Call a Doctor

31 days of Halloween Day #21-2023

My posts are often inspired by day-to-day life, so quick think of people you often trust without a second thought. Your parents? Spouse? Friend? How many of you thought of your Doctor in that answer. Think of it. You go in with an ailment, they tell you what's wrong and you trust them to write a proper prescription. You even take it without much thought. That's trust.

Doctors are supposed to help people when they’re at their most vulnerable. However, Dr. Harold Shipman, he became one of the most prolific serial killers in English history.

Shipman would first diagnose his patients with illnesses they didn’t have and then inject them with a lethal dose of diamorphine. Unbeknownst to the alleged people who died by his hand between 1975 and 1998, their visit to the office of Harold Shipman would be the last thing they’d ever do.

He was a prolific Medical student, a great athlete, well-liked, and a respected student. Shipman went on to marry Primrose May Oxtoby while studying medicine at Leeds University Medical School. The pair had four children together, and from the outside, Shipman’s life was the picture of normality.

He graduated in 1970 and commenced life as a junior doctor, but he quickly moved up the ranks and became a general practitioner at a medical center in West Yorkshire.It was here in 1976 that Shipman first found himself in trouble with the law. The young doctor was caught forging prescriptions for Demerol, an opioid typically used to treat severe pain, for his own use. He was fined, fired from his job, and required to attend a rehabilitation clinic in York.Harold Shipman seemed to get back on his feet quickly and returned to work at Donneybrook Medical Centre in Hyde in 1977, the next 15 years of his career spent here before setting up a one-man practice in 1993. He developed a reputation among his patients and in his community as a good and helpful physician.

At this time, Shipman had got his hands on enough diamorphine to kill hundreds of people, Though Shipman was previously fired for forging prescriptions, he was not removed from the General Medical Council, the doctors’ regulatory body. During his peak times, he was still able to write and forge prescriptions. He had been collecting the whole time

According to investigators, Shipman would stop and restart his killing spree many times throughout his decades of terror. But his method of killing always remained the same. He would target the vulnerable, with his oldest victim being 93-year-old Anne Cooper and his youngest 41-year-old Peter Lewis.Then, he’d administer a lethal dose of diamorphine and either watch them die right there or send them home to succumb.

However, in 1998, undertakers in his community of Hyde became suspicious of the number of Shipman’s patients who were dying. The neighboring medical practice further discovered that the death rate of his patients was almost ten times higher than their own.In all, it’s believed that he killed 71 patients while working at the Donneybrook practice and the remainder while operating his one-man practice. Of his victims, 171 were female and 44 were men.Shipman had also covered his tracks by adding false illnesses to his victims’ records. His crimes were finally uncovered after he made the mistake of trying to forge the will of one of his victims, 81-year-old Kathleen Grundy, a former mayor of his town of Hyde.

After Shipman administered a lethal dose of diamorphine (heroin) to Grundy, he selected the “cremation” box on her will to hide the evidence. Then, he used his typewriter to write her family out of the will entirely, leaving everything to him.However, Grundy was buried, and her daughter, Angela Woodruff, was notified about the will by local solicitors. Immediately, she suspected foul play and went to the police.

Woodruff said of the situation,” The whole thing was unbelievable. The thought of Mum signing the document and leaving everything to her doctor was inconceivable.In 2000, Shipman was handed life imprisonment with a recommendation that he never be released. 15 life sentences. He also then and only then had his medical license revoked.

The final count, reported by BBC, was that his victim count was between 200 and 250 people and another 4 dozen of possible connections.

***He was finally incarcerated in a Manchester prison but ended up in Wakefield Prison in West Yorkshire, where he took his own life.That’s what's up Doc?