Harold Shipman: the Hyde GP, the forged will and the inquiry that counted his victims

• Born14 January 1946, Nottingham
• Known asFred
• PracticeGeneral practitioner in Todmorden (1974–75) and Hyde, Greater Manchester (1977–98)
• Arrested7 September 1998, after a patient’s forged will was reported to police
• Convicted31 January 2000, Preston Crown Court: 15 murders and one forgery
• Sentence15 life sentences; whole life confirmed by the Home Secretary in 2002
• Inquiry findingAbout 250 patients killed between 1971 and 1998, 218 identified
• Died13 January 2004, HMP Wakefield, aged 57

Harold Shipman was a family doctor. For most of his career he worked in Hyde, a small town on the eastern edge of Greater Manchester, where he was known for making home visits to elderly patients and was widely described as the best doctor in town. In January 2000 a jury at Preston Crown Court convicted him of murdering fifteen of those patients with lethal doses of diamorphine, and of forging the will of one of them.

Fifteen was only the number the prosecution chose to put before a jury. A public inquiry chaired by a High Court judge, Dame Janet Smith, spent four years going through his patients’ deaths. It concluded that he had killed about 250 people between 1971 and 1998, of whom it could identify 218. Most were elderly women who died at home. He is generally described as the most prolific serial killer in British history.

This account rests mainly on the Shipman Inquiry’s own reports and on contemporary coverage by the BBC and The Guardian, listed at the end. Where those accounts disagree about a date or a figure, it says so. The people he killed and their families are not named here.

A grammar-school boy from Nottingham

Shipman was born in Nottingham on 14 January 1946 and grew up on a council estate in the city. Everyone called him Fred. He passed the eleven-plus and went to High Pavement Grammar School.

In 1963, while he was studying for his A-levels, his mother died of cancer at the age of 43. He was seventeen. Newspaper profiles written after his conviction made much of what he had seen at her bedside: a doctor visiting the house to give her morphine for the pain. That detail comes from the press and from people who knew the family, not from any finding of the inquiry, and it explains nothing on its own. It is repeated so often that it is worth knowing where it comes from.

He entered the medical school at the University of Leeds in 1965, married while he was a student there, and qualified as a doctor in 1970.

Pethidine, Todmorden and a warning letter

His first post was at Pontefract General Infirmary in West Yorkshire, where he worked from August 1970 to February 1974, first as a house officer and then in more senior hospital posts. In March 1974 he joined a group general practice in Todmorden, a mill town in the Pennines.

Within months he was taking pethidine, an opioid painkiller, and obtaining it by writing prescriptions for patients who did not need it. He began to suffer blackouts. In 1975 his partners discovered what he was doing and he was forced out of the practice. The inquiry dates this to late September 1975; its later report says only “late 1975”. He was treated for drug dependence, ending at a psychiatric hospital in York.

In February 1976 he appeared before magistrates in Halifax and pleaded guilty to obtaining pethidine by deception, unlawful possession and forging prescriptions, asking for dozens of further offences to be taken into consideration. He was fined £600. The General Medical Council, which licenses doctors in the UK, decided not to hold a disciplinary hearing and sent him a warning letter instead. He was not struck off, and no restriction was placed on his access to controlled drugs. Within two years he was back in general practice.

The best doctor in Hyde

In October 1977 he joined the Donneybrook practice in Hyde, a group of several doctors. The Guardian’s chronology of the case gives the year as 1979; the inquiry, which had the practice records, says 1977. He stayed there for fourteen years and built up a large and loyal following, especially among older patients, who valued a doctor who would come to the house.

In 1992 he left his partners, after a falling-out, and set up on his own. He took his patients with him and opened a single-handed surgery at 21 Market Street, Hyde. The BBC’s profile puts the move in 1993; the inquiry and The Guardian say 1992. By 1998 he had more than 3,000 patients on his list and a waiting list of people who wanted to join it. To the town he was a hard-working, old-fashioned family doctor. Some colleagues found him arrogant, but nobody, publicly at least, suspected anything worse.

The concerns of March 1998

The first person to put a pattern on paper was a doctor at another practice across the road. In March 1998 she contacted the coroner for the area. She had noticed how many cremation forms Shipman was signing: in a period of three months he had signed sixteen, while her own practice, with roughly three times as many patients, had fourteen deaths. A local undertaker had separately noticed the same thing: Shipman’s patients were dying at an unusual rate, and they were often elderly women found dead at home, alone and fully dressed.

The coroner passed the concerns to Greater Manchester Police. The investigation lasted from 24 March to 17 April 1998 and found nothing. The inquiry’s second report, published in 2003, was blunt about why. The case had been given to an officer without the experience to handle it unsupervised. He did not understand the comparison of death rates he had been given, did not check whether Shipman had a criminal record, did not contact the General Medical Council and never spoke to the undertaker. He also put weight on the fact that no motive was apparent. The medical records he relied on were reviewed by a health authority adviser who raised no alarm.

The inquiry found that Shipman killed three more patients between the end of that investigation and his arrest.

The will

On 24 June 1998 one of his patients, an 81-year-old widow and former mayoress of Hyde, died suddenly at home. He certified the cause of death as old age. (One Guardian trial report gives her age as 82; the inquiry and other reports say 81.)

Soon afterwards a will came to light. Dated 9 June 1998, it left her entire estate to her doctor. It was badly typed and the signature looked wrong. Her daughter, herself a solicitor, knew her mother’s affairs and did not believe it. She spoke to the two people who had “witnessed” the will and in July 1998 went to the police. The estate was worth £386,000 according to the BBC and The Guardian’s trial reports; The Guardian’s later chronology puts it at £350,000.

This time the police investigation was thorough. A typewriter was taken from Shipman’s surgery, and a document examiner concluded that the signatures were forged and that the will had very probably been typed on that machine. His fingerprint was found on the document. The widow’s body was exhumed on 1 August 1998. Toxicology tests found morphine in her body at levels consistent with a fatal overdose; the prosecution’s case was that he had injected her with diamorphine, which breaks down into morphine in the body.

Shipman was arrested on 7 September 1998 and charged with her murder and with forging her will. Detectives then turned to the deaths of other patients. More bodies were exhumed in the autumn of 1998, further murder charges followed, and in February 1999 he was also charged over women whose bodies had been cremated, which meant the evidence against him came from records rather than toxicology.

The trial at Preston

The trial opened at Preston Crown Court on 5 October 1999 before Mr Justice Forbes. Shipman was charged with murdering fifteen women, aged between 49 and 81, who had died between 1995 and 1998, and with the forgery. He pleaded not guilty to every count.

On 31 January 2000 the jury found him guilty on all sixteen counts. The judge passed fifteen life sentences and told him he should spend the rest of his days in prison. In February 2000 the General Medical Council erased his name from the medical register. The Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to bring further charges, on the grounds that a fair trial would no longer be possible. In July 2002 the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, confirmed that Shipman would serve a whole life term.

• 14 January 1946Born in Nottingham.
• 1970Qualifies as a doctor at Leeds; starts work at Pontefract General Infirmary.
• March 1974Joins a group practice in Todmorden.
• 1975–1976Pethidine addiction discovered; leaves the practice; fined £600 at Halifax; GMC sends a warning letter.
• October 1977Joins the Donneybrook practice in Hyde.
• 1992Opens his own surgery at 21 Market Street, Hyde.
• 24 March – 17 April 1998Police investigate concerns raised by a GP and an undertaker, and find nothing.
• 24 June 1998Death of the patient whose will he forged.
• 7 September 1998Arrested and charged with murder and forgery.
• 5 October 1999Trial opens at Preston Crown Court.
• 31 January 2000Convicted of 15 murders and one forgery.
• 19 July 2002The Shipman Inquiry’s first report: at least 215 patients killed.
• 13 January 2004Found dead in his cell at HMP Wakefield.
• 27 January 2005The inquiry’s final report: about 250 killed, 218 identified.

Fifteen, 215 or 250?

The government set up the Shipman Inquiry in 2000 under Dame Janet Smith, then a High Court judge. Its first report, published on 19 July 2002, examined 888 deaths. It concluded that Shipman had killed at least 215 of his patients between 1975 and 1998: one in Todmorden, 71 during his years at the Donneybrook practice and 143 after he went single-handed. In another 45 cases it found a real suspicion that he had killed but could not be sure. The killing accelerated at the end: thirty deaths in 1995, thirty in 1996, thirty-seven in 1997.

The sixth and final report, published on 27 January 2005, looked back at his hospital years at Pontefract. It identified three more patients he had killed there and estimated that the real number at Pontefract was probably between ten and fifteen. Its overall conclusion was that he had killed about 250 patients between 1971 and 1998, of whom 218 could be positively identified. The report also recorded suspicion, not a finding, about the death of a young child at the hospital.

This is why the figures in circulation differ so much. He was convicted of fifteen murders. The inquiry identified 215, then 218, and estimated about 250. Newspapers in 2002 added the 45 suspicious cases to the 215 and reported “up to 260”, and other press estimates went higher still.

Of the 215 victims in the first report, 171 were women and 44 were men. The oldest was 93. The youngest was a 41-year-old man who was terminally ill, whose death the inquiry found Shipman had hastened. The youngest whose death was unexpected was 47, and some reports give 47 as the youngest victim for that reason.

How he did it, and why no one saw it

In almost every case the method was the same: an injection of a lethal dose of an opiate, usually diamorphine, the medical name for heroin, given during a home visit or at the surgery. Because he was their doctor, he could certify the deaths himself, and the inquiry’s third report found that the system of death certificates and cremation checks had not detected any of his killings.

Getting the drugs was easy for the same reason. After his 1976 conviction he had declared that he would not carry controlled drugs, so he kept no register of them. He collected prescriptions on behalf of patients who were dying and kept the drugs, took away supplies left in the homes of patients who had died with the explanation that he would dispose of them, and wrote prescriptions in the names of patients who did not need the drug. In 1996 alone he obtained 12,000 milligrams of diamorphine in the name of one terminally ill patient, enough, the government later noted, for about 360 lethal doses.

Why? The question the inquiry could not answer

Shipman never confessed and never explained. The inquiry found that, apart from the forged will, he had not killed for money, and that there was no sexual or sadistic element in the killings. It did not accept that money explained even his last killing. Its conclusion was that if motive means a rational or conscious explanation, his crimes were without one. Detectives said at the time of the verdict that they were baffled. Theories about what drove him, such as a need for control over death, have been offered in the press by coroners and doctors, but they remain opinion, not findings.

Wakefield, January 2004

Early on the morning of 13 January 2004, the day before his 58th birthday, Shipman was found hanged in his cell at HMP Wakefield in West Yorkshire. An investigation by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman concluded that his death could not have been predicted or prevented. The inquest, held before a jury in 2005, found that he had taken his own life because he could not face spending the rest of it in prison, and that his wife’s pension position had been a contributing factor; the BBC described the outcome as a suicide verdict, The Guardian and the Manchester Evening News as a narrative verdict.

His own NHS pension had been forfeited after his conviction, but because he died before the age of 60 his widow was entitled to a lump sum and a pension. The payments were reported at the time as more than £100,000 and about £10,000 a year, and some families of his victims, who had each received £10,000 in compensation, were reported to be deeply uncomfortable about them.

What changed because of Shipman

The inquiry’s later reports were about the system rather than the man, and much of modern British medical regulation traces back to them.

• Death certification. The third report, in 2003, found that the system of death certificates and cremation forms had failed to detect any of his killings. Its central recommendation, independent scrutiny of deaths, took two decades to arrive. A non-statutory medical examiner system began in 2019, and from 9 September 2024 every death in England and Wales that is not referred to a coroner must be reviewed by an independent medical examiner.
• Controlled drugs. The fourth report, in 2004, examined how easily he had stockpiled diamorphine. The Controlled Drugs (Supervision of Management and Use) Regulations 2006 created “accountable officers” responsible for monitoring the use of controlled drugs in NHS and private healthcare organisations.
• Doctors’ licences. The fifth report, in December 2004, found fundamental flaws in the General Medical Council and said it had been too focused on protecting doctors rather than patients. Since 3 December 2012 every doctor licensed in the UK has had to go through revalidation, a check of their fitness to practise, every five years.

Hyde remembers

On 30 July 2005 a memorial garden was opened in Hyde Park, in the town where most of the victims lived. The Garden of Tranquillity has roses and herbs, a stone water feature and a granite timeline, and was designed by an artist born in Hyde. It honours the victims, not the man who killed them.

Where the accounts disagree

Most of the record is settled by the inquiry, which had the practice files, the death certificates and the police papers. The sources still differ on a handful of points, noted above where they come up: the size of the estate in the forged will (£386,000 or £350,000), the year he joined the Donneybrook practice (1977 or 1979) and the year he went single-handed (1992 or 1993), the age of the woman whose will he forged (81 or 82), the age of his youngest victim (41 or 47, depending on whether a terminally ill patient is counted), and whether the inquest returned a suicide verdict or a narrative one. Above all, the number of people he killed depends on which figure you take: fifteen proven in court, 218 identified by the inquiry, about 250 estimated.

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Questions people ask

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Sources

Every date and name on this page was checked against at least two of the following. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

1. The Shipman Inquiry, First Report: Death Disguised (vol. 1)Dame Janet Smith, July 2002 (copy hosted by serialkillersinfo.com)
2. The Shipman Inquiry, Second Report: The Police Investigation of March 1998 (Cm 5853)The Stationery Office, July 2003
3. The Shipman Inquiry, Third Report: Death Certification and the Investigation of Deaths by Coroners (Cm 5854)The Stationery Office, July 2003
4. The Shipman Inquiry, Sixth Report: Shipman: The Final ReportJanuary 2005 (PDF hosted by BBC News)
5. Learning from tragedy, keeping patients safe (Cm 7014)Department of Health, 2007
6. Harold Shipman (written answer by the Home Secretary)Hansard, House of Commons, 4 July 2002
7. Harold Shipman: The killer doctorBBC News, 13 January 2004
8. Shipman jailed for 15 murdersBBC News, 31 January 2000
9. Daughter’s suspicions ‘led to doctor’s arrest’BBC News, October 1999
10. GP’s fingerprint on ‘forged’ willBBC News, October 1999
11. Shipman ‘killed 215 patients’BBC News, 19 July 2002
12. Shipman ‘will never leave jail’BBC News, July 2002
13. Harold Shipman found dead in cellBBC News, 13 January 2004
14. NHS pension for Shipman’s widowBBC News, January 2004
15. Despair led to Shipman’s suicideBBC News, April 2005
16. Garden tribute to Shipman victimsBBC News, July 2005
17. Harold Shipman: a chronologyThe Guardian, 25 August 2005
18. Shipman found guilty of murdering 15 patientsThe Guardian, 31 January 2000
19. Doctor ‘duped patients over forged will’The Guardian, 16 October 1999
20. Shipman killed 215 patients, inquiry rulesThe Guardian, 19 July 2002
21. Shipman killed 250 over three decadesThe Guardian, 28 January 2005
22. Shipman found hanging in prisonThe Guardian, 13 January 2004
23. Shipman hanged himself out of despair, inquest jury concludesThe Guardian, 23 April 2005
24. How a humble GP perverted his medical skill to become Britain’s most prolific mass killerThe Independent, 14 January 2004
25. Shipman must never be freed from prison, says BlunkettThe Independent, 5 July 2002
26. Killer GP ‘could not face life in jail’Manchester Evening News, 2005
27. Garden to bring peaceManchester Evening News, 1 August 2005
28. Shipman inquiry finds GMC has ‘fundamental flaws’BMJ, December 2004
29. An overview of the death certification reformsGOV.UK, Department of Health and Social Care
30. Causes of death to be scrutinised in revamp of death certificatesGOV.UK, 15 April 2024
31. The Controlled Drugs (Supervision of Management and Use) Regulations 2006 (SI 2006/3148)legislation.gov.uk
32. Regulations for medical revalidation come into forceGOV.UK, 3 December 2012

The facts on this page come from public records and the published sources above. If you find an error, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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