UK's 'Doctor Death', Physician Who 'Relieved' Over 250 Patients Of Their Pain, By Killing Them

Harold Shipman aka Dr Death, a British general physician, was found to have killed around 250 of his patients over a period of 23 years, starting in 1971.

Doctors are considered angels, but there was at least one in recent history who proved to be an 'Angel of Death'. Meet the 'Grim Reaper' in the guise of a doctor — Harold Shipman, also known as 'Dr Death'. Shipman, a British general physician, was found to have killed around 250 of his patients over a period of 23 years. As per official records, he was charged with 15 murders and one count of forgery, which led to a life sentence for him. An investigation was launched to understand the damage he had dealt to the minds of the female population.

Shipman, born in 1946, attended the School of Medicine at the University of Leeds in 1965 and became a general practitioner. He developed an addiction to painkillers himself during his college education, as per a report in The Guardian. While growing up, he lost his mother at the age of 17 due to an alleged morphine overdose while she was battling lung cancer. An editorial published in a journal of the Medico-Legal Society says his mother's doctor had given her a morphine overdose to "relieve her of her sufferings". This struck Shipman hard. According to reports, this became his modus operandi to 'relieve' his patients (who were mostly middle-aged or elderly women). 

During his practice as a GP, he targeted his patients with injections of diamorphine, the clinical name for heroin, reported the Radio Times. Due to this modus operandi of his, he had stockpiled diamorphine by either falsely prescribing it or taking it from cancer patients after their deaths. No suspicion was raised in a number of deaths, as he would himself sign the death certificate attributing it to natural causes. But people eventually started to question such high death rate of patients under his care.

The youngest victim of his was said to be a four-year-old. The girl was killed within the 10 minutes when her mother had stepped away for a bit, reported The Independent. From a four-year-old to a woman in her 80s, Dr Death spared none.

However, there was one survivor who defeated the odds and came back alive after Shipman tried to end her life.

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Survivor Recalls Her Near-Death Experience

Elaine Oswald, the only patient who survived Dr Death, told The Independent that she became unconscious one day after Shipman pricked her with a needle. "I couldn't see properly," she said. "There were people slapping my face, telling me not to sleep. They were saying, 'Fight it, fight it'."

Following the incident, she remained in the hospital for four days. Upon returning home, she found Shipman to be very attentive to her. Within three days, she and her husband were even being entertained at supper by the Shipmans. Whenever the conversation of her illness would pop up, she would be told that she was acutely allergic to opiate-based painkillers that Shipman had prescribed.

Oswald was probably the only lucky one as she dodged death. The murders went on for quite a while before the pattern started to break and people started to have their suspicions, reports said.

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How Shipman's Game Got Over

In August 1998, a taxi driver, John Shaw, while talking to the police reportedly said he suspected Shipman had killed 21 patients. His statement came after he noticed that many elderly women he was taking to the medical centre were dying in Shipman's care despite arriving in what seemed to be good health.

Shipman's last victim, Kathleen Grundy, was found dead in her house in June 1998 and Shipman was the last person to see her alive, reported Radio Times. Grundy's daughter Angela Woodruff, who was a lawyer, was told by a solicitor that an inauthentic-looking will was made seemingly by her mother that basically excluded Woodruff and her children from it. But the point that made everyone think hard was the fact that Grundy left £386,000 to Shipman.

Woodruff reported this to the police, which led to an investigation. During the investigation, traces of heroin were found in Grundry's body. Forensic scientists said her death was "consistent with the use or administration of a significant quantity of morphine or diamorphine and similar values have been seen in fatalities attributed to morphine overdoses", the Radio Times article said. The police eventually reached the conclusion that the will was fake and arrested Shipman on September 7, 1998.

A court later sentenced him to life imprisonment. 

According to Britannica.com, Shipman was convicted on 15 counts of murder and one count of forgery. His own end came in January 2004, a day before his 58th birthday. Shipman committed suicide, hanging himself in his prison cell.

According to the Britannica article, a government inquiry was ordered to ascertain how many more patients may have been killed by Shipman. In 2005, a year after his death, an official report said he had killed an estimated 250 people since 1971.

Despite the case of the forged will, which eventually did him in, money was not found to be a serious motive for Shipman to kill so many of his patients who came to him with a hope to live longer. While his actual motives remained unclear, there were several theories that speculated the possible reason why he turned into a murderer. The Britannica article says while many believed he may have wanted to avenge his mother's death, others speculated it was euthanasia that he thought he was practising. "A third possibility raised was that he derived pleasure from the knowledge that, as a doctor, he had the power of life or death over his patients," the article notes.