Harold Shipman, the former doctor who is said to have murdered over 250 people while practising, was found dead in his prison cell on this day in 2004.
He had hanged himself by tying a bed sheet around the bars of the cell at Wakefield Prison. Shipman had been taken off ‘suicide watch’ 18 months earlier while at Frankland prison, near Durham.
His wife Primrose was due to visit him the following day – his 58th birthday – and had spoken to him the night before, when she had found him to be behaving normally.
Nevertheless, the jury at the inquest into his death would find that he had killed himself as he was in despair at the thought of being incarcerated, and because he had established that his wife would be entitled to an NHS pension if he died before the age of 60.
The jury found that Shipman was "neither bullied nor goaded" into taking his own life. A pathologist told the inquest that Shipman had not been attacked or murdered, and ruled out the possibility that the suicide was an accident.
Shipman was jailed for life in January 2000 for murdering 15 patients, the victims dying from lethal injections he administered. The Shipman enquiry established that he almost certainly killed 200 others, and had a ‘real suspicion’ that he was responsible for 45 more.
The former GP maintained his innocence throughout, always insisting that he had simply administered pain-relief, and had been planning an appeal against his conviction before his death.
[January 5, 1981: Peter Sutcliffe charged with Yorkshire Ripper murders]
- Harold Shipman saw his mother die of lung cancer when he was 17 years old. In the late stages of her life, she was administered pain-killing morphine at home by her own doctor, in a manner that Shipman’s murders would later emulate.
- It is now believed that Shipman killed patients from his very earliest days as a GP, when working in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. He moved to Hyde, Greater Manchester, eventually becoming a sole practitioner in 1993.
- He was first investigated in early 1998 due to the large numbers of cremations of his patients he was requesting authorisation for. The investigation foundered, and Shipman murdered three more patients before he was finally arrested.
- Shipman was caught when he forged a will in the name of his final victim, Kathleen Grundy, which excluded her lawyer daughter and grandchildren but left him a sum of £386,000.
- He was tried and convicted for the murders of 15 patients between 1995 and 1998; the Shipman Inquiry, chaired by Dame Janet Smith, found that he had killed on at least 200 other occasions.
- While in prison, Shipman liked to play Scrabble, joined a card school and was writing a biography of Napoleon. He signed up to an English literature course and studied the peninsular wars.
- Primrose Shipman said she had had a "two-minute" conversation with her husband about suicide while he was on remand at Strangeways prison in Manchester in 1999. On asking if he was suicidal, he had answered "no" and promised to talk to her about it if he did.
- Shipman remains the only British doctor to be convicted of murdering his patients.