if you're listening to this you've probably heard of harold shipper you're like i know he did something bad it wasn't that he wasn't stitched up by a coroner before we get to those though let's go back to the very beginning how exactly does someone with such a fascination for death get into a profession which is all about preserving life well the answer might well lie in harold's formative years the story of how he came to be the man he is was a recipe lifted straight from the serial killer cookbook narcissistic delusions of grandeur trauma and mother issues yeah ted what were the guys we mentioned earlier ted bundy ed gean john wayne gacy yeah you can see where serial killers come from baby harold was born on the 14th of january 1946 the middle of three children in a working-class family in nottingham in england his father drove lorries meaning that for the most part the shipment kids were under the sole care of their mother vera bowl accounts she was controlling and hard to please and gave her eldest and youngest a stressful childhood harold however was let off easy his mother made no secret of the fact that he was the favorite child and she had high hopes for his future being told every day how much better he was than his siblings and schoolmates gave the boy a severe superiority complex which made it difficult for him to make friends remember that one kid at school who thought he was destined for mensa just because he aced a basic algebra exam that was harold shipman yeah those people are incredibly annoying i mean annoy hopefully most of them didn't go on to become serial killers but harold shipman obviously did the attitude stuck with harold throughout his life one of his colleagues from his time in hyde dr jeffrey moisey once told reporters he had very high opinions and very strong opinions and he felt the way in which he practiced medicine was the standard to which all his colleagues should aspire yes can you really even call yourself a doctor if you don't have a double figure kill to death ratio indeed his mother's soft spot for harold meant that when she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer it was he who took much of the burden of her day-to-day care even though it was just a teenager at the time despite the adult he became you have to feel kind of sorry for the kid that he was by just turning 17 years old he was watching in the final days of his mother's life unfold right before his eyes yeah i mean anyone can have sympathy for that that has got to be pretty brutal but don't become a serial killer because of a harold come on and what most fascinated him about it all were the drugs the morphine which their family doctor would administer to his mother to ease her pain with one little vial of liquid she was rev she was relieved of all her suffering it was this which inspired shipment to study medicine which he went on to do at leeds university after his mother's passing at the very beginning of his studies when he was 19 harold had another coming-of-age experience he got someone pregnant the girl was 17 year old primrose who he married in a small ceremony at the registry office when she was four months due at the demand of her super religious parents that sort of thing was common in the 1960s in england when a child was born out of wedlock it was a big taboo fast forward 10 years and the couple had another child together and were living together in the small town of todd morden west yorkshire it was this quaint little pastoral town of just 15 000 people where things started to unravel for shipment his colleagues in the local medical center noticed some strange discrepancies in his files most notably they were wondering why the hell this guy prescribed so much morphine from the amount he had dished out over the first half of 1975 it seemed like this was his go-to cure-all for any and all ailments which you might recognize as a tip from train spotting rather than a medical textbook yeah um morphine is not the cure can you just go into the doctor it's like yeah yeah i've got this mild cold and he's like some morphine i'll fix that right up it's like 1800s you want some cocaine drops it turned out that he had written up to 74 prescriptions for the opiate drug pethidine to feed his own drug addiction peptidine is usually given to women during childbirth but shipman had spent the last six months injecting himself with around 700 milligrams in the arms and legs every single day to deal with a severe bout of depression he claimed it was caused by suggestions not being taken seriously enough by his peers at the clinic oh harold you snowflake get over it you intellectually entitled idiot which was someone so used to intellectually dominating the room must have really tortured his pride indeed so much so that he had to take morphine to get over it oh my in february of 1976 he was summoned to a court in halifax where he admitted to eight counts of obtaining drugs by deception by way of excuse he said that he had become fascinated by drugs during his time at university which is a fair enough explanation for a little bag of weed in your bedroom drawer but not so much for raiding the pharmacy of its stockpile of injectable opiates also you're a doctor you've what it's been 10 years since you started so you've been practicing medicine for four years people expect better of you really but amazingly the punishment for doing so was pretty light it was the 1970s after all he got a 600 pound fine which is well gonna be a few thousand pounds today so not small but uh you'd kind of think he might go to prison or lose his medical license right and also compensation to the nhs uh that's the health service in the uk to cover all of the drugs he stole after settling the bill shipman set off to drug rehab in the city of york where he laid low for a while and attempted to kick that drug habit this disgrace was the first major roadblock in the career of our frustrated self-assumed genius and it may well be what completed his transformation from garden variety narcissist to cold-blooded killer it took less than five years for the heat to die down and harold returned to practicing as a gp okay so he took some time off i say that five years is quite long i mean i guess people have got to forget about it and stuff but you know they didn't take away his medical license i guess you know just addicted to drugs he's not exactly like he's killing anyone right in 1979 the shipments relocated the community which was to come his hunting ground for the next two decades the sleepy town of hyde where our story began despite his record of criminality abusing his position he landed a job at the donnybrook medical center and the rest is history dark grisly depressing history at his tribunal for stealing drugs in 1975 the presiding magistrate dr morris golden said to shipment it is indeed a very sad case that almost at the beginning of your career you should find yourself in this position and god if only he knew the positions that the pasadene-loving doc would find himself in in the years to come so now we're all caught up on the life and times of britain's most heinous killer we find ourselves back in the innocent days of 1998. let's recap we have a killer on the loose who was reported by his colleagues but have been cleared by the police he's also maintained the good faith of much of the community and looks set to ride off into the late 90s sunset with wonder wall blaring out of the stereo of his ford focus that is the worst 90s reference ever uh my dad drove a ford focus i loved that album uh what's the story morning glory from oasis wonder wall uh but see there's a funny thing about serial killers they don't exactly have the best impulse control shipment was no exception so instead of wiping the sweat off his brow after his close call with the law and calling time on his career as a murderer he just kept on doing what he did best on june 24th kathleen grundy the former mayor s of hyde was found dead in her house at the age of 81. her family was shocked at the speed of her passing but they were assured by a trustee shipman that he had just seen her that morning and that she hadn't been in the best of health no need for an autopsy certainly not why would we want an autopsy it might reveal something suspect quick but a body uh it was perfectly natural people in their 80s to pass like this and why put the family through any more stress and worry of course the victim's daughter angela took shipment at his word and a week later hundreds of townsfolk attended the funeral at hyde chapel to say their farewells among them were grundy's two grandchildren who she had been gushing about to her friend just the night before her passing they said their final tearful goodbyes and mrs grundy was taken away to be buried from shipman's perspective it was another job well done well you know not his actual job he'd obviously done a terrible job of that but another flawless murder the perfect crime which the police seemingly couldn't figure out even if it was staring them right in the face the world continued on as normal and angela woodruff set about setting her mother's affairs in order but as she dug into the drawers of paperwork containing the insurance policies bank books and all the other dreadful admin that has to be done after her death she made a strange discovery apparently her mother and a good doctor had been closer than she realized so close that he was now the sole beneficiary of mrs grundy's 386 thousand pound estate this was outlined in a new will which had only been completed recently the document read all my estate money and home to my doctor my family are not in need and i want to reward him for all the care he has given me and the people of hyde he is sensible enough to handle any problems and that this may give him the dot my doctor is dr h f shipman 21 market street hyde residue to my daughter i wish my body to be cremated if this is so maximum level suspicious i mean take this to the police lady and i mean surely something's going to happen or maybe not in retrospect but surely just look at some handwriting from like her previous wills or something like that is so sure to just like give all the money to the doctor burn me oh okay so the grandkids were going to get nothing while some random doctor was getting every penny she owned sounds legit after the initial shock woodruff took a closer look at the document and found that as you might have already noticed it was written with about as much subtlety as an eight-year-old forging their own sick note for school sorry johnny can't come to school today he's very very sick signed johnny's mum yeah it is very amateurish isn't it now while the childish levels of trickery might fall some naive souls woodruff was a lawyer she dealt with this stuff every day of her life and rarely did any authentic legal document look as slapdash as this the typesetting was all uneven the grammar was poor and the signature of mrs grundy didn't even match her usual one woodruff went to the police with the document and further checked to reveal dr shipman's fingerprint in the bottom left corner with none from the deceased anywhere to be found considering how many people he killed and how long he got away from it with it how could he possibly be so sloppy so while it was al capone's lacks approach to taxes which eventually brought him down dr shipman's achilles heel was his ham-fisted word processing skills with his smoking gun in hand now the real investigation could begin it began rather depressingly with the i thought callum was going to write but no he continued murdering people it seems that this is actually where he starts to get caught was it really through something so sloppy harold or fred it began rather depressingly with the exclamation of mrs grundy's body the town was torn apart by a fresh wave of anxiety as they waited with baited breath for the results of the autopsy and sure enough as angela woodruff had suspected her mother hadn't passed away from natural causes it was a massive overdose of morphine which had seen her off okay so the note said the she was to be cremated so i guess her family didn't obey her wishes and had her buried which obviously turns out pretty useful in this case the coroners managed to narrow down the injection to around three hours before the time of death which was precisely when harold shipman had been visiting in mrs grundy's diary she had written that the doctor would be visiting her to take a blood sample for a manchester university survey on aging oh come on doc she wrote it in her diary there's so many breadcrumbs they're going to look up that study it's probably not going to exist yeah the study was totally fictitious and instead he administered her with a fatal dose of diamorphine i think diamorphine is a heroine like that's the medical word for heroin which i believe is a prescription drug in the uk and almost nowhere else might have made a video about that somewhere else as it turns out this was completely typical of his modus operandi shipment wasn't just some opportunist he was a full-fledged predator a con man who wilded his way into the trust of his victims and engineered the perfect conditions to kill them without suspicion but now all of this good faith and benefit of the doubt had dried up and on the morning of the 7th of september 1998 shipman was asked to come down to the police station for questioning while raiding his house the police gather boxes medical records a collection of jewelry pieces which were likely taken as souvenirs from his victims don't take souvenirs harold you're already looking psycho enough i mean you are a psycho you killed so many people but come on come on there's so many breadcrumbs how did it take so long for you to get caught and even a battered old typewriter with a broken key which was an exact match for the documents forged in the name of mrs grundy harold you amateur how did you kill so many people and get away with it for so long good lord with shipment in custody the police set to work on raking through the files found at his home and clinic given the prior investigation they had reason to believe that mrs grundy might not be the only victim and how right they were all in all they identified a further 11 cases in which the deceased could be exhumed for examination over the following months the graveyards of hyde were restless investigate as investigators worked through the night to open the graves of shipman's patients and deliver the bodies back to the morgue that has got to be super unpleasant i mean those bodies are going to be pretty ripe of course high levels of morphine toxicity were discovered in all of them despite the causes of death being listed as natural now with 12 separate murder charges hanging over him the good doctor went head-to-head with investigators as best he could despite basically having the word guilty written across his forehead predictably his excuses were about as convincing as the signatures he forged on the fake will for the most part he just struck to one word answers despite some pretty intense grilling but when probed about the typewriter in his home matching the documents he said that mrs grundy had borrowed it from his home several times he just couldn't remember when dude this is so weak get a lawyer do you not have a lawyer can you not come up with something better detective chief inspector mike williams of the greater manchester police later told the bbc my assessment of him was that he was treating this as some sort of game or competition pitching his what he considered to be superior intellect against those of the officers who were interviewing him oh harold i hope they i mean i know they crushed you and you end up in prison forever but uh yeah no this makes you very unlikable harold and all the murdering as well well done harold the old she borrowed my typewriter defense checkmate surely no detective judge or jury was going to matt be such a match for masterful deception for your masterful deception his most audacious gambit was trying to retroactively paint one of his victims as a drug addict herself he can be heard on the investigation tape saying i had my suspicion she was actually abusing a narcotic of some sort she did have drugs available she may well have given herself accidentally an overdose what all of them herald all 12 that they dug up good luck with that one mate as if it weren't enough that he had taken away someone's mother someone's grandmother someone's wife he was now even willing to put them through the heartache of those baseless accusations if there was any chance they might see him walk free to kill again but in reality dr shipman wasn't quite the evil genius he envisioned himself obviously not i mean the typewriter the forged letter the souvenirs like the let's create them really quickly quick quick burn the body it's you're not you're not an evil genius dr shipman not at all uh he prefailed to provide any convincing alibi or explanation for the pile of bodies by his side by the time the trial came around the police had gathered a total of 15 counts of murder to send him down on all of the victim's women all of them elderly those 15 murder charges with an additional one for forgery were brought before preston crown court on october 5th 1999 the media went into a frenzy over the case of doctor death which i believe is the kind of nickname that he was given rather appropriately and the entire nation was in a state of total shock at seeing the mask of a small town doctor ripped off to reveal a cold blood killer during the trial shipments murderous methodology was laid bare by the prosecution we already know that he used his trusted position as cover he would visit his patients at home either at their request or under some false pretenses then inject them with enough morphine to sedate a racehorse it's chilling to imagine his elderly victims welcoming shipment into their homes with a smile and brewing him a cup of tea as he prepared the needle which would end their life yeah i can imagine this i mean i've got elderly relatives and it's like that's really depressing his penchant for targeting the elderly was no coincidence either and it wasn't just because he really loved a good cup of tea before a kill shipment knew that nobody would ask questions if some old octogenarians passed away quietly in their homes and nobody would demand an autopsy to make sure of it he even went back into the patient's medical records and added fake conditions to the notes to back up his reported causes of death there's your criminal masterminding harold maybe you're not you know not an irredeemable criminal mastermind after all well i mean you are irredeemable but like in terms of being a criminal mastermind this malevolent stroke of genius allowed shipman to sidestep the first investigation into his hefty kill count but as we already know old harold wasn't the most tech savvy of people the prosecution explains how each of these amendments had an electronic timestamp added which showed shipment or altering data from years gone by just hours after each of his victims died i take back everything i said uh you're an idiot like every when you edit a file on any computer it's always like last modified i mean come on come on what's more he also scooped up all of their prescription medications on the way out of the door it seemed harold hadn't quite managed to kick that drug habit which plagued him in his 20s in the weeks leading up to his murders he would often prescribe the victims with his favorite drugs so he'd have a nice post-kill hit just waiting for him that is disturbing these paper trails were damning in the highest sense of the word like i said before shipment was so utterly unbelievably guilty that not even the best lawyer in the world could have got him acquitted and he didn't exactly do his defence team any favors with how he came across in court harold maintained the same aloof demeanor which had irritated his colleagues and schoolmates throughout his life presumably his lawyer spent much of the trial kicking him under the table and whispering cry for christ's sake now i mean even if he cried that jury is sending him away or that judge is sending him away i mean come on come on on the other hand the first witness in his case made a fantastic impression this was angela woodruff ace attorney the solicitor and daughter of shipman's final victim her calm collected account of her quest for the truth won the jury over wholesale if we ever had to choose a hero of the story it would probably be her you'd think it would be the police who tracked him down but they they didn't do that great of a job the first time around did they as more and more victims relatives took the stand some revealed how shipment had claimed to be calling an ambulance with their loved ones as they passed away but his phone records proved that he had hung up the calls before they have connected leaving the patient to slowly slip away with their worried family looking on helplessly shipman's defense against these piles of evidence was poultry at best his story kept shifting between sessions of questioning and when it was obvious that there was no wriggling out of this one he tried to claim that he was acting on compassionate grounds but that hardly stands up when you consider the fact that none of his victims had a terminal illness far from it take 77 year old lizzie adams for example she was still working away as a dance teacher as nimble as ever when shipman took that all away from her yeah i mean dude you've been caught there's so much evidence it's time to be like yeah you got me you're going to prison either way why put yourself through the stress you're going to prison harold with all this information in hand the jury retired to deliberate for a total of 34 hours and you can probably guess the conclusion they came to on january the 31 2000 harold shipman was convicted on all counts and sentenced to 15 consecutive life sentences plus four years for forging the will the judge decided to combine all of these punishments into one neat package life without parole an extremely rare sentence in the uk oh and he lost his medical license of course and finally yeah life without parole you don't hear about that often like generally especially compared to our american friends getting uh a life without parole sentence i mean it doesn't you don't really hear of it that much even some pretty bad murders it's you know 20 years and then you can be out after less if you behave yourself when the sentence was handed out chipman stood in the courtroom pale and anxiously biting his lip aside from having his evil laid bare for all to see he had to face up to the fact that he had been well and truly defeated better people had thoroughly humbled him by unraveling what he thought to be the perfect web of deception but it wasn't harold your web was very very shoddy wasn't it judge forbes's closing remarks tried to express the portrayal felt by all of the victims families the people of hyde and the whole of the nhs whose reputation ship not tarnished he said each victim was your patient you murdered each and every one by a calculated and cold-blooded perversion of your medical skills i have little doubt that the victim smiled as they submitted to your deadly mistreatment the sheer wickedness of what you have done defies description afterwards the doctor was taken off to start his new life in durham prison where he would presumably be barred from helping out in the infirmary bloody well hope so the judge turned to the weeping crowd in the public gallery and spoke about how emotionally harrowing the whole affair had been he thanked all of the witnesses who were willing to relive their trauma to secure justice for their loved ones so hyde was free of doctor death and its old deers could finally go get treatment for a cold without risking their lives everything's all good now right well not quite because the true horror was still to come indeed like i mentioned at the beginning how he is the most prolific serial killer ever so far what he was convicted of killing 15 people let's just say there's a reason there's another four pages of callum script today i mentioned that the 15 murder charges which shimon went down on were mostly based on autopsy results but we already know that he did his best to convince the families to have his victims cremated which makes an autopsy around 10 000 times more difficult yeah no kidding so what kind of body count are we really talking here 20 people 50 people this is the question on everyone's mind for months the media went crazy for the story with all sorts of estimates floating around the front pages of newspapers after the trial concluded the bbc reported an estimated total of 146 victims for comparison's sake your average double decker bus holds about half that many people shipment had potentially filled two entire double decker buses with victims but that was essentially just hearsay at this point media sensationalism surely to get to the bottom of it two separate inquiries were commissioned dame janet smith and professor richard baker of the university of leicester both independently went through all of shipman's files to identify cases which seemed to match the conditions of his confirmed murders after pouring through the evidence for months upon months the inquiries arrived at some truly mind-boggling figures 236 and 216 victims respectively with serious suspicion hanging over a further four dozen or so cases now we're desensitized to these sorts of figures nowadays so let's take a second to really appreciate the gravity of this number around 250 times this man watched on as someone he was charged to protect slowly died in his hands 250 times he went home and slept having just ended a life each murder an eerie echo of his own mother's dying moments reenacted over and over through his sick addiction to murder at the beginning i mentioned that harold shipman was the uk's worst serial killer but i have to admit that was a little misleading actually he has the highest number of confirmed victims of any murderer in modern times shipman is the world's worst serial killer yeah as i said the beginning i thought so i mean it's an extraordinary number of people the extensive list of his victims reads like the closing credits to a movie charles harris 70. dorothy fletcher 74 christine hancock 53 lily higgins 83 leah johnson 80 and on and on one name stands out among the rest susie garfitz who was under shipman's care for complications related to her cerebral palsy in 1972 while working at his very first job as a junior doctor at pontefrank general infirmary in west yorkshire shipment killed susie when her mother left her bedside for 10 minutes to get a cup of tea she was four cases like this were unearthed for years after the original conviction and the researchers involved agree that the spree probably started just a few months after shipman gained his medical license in 1971 but unfortunately the good doctor wouldn't be hanging around to answer for all of these crimes the man who was so obsessed with taking the power of life and death into his own hands did it one last time on january 13 2004 in his cell at wakefield prison where he was relocated to six months prior shipman took his own life he hanged himself from the window bars of his cell with a set of bed sheets and so ended the story of britain's worst murderer and the most prolific serial killer in the world now i'm not someone who believes in hell but boy sometimes i wish i did believe this is a good example of one of those times perhaps knowing the full gargantuan scale of his crimes he couldn't face the fact that he would continue to face fresh interrogations for the rest of his days or maybe he finally felt the long overdue guilt for his almost three decades of menace i doubt it somehow this guy i mean he's obviously a murderer but he just he sounds he sounds like obviously he's complete psycho total psycho or maybe he just wasn't a fan of prison i've heard it's not that great some say that his wife primrose suspected foul play was involved in his death but she must have been hard pressed to find anyone who even slightly gave a damn yeah it'd be like oh no he killed himself let us deeply investigate this really really deeply immediately give up the self-appointed grim reaper was public enemy number one after all and he had decimated public trust in the nhs how the hell could they have let this happen and how many other doctor killers might be out there the general medical council was on full damage limitation mode while the public inquiry commission look took those involved to task for their failings the next time you mess up at work just imagine how the rookie police officer who originally cleared shipment of wrongdoing must have felt at this point yeah no kidding that like not doing your job properly back in the day i mean you're not responsible for this but uh you gotta be feeling pretty damn bad the gmc brought charges against six other doctors not for murder but for counter-signing so many damn cremation forbes for shipment without noticing that this guy really liked burning bodies they were all cleared of any wrongdoing but not so for two other doctors from thames side general hospital who somehow failed to address the massive amounts of morphine in the system of one of shipman's victims in 1994. the greater manchester police force apologized for their mistake but defended the detectives assigned to the case as having done the best they could with the information available at the time i'll leave it up to you to decide whether that's true or not they did seem a little bit negligent didn't they allegedly as for the health service itself they made some serious changes in the hope of avoiding a calamity like this happening again single doctor gp clinics went out somewhat shunned for their lack of internal oversight and health authorities started keeping a closer tab on small town doctors and their reported stats gps started underprescribing pain medicine for fear of accidentally prescribing too much and inadvertently inheriting the doctor death nickname there were even extra questions added to the standardized cremation paperwork thanks to shipment which read do you consider that there should be any further examination of the remains of the person who has died do you know or suspect that the death of the person was violent or unnatural wait you just pray if you're if your [ __ ] might be like no and absolutely not let's burn this body quick oh it's basically asking oh by the way do you reckon the doctor killed them okay never mind these are for the coroner of course okay um thankfully the answer is always almost always no because shipment is actually the only doctor in the history of the uk to be convicted for killing his patients but that's just the thing he's the only one to be convicted of it therein lies the real chilling aspect of this case was he the only one couldn't it be the case that others have done the exact same thing but refrained from pushing the limits and getting greedy just how long could someone like that keep getting away with it all while wearing the smiling mask of your friendly family doctor the total number of deaths in a case like that might make shipments 250 pale in comparison i'm not sure about that he killed a lot of people and he got caught for it if if there's people killing less then they're less likely to get caught but i don't know who knows i absolutely hope that that isn't the case my advice don't dwell on it that's the way madness lies yes absolutely and that's where we end today's casual criminalist well that's where we end the doctor shipment part of this episode um and we've just got some what callum has described as dismembered appendices so let's have a gander number one if you're left wondering how such a meticulous killer could have been caught through such a childish through such childish slapdash forgery you're not alone some suspected that was left because shipment actually wanted to get caught as he couldn't stand the anxiety of his downwardly spiraling life of drugs and deceit number two the pres weren't the first to give dr shipman the doctor death moniker it was old biddies around town who came up with it for two years prior to his capture the elderly ladies of hyde began referring to shipment by that gruesome nickname yet for some reason they kept going to him for treatment come on police please do something someone's gonna hear that you're calling your d your doctor doctor death someone should look into that one was quoted as saying all the old ladies die with him they say he's a good doctor but you won't last oh my number three despite being president at two of the murder scenes shipman's wife primrose defended his innocence to the last possibly because she was under his abusive control psychologists call the phenomenon fall ado where two people are so close that they share a common delusion or warped world view his suicide may have been a kind of twisted thanks for her loyalty as she was still entitled to receive his nhs pension if he died before turning 60. really they didn't take that away number four if you find your sand this is the final one if you find yourself down in the town of hyde you can pop into the garden of tranquility to pay your respects to the shipment victims the memorial opened in 2005 in the town park as a place for some quiet reflection on the darkest episode of the town's history yet 250 people is just i mean casual criminalists we cover killers we cover crimes but we're here at episode two and we've already covered one of the biggest um as always thank you for listening to the casual criminalist if you watched on youtube thank you for doing that leave me a comment if you're on youtube leave me a review if you're listening to this on uh apple podcast spotify wherever you get your podcast i would appreciate it and thank you for listening you

Channel: The Casual Criminalist

Views: 698,155

Keywords: true crime

Id: YF0g0xjBwLs

Length: 41min 13sec (2473 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021