THE 250 MURDERS OF HAROLD SHIPMAN

harold shipman was a very adored doctor in manchester although lately his patients seemed to be dying unexpectedly whilst in his care people were growing uneasy of him but no one wanted to be the person to say out loud and so no one did and these patients just continued to die so today's video is going to be part two of the harold shipman kiss if you didn't catch part one you kind of need to watch that one first otherwise this won't make any sense girl i'll link part one up here in the eye go and watch that one first on another tab and then come over here and i'll tell you the rest of it but quickly before we get into part two i do just want to thank our sponsors for making this video possible not vpn nordvpn has been essential to me over the last well few years i've been using it for years now when it comes to my internet safety i always tell all my friends to get a vpn i don't let anyone i love use the internet without a vpn these days because they are so important nordvpn 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abuse depression and suicide so if any of that is something that you don't feel like you want to watch right now i completely understand click out of this video look after yourself i'm sure i'll catch you again some other time with a different video but for now i'm just gonna get on with part two if you don't mind i already gave a little bit of a summary at the start of this video so let's just jump straight in so far two patients have died under harold shipman's care and so far no eyebrows are raising really that was until two weeks later when a third death happened under harold shipman's care it was december of 1997 when 49 year old bianca pomfret was found dead in her own home by a mental health support worker bianca lived alone and she very greatly suffered with depression and so she had this support worker that would come out to her i think every day just to like check on her see how she's doing and on this particular day they arrived at bianca's home and the front door was unlocked so they just walked straight in and there they found her dead sitting on the surface she was fully clothed she looked like she was just in the middle of her daily routine when she must have passed away quite peacefully when the support worker reported bianca's death they were very adamant that they didn't think that this was a suicide um obviously they couldn't really tell what her cause of death was from from the outside so that was kind of the main belief theory because she was very depressed but this support worker was saying no she's actually doing really well at the moment which is the saddest part of all of this she'd suffered for a very very long time and she was finally starting to you know find her feet and be happy again and then she died very unexpectedly at the age of 49. she was very young you know people don't just die very unexpectedly and suddenly at 49 just in the middle of their daily routine while they're sat on the surface that just doesn't happen she was a patient of dr harold shipman's although she never really had like any serious illnesses or nothing major ever really it was always just like small things that she went to him for so there was no clear cause of death and when the coroners were called to come and get her body they also agreed that something was weird here because they had also been called out to collect the last body and now they were realizing that this was two bodies in the last two weeks that were harold shipman's patients and they both died in a very similar way as well both of their bodies were found you know still fully clothed sitting on the surface they died during their daily routine which like i say is not a common way to find a 49 year old dead and this was playing on these coroner's minds as they were kind of doing their job and whatever and when they finished they went back to their manager i think they worked at a funeral director's funeral home their manager was called debbie massey and they went to her and they basically told her their suspicions that they'd been to these two different bodies and they were found very similar and they were both harold chipman's patients it something wasn't right here so now debbie is also suspicious of harold shipman she thinks this is weird too and then about a month after those murders in february of 1998 debbie massey was just at work at the funeral directors when a doctor walked in a dr booth from one of the local medical surgeries and debbie saw this as an opportunity to flag her concerns about dr harold shipman to another doctor i don't think dr booth and dr shipman worked together at all but at least it was like someone else in the medical profession that could maybe flag it with someone higher up you know dr booth actually knew who harold shipman was i mean everyone in the town did because like i say he was quite a famous doctor in the area debbie pulled dr booth aside and told her about her suspicions that all these seemingly healthy people were now dropping like flies they were all dying in the middle of their daily routine all under the same circumstances and they were all his patients dr booth agreed with debbie that this was odd and so she went back to work and raised the alarm with one of her superiors a dr linda reynolds and much to dr booth's surprise dr reynolds responded and said well actually i've been having these concerns myself for quite some time dr reynolds had noticed just how many cremation requests harold shipman was filing it was way more than he should be it was way more than she'd ever filed at least it seemed that a lot of his patients were dying in quite a short space of time so these cremation requests the reason she knew about this is because cremation requests have to be signed off by two different doctors just to like you know make sure that no one gets cremated by accident and because harold shipman ran his surgery all alone he was the only doctor there he had to go to this medical center across the street called brook surgery which is where dr reynolds and dr booth worked and he had to take his cremation requests and get them to sign it as well sometimes they would get him to sign theirs for them and dr reynolds herself had signed quite a few of these cremation requests for shipment but it wasn't that that concerned her it was a conversation that she had with another co-worker who said that they'd also been signing cremation requests for shipment and she was like well hang on i'm the one that's been signing all the cremation requests what do you mean and they were like what no i've been the one that's been signing them for this long and then they found out that there'd been twice as many cremation requests signed because they'd both been signing them thinking that they were the only person does that make sense so say there were like 40 cremation requests he would give 20 to each doctor so it didn't seem like as much and now linda reynolds realized that oh my god there's been so many the group was suspicious although they weren't suspicious probably in the way that you're thinking right now watching a true crime video they were more suspicious that maybe he just wasn't that good of a doctor he was under qualified and maybe his lack of knowledge and you know proper care for his patients meant that they were dying prematurely they didn't think there was anything too sinister going on they just thought that he wasn't good at his job and it was becoming fatal and he needed to you know step down from the profession and so the doctors all agreed to actually put this conversation to rest for a second and meet up properly like the next week and have a proper discussion about this because these were big bold accusations that they were making against dr harold shipman that he was literally killing off his patients this they couldn't just like throw this around without a lot of discussion and evidence behind it so they decided that they were going to meet up the following week at a pub and they were gonna pull in all the evidence that they possibly could and they were all just gonna discuss it together and figure out what they were gonna do so like i said that meeting was scheduled for the next week but in the meantime harold shipman was still doing all of his home visits of course and the suspicion only continued to mount against him ada warburton was a 77 year old patient of shipments and she was relatively healthy for her age she lived alone she was independent she was a very active woman but on one particular day harold shipman decided to pay aydah a surprise visit there was absolutely no evidence of this meeting being planned in advance and when he arrived he found his patient aydah warburton dead sitting on her couch fully clothed it seemed that she'd suffered a stroke so shipman called aeda's niece to inform her of her aunt's passing and her niece was so shocked like i said ada was a very fit healthy active woman she just couldn't believe that she'd had a stroke of all things but that was when her niece realized something how had her auntie's doctor got hold of her personal phone number she wasn't her auntie's emergency contact or anything like that and so she asked shipman how he'd gotten hold of her number and he said that he'd found aydah's will in her home and it said that she was leaving most of her assets to her niece and so for that reason shipman thought that erda's niece was the person that she was closest to in the whole family if she was getting everything and so for that reason he went into aydah's phone book and tried to find her niece's number just so that she could be the first person he told the niece accepted that reasoning and she actually thanked harold chipman for doing what he thought ida would have wanted you know telling her first again harold shipman was able to smooth out any suspicion with these patients families although little did he know they weren't the only people growing suspicious of him the next week that group of doctors from brook surgery all met up in the pub to discuss harold shipman's very suspicious death rates and they came to this meeting prepared man they printed off sheets and sheets and sheets of you know statistics numbers figures comparing their surgery to his and they were going to compare loads of different statistics like death rates cremation requests and what they found when they compared these two lots of data was absolutely chilling over the last two years the brook surgery had around 10 000 patients and they had signed 14 1-4 cremation requests harold shipman's surgery on the other hand had around 3 100 patients which is about a third the amount of the brook surgery but somehow he had managed to file 41 cremation requests which is four times more than the other surgery to simplify that that is one cremation per 1000 patients at the brook surgery whereas at harold shipman's it's one in a hundred that is ten times more deaths than the brook surgery and as soon as these doctors managed to pull together all of these statistics they were just horrified and dr linda reynolds knew that she had to report this and so on march 24 1994 she went and reported her findings to a coroner named dr pollard but literally as this was going on that very same day dr harold shipman is signing yet another cremation request this time it was for an 88 year old patient named martha marley martha had a daily routine every single day and she'd had this for years where she would call her daughter twice a day the first was at 9 00 am and the second would be at 6 00 pm and she never missed either of those phone calls on this particular day she had the normal 9 am phone call and her daughter recalled her being very bright bubbly her usual happy self she didn't have any complaints she you know she seemed in good spirits however when that 6 pm phone call came round martha didn't pick up the phone immediately her daughter knew something was wrong all it took was one phone call because her mother had not missed a phone call in years this meant that something was wrong so as soon as her daughter finished work she went round to martha's house to go and check on her but when she did that was when she found her mother dead sitting on the surface fully clothed in the middle of her daily routine martha's daughter called for paramedics she also called for harold shipman knowing that that was her mother's doctor however when everyone arrived there was nothing they could do martha had already been dead for some time at this point harold shipman ruled that martha marley's death must have been from old age and everyone just kind of accepted it because after all she was 88 years old but later that same evening that team of doctors from the brook surgery reported their findings to the police statistics and all they like showed them all these sheets of paper and police agreed that it seemed like something suspicious was going on here especially because harold shipman seemed to be present for a lot of the deaths you know a lot of the time he was the one to find the body which was unusual but even though this group of people were suspicious of harold shipman these doctors and the police you have to remember that the rest of the town absolutely adored this man they thought he was like jesus like a healer he was a very very treasured and well-respected member of the community and so police knew when they were starting this investigation against harold shipman it was gonna be a very very difficult one to do it was a very awkward thing for them to do to question the integrity and the capability of such a beloved person in the town they knew that it was going to be met with a lot of judgment and a lot of disagreement and a lot of criticism and i think for that reason it was just doomed from the start they didn't do anything thoroughly they didn't collect enough evidence you know they'd already kind of dismissed it in their head before they even began although that is easy to say in hindsight i suppose at the time the police were quite confident in the investigation they thought that they were going to smash this they thought that you know they were going to find out what was going on get to the root of it they told the doctors from the brook surgery to just go back to work and carry on as normal don't let on to harold shipman that you know anything that you know there's an investigation going on just carry on even signing the cremation requests if you have to the police assured them that they would be working as hard as they possibly could in the background to try and get some evidence against shipman and he was completely oblivious in his own surgery so the first thing police tried to do in this investigation was get hold of these statistics themselves because obviously it's not like they didn't trust the brook surgery doctors but you know for the sake of a police investigation they have to go out and find their own materials they can't just trust these doctors word for it you know just in case the numbers were added wrong and stuff like that the police had to go out and find these statistics themselves and the place to do that is at the town hall because in the town hall well at least in hyde town hall i don't know if this is the same in every single town hall but they kept all the death records from like each doctor's surgery and notice i said death records and not cremation requests because you know not everyone's cremated i suppose that was the only figure that the brook surgery doctors had to go off because that was all they had access to was his level of cremation requests but now the police could actually find the full death records and at the town hall there were four different lists of death records for dr shipman surgery however on this particular day when this police officer arrived to look through them they were only handed two of these lists half of the list and it's important to note that they didn't know that there was supposed to be four so they were handed two lists and they look at them and they're like oh this isn't as many as the brook surgery doctors said they're looking at half the death records thinking it's the whole thing so of course it seems like less than they expected because it is half as is half the amount so the police officers came to the conclusion that dr shipman's surgery looked like it had a normal amount of deaths there maybe he just filed for more cremation requests than brook surgery did maybe he just had more patients that wanted to be cremated in their death like yeah it looked suspicious at first but now police have seen the full death records or at least they think they have their suspicions of harold shipman very quickly diminished they just thought this whole thing must have been a bit of a misunderstanding and they weren't really worried anymore but they should have been so suspicion is dying down for the police but the brook surgery doctors are still not convinced they're like no can you like keep going in this investigation can you try and find some other pieces of evidence because we're pretty sure something's going on and dr reynolds even suggested to the police that maybe they should carry out post-mortems on dr shipman's last two patient deaths aydah warburton and martha marley because neither of their funerals had actually taken place yet and so both their bodies were still just inside the mark so if they did want to perform an autopsy well they're right there and then they might actually find some answers as to how these women actually died they could find a cause of death and stuff like that but the police were just like i don't see any point in the end police decided not to request for an autopsy for multiple reasons first of all it is very very expensive second of all it would only prolong the ordeals for ada's and martha's families who just want to bury them and lay them to rest and in the end it could all be for nothing as well what if they do the autopsy and their cause of death comes back and it's the same as what harold said it was then they're going to look really stupid and they will have spent a lot of money on this and they will have inconvenienced the families i mean at this point the police weren't suspicious of harold shipman enough to make it worth doing the autopsies but they did do one last thing before they dropped this investigation just to make sure that harold shipman was in the clear they got in touch with the west pennine health authority which are well the health authority they're like the big guys at the top above all the doctors above all the hospitals all the surgeons they're like the guys that keep all the records they're just the big guys that's where you go to complain about doctors i suppose so the police called them and they asked if they've ever had any complaints or negative reports about a doctor harold shipman and they said they had absolutely nothing not a single complaint about this man i told you they loved him so that settled it for police then there were no reports of him doing anything sinister there weren't even any complaints about him being bad at his job they just thought this had just been a big misunderstanding and they put this case to rest so the police officers went and told the doctors at the brook surgery that they were going to be closing this case and one of the officers actually said to dr reynolds that she should be careful what she says about such a pillar of the community the group of doctors were quite stunned at this they thought that their evidence was quite concrete and they couldn't understand how the police hadn't found that same evidence but either way they were relieved because they didn't want to be right they didn't want harold shipman to be killing his patients so you know they were happy to be proved wrong and that was where that ended the case was closed i find it very frustrating that they didn't even check harold shipman's um criminal record imagine a true crime youtuber for getting the words criminal record but if they had checked his criminal record they would have found his previous forgery charges drugs charges all that kind of stuff and even though that doesn't equal murderer it might have raised a couple more eyebrows and then they might have looked into it further but they didn't even do that imagine a guy is being accused of potentially murdering his patients but you're not even going to check his criminal record what do you mean but they didn't they didn't check any of that the case was closed and things were allowed to continue on the way that they were a few months later on june 25th 1998 harold shipman visited an 81 year old patient named kathleen grundy kathleen was a very wealthy very successful woman in her lifetime she was actually the former mayor of hyde the place where they lived and she was still a very active member of the community she volunteered at charity shops she would serve free meals to the elderly she just liked to spend her free time helping others she was an amazing woman and on this particular day kathleen had booked in an early blood test with dr harold shipman around 8 30 am it was gonna be a home visit he was gonna come to her and then she was gonna go for her shift at the charity shop like half an hour later but kathleen grundy never turned up for her shift at the charity shop that day around midday her co-workers started to get really concerned because she hadn't even so much as called up to tell them that she wasn't coming in they started to get really worried about her and so two of her co-workers decided to make the short walk to her house to go and check on her and make sure she was okay they knocked on the door but no one came and so one of them actually just tried the door handle and it was unlocked so he just opened the door and they walked in and when they went into the living room that was where they found kathleen grundy dead on the surfer fully dressed for work she must have died within like half an hour before she was due to be at her shift so these two co-workers called for help and of course harold shipman was alerted since he was her gp he came down to her house and actually ruled her death as old age and her family were massively shocked by her death like i said this was a very active fit healthy woman but after all she was 81 years old and so they did accept the old age ruling because i mean people do sometimes just die of old age around that age her funeral took place the week after her body was found and you might think that this is where kathleen grundy's story ends but you would be mistaken because her death was actually the start of the end for harold shipman a couple of weeks after her death kathleen's solicitor got in contact with her daughter because they'd been reading over her will and they noticed something was rather odd about it kathleen grundy had written in her will that she wanted to leave absolutely everything all her money all her assets her house everything to harold shipman to her gp and she left absolutely nothing for her own daughter and bear in mind she was a wealthy woman so this was a lot of stuff that she was leaving to just her doctor there was two houses there was a bunch of assets all her jewelry and stuff like that and of course just all the money that she had in her bank accounts it was half a million pounds worth of stuff i don't know if i just said that but half a million pounds worth of stuff and not a single penny of that was for her daughter the solicitor read this will and he was just like surely not something has to be wrong here and that's why he called kathleen's daughter and she thought the exact same she was baffled there was absolutely no reason that she would have been written out of her mother's will they hadn't had an argument or a fight they hadn't fallen out and as far as she was aware she was due to inherit everything from her mother so why had her mother changed her will to leave everything to a doctor kathleen's daughter asked the solicitors if she could come down to the office and have a look at this will herself she wanted to see this with her own eyes and when she did she noticed a lot of things that were just off about it a lot of things just didn't sit right with her there was nothing like majorly suspicious about it there were just a few too many weird little things that didn't seem right for example part of it read all my estate money and house to my doctor but kathleen like i said owned two houses so why had she just not mentioned where the other one was going that's like a huge asset your house is one of your biggest assets and she hadn't even written it into her will and her daughter found that very very confusing because as far as she was aware she was inheriting both houses in fact the will itself was just very rushed and messy there were a lot of grammatical errors in it which again kathleen's daughter was like that doesn't sound like my mom her mum was very well educated she was the mayor for christ sex she knew how to talk grammatically correct i don't know if i do that did that make sense that would be really funny if that didn't make sense it just didn't sound like her in her own will but one of the main things that stuck out like a sore thumb to her daughter was the fact that the will had been written up on a typewriter whereas kathleen grundy always made sure to hand write pretty much everything especially important documents like a will i don't even know if kathleen grundy even owned a typewriter and if she did she barely used it her daughter was pretty convinced that her mother just hadn't written this will this was written by someone else and so she decided to try and gather her own proof she went back to her mother's house and started rummaging through her bureau trying to find loads of letters and like checks and stuff and she brought them all back to the solicitor's office and compared the signature on all of these checks that kathleen had written to the signature on the bottom of the will and they didn't match up on top of that the writing wasn't smooth either it looked like it had a lot of bumps in almost as if the signature had been traced but what was even more concerning was the date on that will the date that her will was completed and she decided to leave everything to her doctor was exactly two weeks before her death she changed her mind about where her whole lot of assets and money all the houses everything was going just two weeks before she died how convenient and with that kathleen's daughter along with this whole team of solicitors were not only suspicious of harold shipman for potentially forging this will but also could it be even worse could he have had a hand in her death so the group of them rushed straight down to the police station to go and report their findings and once again a second investigation is opened against dr harold shipman so the police started by looking at the day of kathleen grundy's death like i said she had an early blood test booked in for 8 30 a.m that morning so police chased this up but they found that no blood sample was ever sent off to the lab that day and even worse kathleen didn't really have any reason to need a blood test right now she was very healthy at the time she wasn't complaining of any illnesses or ailments a lot of the police officers that were put on this investigation feared that this was much deeper than just forgery or a dodgy doctor they feared that harold shipman was a murderer well a serial killer and looking back at the suspicion and the investigation from six months ago with the doctors from the brook surgery it was clear that harold shipman had been up to something for a long time now and who knows how many potential victims there'd been in that massive window of time there could be so many what police really needed to figure out right now in this investigation was how kathleen grundy really died was it really old age or was she murdered and the only way to figure that out is to do an autopsy but kathleen had already had her funeral she'd already been buried and so the only option was for them to literally dig up her body exhume her body and then perform an autopsy on it after a couple of months of it being buried and i i can't imagine how traumatic that is for the family to know that you've laid your loved one to rest and then they're getting ripped out of the ground and dissected for a murder investigation but they knew it had to be done and if kathleen was a murder victim then they wanted to get her that justice and so her body was sent off to the lab they were doing all sorts of forensic tests toxicology reports and her body was actually in very very good condition there weren't any worrying like injuries or marks or anything on her body although the real concerns came in the toxicology report at the time of her death it was found that kathleen grundy had a dangerously high level of diamorphine heroin in her system and she certainly wasn't a heroin user in her free time immediately her family knew that she hadn't given herself that substance and the dose that she had was actually so large that it absolutely without a doubt would have killed anyone that took it and that only meant one thing that kathleen grundy was murdered by lethal injection and the only person it possibly could have been was dr harold shipman and so police jumped on this straight away they went straight down to his surgery he wasn't there at the time but they seized his typewriter they took it back to the police station and they compared the typewriter with kathleen grundy's will in fact i think they typed the whole thing up again to see how it would come out and it was the exact same the type of ink the space in between the letters like everything it was very clear that this will kathleen grundy's will had been written on harold shipman's typewriter and for police this was all the evidence they needed to arrest harold shipman on suspicion of murder in september of 1998. but by now this investigation was the talk of the town and not only that the media had picked it up as well and the name dr death was being thrown around it was all over every newspaper news channel this was it was becoming nationwide news very very quickly and on this particular day when the police wanted to go and arrest harold shipman they felt like they couldn't because of the media storm around this case they didn't want to attract reporters and journalists and stuff so they didn't go and get harold shipman and handcuff him and throw him in the back of a car and drive him to the police station no no no no they called him up told him that they were going to arrest him and asked him if he could just come down to the police station himself and he did i've been doing this job for years now and i have never heard of the police calling up their suspect and being like do you want to come and get arrested and the suspect being like yeah okay when harold shipman arrived at the police station they started questioning him right away and they noted on the record that he was very unemotional he was very cold actually quite calm and relaxed and quite aloof aloof it was almost as if he felt this police investigation was like an inconvenience to him he felt like he was above this like he couldn't be bothered with this it's that superiority complex coming back in do you remember that from when he was a kid he said no comment to most of the things that police asked him and he didn't flinch once even when he was presented with like the toxicology report and the forged will and stuff like that that was so obvious evidence he didn't flinch once he was just like i've never seen that before him on that but ultimately harold shipman's biggest downfall in this whole investigation was his medical records not his medical records the records that he kept as a doctor there were too many inconsistencies between all of his records obviously because he had to lie and cover things up along the way he hadn't done so very well so he would make two different lots of records he would make paper records when he was at his patients homes doing the visits and then he would take these paper records home and turn them into an online record on the computer system so there were two lots now and when they would compare the paper records with the online records of each patient they never seemed to match up he would write one thing and then he would type it up completely different and police had a theory for this they believed that the online records used to match the paper records but whenever he decided that he was going to murder one of his patients he had to make it believable of course so he would go into their online records and he would edit them to match the thing that he said they died of so if they died of a stroke he obviously had to go on there and log the symptoms of a stroke so it looked like that was the way it was heading so then when they did die of a stroke they could look at the records and be like oh well you know it makes sense but one thing police couldn't understand about harold shipman at all was his very clear lack of a motive i mean i suppose there was a motive for the last murder of kathleen grundy changing her will and everything obviously he was trying to get hold of that stare but all of the other patient deaths that police now believe to be murders harold shipman wasn't gaining anything from those he wasn't stealing anything as far as we're aware so like what was he getting out of that was it just for fun psychologists have since theorized that these murders could actually link back to his mother because obviously his mother was his best friend and she died when he was still very young and it was a very very traumatic thing that he went through probably the most traumatic thing shipman ever had in his life he was just angry at the world for everything that he'd ever been through in his life and i think this was his kind of messed up way in his head of trying to get revenge for that so the police kept going in this investigation and now they're trying to build up evidence against harold shipman to take to trial and one of the first things they did was go through every single one of harold shipman's patient death records ever in his whole career because it was clear that any single one of those could be another potential murder victim they didn't know how many victims he actually had but it was going to be very very hard to tell based on their records which ones of them were murder victims and which ones maybe did actually die of like natural causes or strokes and things like that because surely some of them did he had a large elderly patient base so surely some of them were dying of natural causes how were police supposed to tell the difference i'm sure you could have guessed there is only one way to 100 confirm someone's cause of death and that is with an autopsy but this brings a lot of issues because they weren't able to perform autopsies on every single one of harold shipman's patients that had ever died it was doable for shipman's more recent patient deaths but anything older than a few months was like an autopsy was pretty much out of the question at that point the bodies would have been so decomposed by now that there's no way that they could perform an autopsy oh and of course there were some bodies that were cremated in fact a lot of them supposedly so in most of the cases there wasn't actually a body to even autopsy or test because harold shipman had made sure that the evidence had been burnt to ashes a long time ago but police did manage to locate 14 other potential victims of herald shipments and they exhumed all 14 of these people from their graves and tested their bodies and what do you know all of them had the exact same cause of death as kathleen grundy they had all been killed by a lethal dose of diamorphine and who else could have administered it they all shared the same doctor so that is 15 confirmed murder victims now and with that harold shipman was officially branded a serial killer and he was charged with all 15 of those murders but he's actually believed to be responsible for upwards of 250 200 and flipping 50 murders which is absolutely horrifying we'll talk a little bit more later on about where they got that figure from it's really interesting how they got to that figure and it seems pretty accurate as well but anyway harold shipman has just been charged with 15 murders and i'm sure you can imagine the chaos that was going on in hyde at this point in time as i keep saying this man was the most treasured doctor in that whole community and now everyone was finding out that he'd been secretly murdering patients for years people were just disgusted that they'd ever even trusted this man that they'd been to see him that they'd taken their loved ones to see harold shipman but actually a lot of his very loyal patients decided to stick by harold shipman when the news came out well i mean it's not exactly like they stuck by him it's more like they just didn't believe it they didn't think that he was a murderer they assumed that he would be found not guilty as soon as this went to trial and then this would just be all a misunderstanding so they didn't want to jump on the bandwagon and start hating harold shipman because they believed it was gonna be okay but on january 31st 2000 harold shipman's trial began and this is where we find out a lot more about those other confirmed murders so i'll tell you a few of those stories now shall i the first known victim of harald shipman's was an 81 year old patient named marie west of course bear in mind she definitely was not his first ever victim she is just the first one of the 15 that they've got he murdered her in the exact same way that he murdered the rest of them a lethal injection of diamorphine but with this one there was an issue when shipman went to marie's house that day he thought that she was going to be home alone and of course his plan was to murder her so he thought perfect and he killed her but as soon as he did he heard some noise in the next room turns out they weren't home alone and so harold shipman starts panicking he has just murdered this woman when someone else is in the house and now he's gonna have to quickly try and think of something to explain her death so shipman got up and he walked into the next room where he found marie's friend sitting at the table he sat down next to her and just said i'm really sorry to tell you this but i think marie's just passed away from a stroke and her friend was of course devastated but she didn't question a thing i mean the doctor told her that her friend had a stroke and she trusted him and so harold shipman got away with that one the next known victim was 67 year old irene turner again the same cause of death however again there was something different about this one too shipman knew before he even got there that he wanted to murder irene that day and he did as soon as he got there he administered the lethal injection irene sat there dying and then harold shipman decided to switch roles he was no longer serial killer doctor now he was concerned doctor as irene turner lived dying in her chair harold shipman ran out into the street in a panic saying someone help me someone help me he managed to find one of the neighbors and he ran over to them said that he was worried about irene he wanted to take her to a hospital straight away and he asked this neighbor for his help so the two men got irene in the back of the car and they drove her all the way to the hospital however when they got there it was already too lit irene had died in the car on the way there shipman blamed irene turner's death on her diabetes that she'd struggled with for years at this point so it was believable and no one questioned it i find that particular case very interesting that he tried to murder someone and then drove them to the hospital for treatment knowing that they were going to die anyway like why was he putting on this massive act why did he need to do that i mean maybe he was just trying to maintain his public reputation as like a good dedicated doctor that would do anything for his patients you know what i mean and he actually did something similar with the next murder as well this time it was 77 year old lizzie adams he injected her with the lethal injection and then her family came around to her house like 10 minutes later and harold shipman was like oh crap now i've got to think of something he ran out to her family and he was like i think something's wrong with lizzy i'm going to call her an ambulance and so he got out his phone and pretended to call an ambulance he didn't do it really but by the time the family went back inside the house lizzie had already passed away from the lethal injection and so harold shipman goes into the next room and pretends to go on the phone and cancel the ambulance that he never even ordered in the first place this man was such an actor he filed lizzie's death as pneumonia and again got away with it and he looked like a really great doctor his next victim was 59 year old gene lilly and actually on this particular day one of her neighbors had seen harold shipman leaving her house in a rush and they said that he looked really stressed as well and so when the neighbor saw this they were quite worried they wondered if gene was okay and so they went to her house and that was when they found her dead sitting on her surfer fully dressed dr shipman ruled her death as heart failure but when her body was exhumed and autopsied there was absolutely nothing wrong with her heart and she had died from the lethal injection a few weeks later shipman visited a 63 year old patient named ivy lomas and this particular woman he had actually described to other doctors as just a nuisance he went to ivy's house administered the lethal injection killed her and then just went back to work as if nothing had just happened he was seeing other patients for the rest of the day he didn't report ivy missing he didn't tell anyone about her death in fact he waited until the end of the day to then go back to his office and then report the death and his next murder was somewhat accidental i mean no the murder itself was very intentional but the victim was not actually his initial intended target basically shipman turned up to the wrong house he had an appointment booked in for that dare for this one particular woman and he was planning to kill her but then he went to the wrong address instead he found himself in the home of 81 year old kathleen wagstaff and he seized his opportunity he wasn't planning on killing her but you know might as well now that he's there he administered the lethal injection and left and then the very next day he actually committed his next murder which was bianca pomfret who we talked about earlier i'm going to relatively speed through the next few cases since they are all very very similar well pretty much identical his next victim was a woman named nora nuttall again the exact same murder method and then it was a woman named pamela hillier and with her dr shipman had actually made over 10 edits to her online records because he ruled her death as a stroke but she was quite a healthy woman and so he had to do some lying in those records nine days later harold shipman visited 57 year old maureen ward she was a cancer patient who was actually doing really well at the time she was on some new treatment she was responding really well to it she was getting better but of course harold shipman didn't want people to know that he went to maureen ward's home killed her with the lethal injection and then went back to his office and edited her online records to say that her cancer was coming back and it was spreading so then when she did die it was easily blamed on the cancer the next murders we know of are of two 73 year old women named winifred mello and joan melia again he made up false records for both of those women and the 15th and final murder victim was of course kathleen grundy the murder that finally put all of this to an end at this point in the trial okay yeah that's what we were talking about sorry about that massive tangent about the rest of the victims we're talking about harold shipman's trial right now it actually arose in the trial that harold shipman had stolen nearly 10 000 pounds worth of jewelry from all of his different victims most of which primra's actually tried to say was hers but all of the victims families ended up identifying those pieces and being like um no that's my mum's quite interesting in fact we'll talk about primrose again literally in a second she is interesting in this case but harold shipman himself right the trial has begun and he is maintaining his innocence he does through the whole thing and he's just very calm and collected again very aloof he's acting like he's too good for this the superiority complex and i genuinely think he believed he was gonna get away with this as well i think he was just gonna like wing the trial and then get found not guilty but like i mean just wait and see but back to primrose she was very supportive of her husband throughout his um murder trials she stuck by him through the whole thing she believed he was innocent she went to every single court date she was by his side but really she shouldn't have because at the end of that trial dr harold frederick shipman was found guilty of all 15 murders that we know of he was sentenced to 15 life sentences which is insane and he was also found guilty of forgery for faking kathleen grundy's will and for that he was sentenced to four years but i suppose the four years don't really make any difference when you're already serving 15 life sentences harold shipman was sent to wakefield prison which we seem to talk about quite a lot on this channel don't we it is one of the most notorious uk prisons and it's in wakefield in west yorkshire it makes me proud to be from here it's a category a men's prison and category a prisoners are like the most dangerous prisoners so it's where all the murderers go all the serial killers rapists all the worst of the worst are in wakefield prison some of the infamous inmates of wakefield prison past and present include robert black ian huntley and robert marsley the brain-eater the last two of which i've actually done full videos on if you're interested in watching them i'll leave them linked up here the brain eater is literally like my favorite video i've ever done so but anyway harold shipman is now locked away in wakefield prison while police are still on the outside trying to figure out the true extent of his crimes because they know that he is responsible for more than 15 murders they just need to find the evidence so police launched what was called the shipment inquiry and this aimed to do four main things one was to determine the extent of shipman's unlawful activities so basically find out how many crimes he's committed two to determine whether other organizations were at fault in this or possibly facilitated harald shipman's actions so like you know the medical practices that he used to work at should they have been keeping a closer eye on him three they needed to figure out how harold shipman was able to access such high quantities of these very dangerous drugs without being questioned by his supplier and four probably the most important part of this whole inquiry how do we stop anything like this from ever happening again how do we protect patients the shipment inquiry was one of the biggest ever in the uk ever the evidence was almost 300 000 pages long i repeat to the fingers of whoever typed all that out because jesus christ so the first thing police did was really tried to crack down on the true number of murdered victims of harald shipman's they needed to determine who died of natural causes and who was a genuine victim so police did this by setting up a criteria and they were going to look at every single one of harold shipman's patients that had died and if they matched at least one of these criteria then they were going to investigate further so the criteria was the following three points first was the patient in general good health at the time of their death was their death very unexpected two had harold shipman visited the patient shortly before their death because it seemed that he always visited them on the morning that they died and three where was the patient found what were the circumstances under which their body was found because it seemed that harold shipman's victims were all found in the exact same way fully clothed sitting on the surface as if they were in the middle of a normal day because that was how it was with that cause of death we haven't really talked about the lethal injection much actually um with the lethal injection i don't think they would have felt any pain in fact they wouldn't have because it was just heroin so it would have just been like a relief in fact i don't actually know in in the dose that they had they might have felt pain but obviously no one's ever survived a dose like that to be able to report so i don't know if they felt pain actually but basically how it would have worked was it would have made them pass out within minutes and then from there they would have just died in their sleep while they were unconscious so they wouldn't have really felt anything to be honest so finally when they'd done all of the investigating the inquiry came back and announced that they had found 618 potential victims of harold shipman that they now needed to look into further these deaths all took place over a 27-year time span between 1971 and 1998. the results of the inquiry took about a year to like refine and investigate they needed to look into all 618 of those deaths and when they did the number fell to 215. of course those 215 can't officially be confirmed but the police have said that they fully believe harold shipman murdered 215 people but you might be thinking where the 250 figure comes from and that was because there were 35 more deaths that police were pretty sure were down to harold shipman but they couldn't say for sure so for that reason they didn't include them in the big big figure but a lot of people do so that's why you sometimes see 215 sometimes see 250. so a lot of people believe he is responsible for 250 deaths but he was only convicted for 15 of which and those other 235 they couldn't exactly put him on trial for them right now if you know anything about juries and like notorious cases like this the jury has to be fully impartial they can't have any prior knowledge of a case before they sit in that jury and with this case because the media attention was so vast everyone knew about the harold shipman case it was like impossible to find an impartial jury everyone knew who harold shipman was and so there was nowhere to find an unbiased jury so they just couldn't take it to trial at all plus i mean it's very expensive to take things to trial and harold shipman was going to be in prison for the rest of his life anyway he had 14 15 life sentences like i don't know is it it's he's not going to get out is it so it's actually believed that harold shipman started murdering started murdering like it's a job his first ever murder was when he had his first ever job at pontefrac general infirmary his first ever job in the medical field and he's already murdering patients there's even some speculation especially around his early victims a lot of his later victims were definitely elderly people whereas a lot of his early victims were people of different ages some people even say that his youngest victim was four years old but on the whole like i said it seemed that harold shipman's victim type was elderly women and psychologists have said that again this probably links back to his mother he probably chose his specific victims because they reminded him of his mother in some way whether that was how they looked how they talked or acted or dressed or maybe even their medical history if they had cancer or if they had some of the similar things that his mother had but it was the way that he chose his very specific victims which is like the most chilling part to me so say he's got like a list of 10 women in front of him that he could kill which of those 10 women is he gonna pick well he had a bit of a criteria as to who he was gonna murder a lot of the patients he went for were people that he didn't think he was qualified enough to fix or cure if they had really serious illnesses and issues that he just didn't think he was a good enough doctor to heal them then he would just kill them or even worse was the second part of the criteria so that was the first part the second part is how much does he actually like the person if they irritated him in any way if they were an annoying person if they always had something wrong with them or if they came to him for very minor things and he just saw them as a nuisance then that was the one that was the one that he was gonna kill so that they couldn't irritate him anymore which i suppose explains why the murders were so sporadic as well he would go months without killing a single person and then within one week there'd be like three four and it's probably because no one was irritating him at the time so he didn't have a reason to kill anyone so he didn't bother but some psychologists do think that the murders probably coincide with um stress in harold shipman's personal life so if he had an argument with his wife they think he would probably go and take it out on a victim and kill someone the next day you know one of the most frustrating things that came out of this inquiry was when they found dr harold shipman's annual drug bill so all the drugs that he was buying in a year that he was being billed for and his bill was 60 percent higher than any other surgery in that area he was buying 60 more drugs for what like a third of the patient base as well remember he had the smallest surgery in the area and for some reason that was not picked up on it wasn't looked into no one ever questioned it when that really could have easily been picked up on by the supplier the results of the shipment inquiry brought about a lot of change after this case so for example gps actually have to have like a yearly assessment to make sure that they're still good at their job i guess so anyway goodness gracious we're finally done talking about the inquiry harold shipman is in wakefield prison at this point in the case he was sent there in february of 2000. and while he was in there shipman actually made very good friends with another prolific uk serial killer named peter moore aka the man in black uh believe it or not i have done a whole video on that guy as well so i'll link that up there if you're interested in that one but less than two years into his prison sentence guards went into harold shipman's cell one day and found him hanging from his window by a bed sheet he was pronounced dead at the age of 57 on the day before his 58th birthday it turns out that the guards at wakefield prison do half hourly checks so every 30 minutes they go to each person's cell and check on them and make sure they're not getting into trouble you know and it was discovered in harold shipman's autopsy that he'd actually hanged himself just a couple of minutes after his last check-in and when the families of shipman's victims learned about his death they were actually devastated and obviously not because they were sad that he died because they weren't but more in the way that like they now weren't gonna get any answers from him all the answers died along with him they still didn't know why he killed their loved one and also now justice isn't really being served is it i mean he served less than two years in prison for what he did in the end but that is everything i have on this case thank you so so much for watching and thanks again to nordvpn for sponsoring this video remember they're giving you guys a huge discount off of a two-year plan plus an additional month free when you go through my link which is down below in the description it's nordvpn.com forward slash eleanor and use the code eleanor at checkout you're welcome a huge huge thank you to all of my channel members for supporting me and helping decide the cases that i cover especially my tier two members whose names are all on screen right now if you want to become a channel member you can click the link to do so in the description or you can click the join button if you're on a desktop but yeah thank you so so much for watching this video if you enjoyed it you'll probably enjoy this one i'm going to leave you on here i'm going to pick you one special so you gotta tell me if you like it it's against the rules if you don't um you can also subscribe because i post stuff like this all the time okay bye-bye bye

Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,381,228

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, netflix, interview, news, horror, harold shipman, harold, shipman, doctor death, dr death, serial killer doctor, 250 victims, doctor serial killer, harold shipman documentary, hospital, manchester, uk, uk's worst serial killer, england, 2021, true crime daily, patients, lethal injection

Id: 5nA6g0baUfo

Length: 56min 52sec (3412 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 12 2021