Harold Frederick Shipman was born in Nottingham on January 14, 1946. His mother died of lung cancer when he was seventeen, having been given morphine at home by the family doctor in her last weeks, a scene he watched. He qualified in medicine at Leeds, and in 1975, working in Todmorden, was caught forging prescriptions for pethidine for his own use. He was fined, sent for treatment, and allowed to go on practising. He moved to Hyde in Greater Manchester and by 1993 had his own single-handed surgery on Market Street.
He was popular. Patients queued to register with him because he gave them time, made home visits and remembered their families. Over twenty-three years he killed a great many of them, almost all elderly women living alone, by injecting diamorphine, usually in their own front rooms in the afternoon. He signed the death certificates himself, gave the cause as old age or heart disease, and discouraged post-mortems. He altered their medical records afterwards to invent the histories that made the deaths look expected, not realising that the practice computer time-stamped every edit. The British press called him Doctor Death.
He was caught by greed rather than by medicine. He forged the will of Kathleen Grundy, an eighty-one-year-old former mayoress, leaving her estate of nearly four hundred thousand pounds to himself, and typed it badly on his own machine. Her daughter Angela Woodruff was a solicitor. She went to the police. Mrs Grundy was exhumed and found to be full of morphine.
The fifteen he was convicted of killing were Marie West, eighty-one; Irene Turner, sixty-seven; Lizzie Adams, seventy-seven; Jean Lilley, fifty-nine; Ivy Lomas, sixty-three; Muriel Grimshaw, seventy-six; Marie Quinn, sixty-seven; Kathleen Wagstaff, eighty-one; Bianka Pomfret, forty-nine; Norah Nuttall, sixty-four; Pamela Hillier, sixty-eight; Maureen Ward, fifty-seven; Winifred Mellor, seventy-three; Joan Melia, seventy-three; and Kathleen Grundy, eighty-one.
He was convicted at Preston on January 31, 2000, of fifteen murders and of forging the will, and given fifteen whole-life sentences. He never admitted anything. The Shipman Inquiry under Dame Janet Smith then examined every death he had certified since 1975 and concluded that he had killed at least 215 people and probably more than 250, the earliest in Todmorden. He hanged himself in his cell at Wakefield prison on January 13, 2004, the day before his fifty-eighth birthday, which secured his wife's widow's pension. The inquiry's findings rewrote death certification, cremation forms, single-handed practice monitoring and the coroner system in England and Wales.