The horrible story of a doctor who killed patients for his own pleasure.

It is estimated that between 1975 and 1998, it killed up to 250 people with lethal injections, writes allthatsinteresting.com.

Using his confidence, Shipman first diagnosed his patients with nonexistent diseases and then injected them with a lethal dose of diamorphine. The visit of 250 people to Harold Shipman’s office, unknown to themselves, was the last.

Harold Shipman hides behind the veil of normal life

Harold Shipman was born in Nottingham, England, in 1946. He was a promising student during his school years and played sports well, especially rugby.

However, Mr. Shipman’s life course changed when he was only 17 years old. That year, his mother Vera was diagnosed with lung cancer. As her mother lay dying in the hospital, Shipman watched closely as doctors alleviated her mother’s suffering by injecting her with morphine.

Experts later speculate that this moment inspired him to commit sadistic massacres and modus operandi.

After the death of his mother, H. Shipman married Primrose May Oxtoby while studying medicine at the University of Leeds. The couple had four children and, viewed from the side, their lives seemed completely normal.
He graduated in 1970 and began working as a junior physician, but quickly rose through the career ladder and became a general practitioner at a medical center in West Yorkshire.

It was here in 1976 that Shipman first encountered law enforcement. The young doctor was caught falsifying prescriptions for Demerol, an opioid pain reliever for his own use. It turned out that Shipman depended on them.

The doctor was fined, fired and forced to receive treatment at a rehabilitation clinic in York.

Shipman appears to have recovered quickly and returned to work in 1977 as a physician at Donibruck Medical Center in Haide. He will work at this institution for 15 years until he established his own clinic in 1993. He had an excellent reputation among patients and was known as a good and caring doctor, who often came to sit by the patient’s bedside.

But back then, no one knew that this “good doctor” was secretly killing his patients.

In March 1975, Shipman accepted his first victim, 70-year-old Eva Lyons. It was the eve of his birthday.

At that time, Shipman could obtain enough diamorphine to kill hundreds of people; no one knew about his own addiction at the time.

Although arrested for falsifying prescriptions, Mr. Shipman was fired, not removed from the General Medical Council, the medical oversight authority. He only received a warning letter.

According to investigators, H. Shipman detained him for several decades of his activity, renewed his obsession with killing. However, his method of killing has always been the same. He always chose the most vulnerable victims: the oldest was Anne Cooper, 93, and the youngest, Peter Lewis, 41.

Then he would inject a lethal dose of diamorphine and watch the victim die right here, or send him home to die.

It is estimated that while working in Donibruk, he killed 71 patients and killed the rest in his private clinic. Among all his victims were 171 women and 44 men.

However, in 1998, funeral home staff were suspected of having passed away a large number of H. Shipman patients. A neighboring clinic found that its patients had a death rate ten times higher than theirs.

They made their accusations to the local coroner and Manchester police. It could have been the end of the Shipman terror, but it didn’t happen.

Police investigators did not even conduct basic inspections and did not even notice that Shipman himself was in the limelight.

If the officers had approached the Medical Council and verified his details, they would have seen that he had falsified prescriptions in the past.

The insidious H. Shipman also rose to his feet, recording misdiagnoses in the medical records of his victims. So the investigators found no reason to be concerned and the murderous doctor was left alone.

Shocking murder that finally unmasked the doctor

Shipman’s crimes were finally discovered when he made a mistake trying to forge the last will of one of his victims, 81-year-old Kathleen Grundy, a former mayor of Hyde.

After administering a lethal dose of diamorphine to Ms. Grundy, Ms. Shipman marked “cremation” in her will to hide the evidence of the murder. Then he wrote a will on a typewriter in which the deceased allegedly wrote down all his assets.

However, K. Grundy was not cremated but buried in the ground. Local paralegals told her daughter Angela Woodruff about the existing will, but Ms. Woodruff found it suspicious and turned to the police.

“It just came to our knowledge then. The idea that my mother had signed a document leaving everything to her doctor was incomprehensible to me. The document was so badly written that it could not have any power,” Woodruff commented on the situation at the time.

In August 1998, K. Grundy’s remains were exhumed and diamorphine was detected in his muscle tissues. On September 7 of the same year, H. Shipman was arrested.

Over the next two months, the remains of 11 more of his patients were exhumed. A police expert also inspected H. Shipman’s surgical computer and discovered that he falsified records to substantiate the cause of a broken finger death on his victims’ death certificates.

At the same time, Shipman was still trying to prove that Mr. Grundy was addicted to morphine and heroin and provided his notes as evidence. However, the police discovered that these recordings were made on the computer after his death.

Police then uncovered 14 other cases in which Shipman injected lethal doses of diamorphine, falsified the patients’ causes of death, and nailed their medical records to show they would soon have died anyway.

Harold Shipman has always denied his guilt and has refused to cooperate with the police or criminal psychiatrists. When the police tried to question him and show him photographs of the victims, he sat with his eyes closed, yawning and deliberately ignoring the evidence shown to him.

Police have managed to prosecute Shipman for only 15 murders, although it is estimated that he could have killed between 250 and 450 people.

In 2000, Shipman was sentenced to life in prison with the recommendation never to release him.

He was incarcerated in a Manchester prison but later transferred to Wakefield Prison in West Yorkshire, where he committed suicide: before his 58th birthday, on 13 January 2004, Mr Shipman was found in his cell and took his own life .

Before committing suicide, he had told his inspector that he intended to retire so that his wife could receive her pension and a lump sum.

When he committed suicide, many wondered why he killed his patients. A number of theories emerged that attempted to explain why H. Shipman felt the need to kill. Some said he was avenging his mother’s death in this way, others said he was guided by a distorted humanity, injecting lethal injections of diamorphine into the elderly so that they would not suffer in old age.

A third party speculated that this doctor had a God complex and was simply trying to show that he could not only save her life, but also take it away.