A doctor’s visit rests on an unusual kind of trust. The patient opens the door, rolls up a sleeve, swallows what is offered and signs what is put on the table. When the patient dies, it is very often the same doctor who decides what the death was and writes it down. Across a century and a half, from Chicago to Tokyo, fifteen people who practiced medicine, or claimed to, turned that arrangement around. Some were licensed physicians with full waiting rooms; others were a midwife, a hospital orderly, a private nurse, an ambulance medic and two healers with no proper medical training at all.
The law did not treat them alike, and the differences matter. Some were convicted of murder many times over. One was convicted of a single killing and became a legend for dozens more. Two were convicted of lesser crimes, one was acquitted of murder, one was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and two were never brought before a court for the deaths laid at their door.
Herman Webster Mudgett, who called himself H. H. Holmes, enrolled at the University of Michigan’s medical school under his own name in 1882 and graduated in 1884, according to Michigan Medicine, the university’s medical center. He was an indifferent student who nearly failed to graduate over a scandal involving a woman in Ann Arbor. A story told for more than a century, that he stole cadavers in his student years to cheat insurance companies, appears in later accounts without a record behind it.
By the early 1890s he was in the Englewood district of Chicago, running a drugstore and building a block of shops and flats as the city prepared for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Several women and a child who were close to him there, among them employees and lovers, disappeared between 1891 and 1893. He was never charged in any of those disappearances.
He was convicted of one murder. Benjamin F. Pitezel, a carpenter who had worked for Holmes for years and had joined him in a plan to defraud a life insurance company, was found dead in Philadelphia in September 1894. He had died of chloroform poisoning. Holmes was arrested in Boston that November, and the Philadelphia detective Frank Geyer spent the summer of 1895 tracing three of Pitezel’s children, who had traveled with Holmes, to Irvington, Indiana, and Toronto, where they were found dead. Their deaths were attributed to Holmes. He was never tried for them, and the trial judge in Philadelphia kept that evidence from the jury.
The trial ran from October 28 to November 2, 1895. The jurors ate dinner before their first ballot, and every one of them voted guilty of murder in the first degree, according to a wire report of the verdict. In April 1896, waiting to be hanged, Holmes sold a confession to 27 murders; several of the people he claimed to have killed were alive. On the scaffold at Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896, he told the witnesses he was not guilty of taking the life of any member of the Pitezel family.
The later image of a purpose-built "Murder Castle" with hundreds of victims grew largely from a few weeks of newspaper reporting in the summer of 1895. Historians who have gone back to the records, among them Adam Selzer, accept far smaller numbers; Selzer has called the popular version a new American tall tale. In 2017, after members of the family suggested he had escaped execution, a court allowed his grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon, Pennsylvania, to be excavated. Anthropologists from the University of Pennsylvania identified the remains as his, chiefly from the teeth, and he was reburied that August.
Thomas Neill Cream was born in Glasgow on May 27, 1850, and grew up in Quebec, where his father managed a shipbuilding and lumber business. He took his medical degree at McGill University in Montreal in March 1876, writing his graduating thesis on the effects of chloroform, then studied at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London and qualified with the Royal Colleges in Edinburgh before returning to Canada in 1878.
His career followed a pattern that two countries failed to read in time. In London, Ontario, where he worked as an illegal abortionist, a young woman who had been his patient was found dead near his office about a year after he arrived; the coroner’s jury found that she died from chloroform "administered by some person unknown." Cream left for Chicago. There, in 1881, a 61-year-old railroad stationmaster died of strychnine poisoning after taking pills Cream supplied as an epilepsy remedy. Cream wrote letters blaming the pharmacists who had filled the prescription, which drew attention to the death; the body was exhumed, strychnine was found, and an Illinois jury convicted him of murder. He was sentenced to life at Joliet.
He served about ten years. His sentence was reduced, and in 1891 he was paroled. That autumn he took a room in Lambeth, south London, under the name Thomas Neill. Ellen Donworth, 19, who had worked pasting labels in a Lambeth bottle factory, died of strychnine poisoning in October 1891. Matilda Clover, 27, who was raising a two-year-old son on her own, died the same month; a doctor who had not attended her signed a certificate giving natural causes. In April 1892 Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell died of strychnine poisoning on the same night.
Once again Cream wrote letters, this time to prominent Londoners, accusing them of the deaths and demanding money. The letters, and his own talk about the case, brought detectives to him, and his handwriting connected him to the crimes. He was charged with four murders, an attempted murder and sending letters to extort money, and tried at the Old Bailey in October 1892 for the murder of Matilda Clover. Dr. Thomas Stevenson, the Home Office analyst, gave the chemical evidence. The jury took about ten minutes. Mr. Justice Hawkins sentenced him to death, and he was hanged at Newgate Prison on November 15, 1892. The Canadian writer Dean Jobb, who worked through his Scotland Yard file, puts his toll at no fewer than ten; two of those deaths ended in a conviction.
Linda Laura Burfield was born in Carver County, Minnesota, in 1867. By 1901 she was practicing in Minneapolis without a license as Dr. Linda Burfield Perry, advertising cures for nervous diseases and the liquor habit, and promoting long fasts as treatment. When a patient of hers died in November 1902 after a fast begun that October, the coroner gave starvation as the cause, but the county attorney found no law against advising a fast and brought no charge, according to MNopedia, the Minnesota Historical Society’s encyclopedia.
She moved to the Seattle area with her second husband, Samuel Hazzard, in 1906, and in Washington she obtained a license to practice medicine. At Olalla, on the Kitsap Peninsula, she ran a clinic she called Wilderness Heights. As many as fifteen people died there between 1908 and 1913, MNopedia reports.
In 1911 two wealthy sisters arrived for treatment after reading her book on fasting, without telling their family where they were going. The elder sister died under Hazzard’s care. Pressed by the British government, Kitsap County prosecutors charged Hazzard in her death; MNopedia gives the charge as first-degree murder, while South Sound magazine describes it as manslaughter. The jury convicted her of manslaughter, and she was sentenced to five to twenty years. Hundreds of women came to the courthouse to support her.
Her appeals took most of two years. She entered prison in January 1914 and served about two years. Governor Ernest Lister pardoned her in 1916, and she moved to New Zealand. She returned to Olalla in 1919 without a medical license and started what she called a school of health, which burned down in 1935. She died at Olalla in 1938 while fasting.
Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot was born in Auxerre, in Burgundy, on January 17, 1897. Expelled from schools as a boy, arrested at 17 for theft and found mentally unfit, he was gassed and wounded at the front in the First World War and discharged with a disability pension in 1920. He qualified as a doctor on an accelerated course for former soldiers in 1921. In Villeneuve-sur-Yonne he became a popular physician and, in 1926, mayor, before being suspended in 1930 after a fraud conviction. In 1933 he moved his practice to Paris.
Under the German occupation he let it be known, under the name "Docteur Eugène," that he could get people hunted by the Gestapo out of France to Argentina. The price reported by the Argentine paper Infobae was 25,000 francs a person. Clients were told to come at night with their luggage, money and jewelry. Most of them, the French Ministry of Justice records, were Jews or petty criminals trying to disappear. None of them reached South America. Among the belongings later seized was a pair of pajamas that belonged to a young boy, René Kneller, who had vanished with his parents.
In March 1944 a fire brigade call to a house he owned in the sixteenth arrondissement set off a murder inquiry. Petiot told the first officers that the dead were Germans and traitors, and walked away. He hid for seven months, part of that time inside the Resistance forces under the name Captain Valéry, until a newspaper attack drew him into writing a long letter of reply. He was arrested as he came out of a Métro station on October 31, 1944.
His trial began before the Seine Assize Court on March 18, 1946. Defended by René Floriot, he claimed 63 killings, all of them, he said, of Germans and collaborators carried out for the Resistance. He could not explain the boy’s pajamas. On April 4, 1946, the jury found him guilty of the premeditated murder of 24 of the 27 people named in the indictment, with theft, and he was sentenced to death. The case presented at trial was one of poisoning, though the American historian David King has since questioned how the victims died. Petiot was guillotined at La Santé prison on May 25, 1946. A Reuters report on King’s research put the possible toll as high as 150; no court tested that figure.
Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911, in Günzburg, Bavaria, the eldest son of a manufacturer of farm machinery. He earned a doctorate in physical anthropology at the University of Munich in 1935 and a second doctorate in 1938, under the racial hygienist Otmar von Verschuer, and joined the Nazi Party and the SS that year. After about 18 months on the Eastern Front with the SS Wiking division, where he won the Iron Cross, he was posted to Auschwitz on May 30, 1943.
As a camp physician at Auschwitz-Birkenau he took part in the selections on the ramps and in the infirmaries that sent prisoners to their deaths, and he helped select 2,893 Romani prisoners for murder when their family camp was liquidated on August 2, 1944, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He carried out experiments on prisoners, among them hundreds of pairs of twins, and sent organs and blood to colleagues in Germany, among them the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology. These were crimes of a different order from the cases around them: acts within a state’s machinery of mass murder, not a private series.
He fled Auschwitz in January 1945 as the Red Army advanced, was held briefly as an American prisoner of war, posing as an army officer, and released without being recognized as a wanted man, and worked on a farm in Bavaria under a false one. In July 1949 he reached Argentina. West German prosecutors were seeking his arrest by 1959; he moved to Paraguay and, after Israeli agents seized Adolf Eichmann in 1960, to Brazil. He was never tried. On February 7, 1979, he suffered a stroke and drowned while swimming near Bertioga, and he was buried near São Paulo as "Wolfgang Gerhard." Brazilian police exhumed the grave in June 1985, forensic experts from three countries identified him, and DNA confirmed the identification in 1992.
Miyuki Ishikawa, born Miyuki Komaru in Miyazaki Prefecture in 1897, came to Tokyo at 18 and trained in the midwifery course attached to the hospital of Tokyo Imperial University, graduating in 1919. It was an advanced education for a woman of her generation, and by 1948 she was one of the leading midwives in the capital, a director of the national midwives' association and head of her local branch. With her husband, Takeshi, a former police patrolman, she ran the Kotobuki maternity home in the Ichigaya district of what is now Shinjuku Ward.
Besides delivering babies, the home took in infants whose mothers could not keep them, most of them born outside marriage, for a fee of several thousand yen, and passed some of them on to people who wanted a child for a second payment. Abortion was a crime under the Penal Code, and a child born outside marriage could end a woman’s prospects. The House of Representatives report on the history of Japan’s Eugenic Protection Law, published in 2023, lists the women who left children at the home as unmarried women, war widows, dancers and café waitresses, among others. It says the home took in 211 infants in all. Many were fed so little that they died.
The case came to light in January 1948, when Tokyo police questioned an undertaker handling the deaths of infants from the home. The Ishikawas were arrested on January 15, 1948, and indicted for murder on January 26 with an assistant midwife. At trial in the Tokyo District Court, prosecutors said 84 infants had died at the home between April 1946 and January 1948, and that the evidence of murder was clear in 27 of those deaths. On October 11, 1948, the court found the evidence insufficient on 22 of the 27. On the other five it found that the couple had jointly caused the infants' deaths from malnutrition by omission, by withholding the food they needed. It sentenced Miyuki Ishikawa to eight years and her husband to four, and acquitted the assistant, who had repeatedly asked for more milk for the children.
On April 28, 1952, the Tokyo High Court set the judgment aside and sentenced her to four years, and the Supreme Court upheld it. Estimates of the total dead, never tested in court, run from 85, the figure in the official history of the Tokyo police, to 169 in an early newspaper report that the same paper later corrected; the most widely repeated figure is 103. Ishikawa told a magazine in 1969 that she had been wrongly convicted. She died in May 1987, aged 90.
Dr. Robert Clements had been Medical Officer of Health for Blackburn, in Lancashire. In 1947 he took his own life in Southport, in what The Atkinson, the town’s arts and heritage center, describes as suspicious circumstances, and his death made national headlines. He was suspected of murdering each of his four wives, and he was linked to the suicide of a local pathologist. He was never charged with any crime. The particulars of the four deaths, and the findings of the inquests that followed his own, have not been reported.
John Bodkin Adams, a Methodist from County Antrim in what is now Northern Ireland, built one of the most prosperous general practices on the south coast of England from Kent Lodge, a large Victorian house in Eastbourne. He drove a Rolls-Royce and attended a great many wealthy widows. He prescribed heroin and morphine freely, and he was remembered, over the years, in a remarkable number of his patients' wills.
In July 1956 a widow in his care, the second wife of a retired Lloyd’s underwriter, fell into a coma and died after he had prescribed her barbiturates; he certified a cerebral hemorrhage. The Eastbourne chief constable, Richard Walker, learned that she had given Adams a check for 1,000 pounds and left him her Rolls-Royce, and called in Scotland Yard. Detective Superintendent Herbert Hannam found gifts to Adams in at least 132 wills, forged checks and forged prescriptions, and came to believe that Adams might have killed as many as 25 patients, according to the Solicitors Journal. Rumor put the number of deaths under scrutiny much higher.
Hannam arrested Adams at Kent Lodge on December 19, 1956, for the murder of an elderly patient, a woman who had once made him the main beneficiary of her will before changing it. The trial began at the Old Bailey in March 1957 before Mr. Justice Devlin and was, at the time, the longest murder trial in British legal history. Adams did not give evidence. In April 1957 the jury acquitted him. He was then convicted of forging prescriptions and failing to keep proper records of dangerous drugs, and he was struck off the medical register. He was reinstated about four years later, won a series of libel actions, and practiced in Eastbourne until his death in 1983. He was never convicted of killing anyone.
Donald Harvey grew up in eastern Kentucky, and his first hospital job, while he was still a teenager, was as an orderly at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky, in 1970 and 1971. He later worked at the Veterans Administration hospital in Cincinnati and then as a nurse’s aide at Drake Memorial Hospital, the county’s long-term care hospital, where many patients were old or chronically ill.
In March 1987 a 44-year-old patient who had been in a coma for eight months after a motorcycle accident died at Drake. At the routine autopsy the Hamilton County pathologist, Dr. Lee Lehman, noticed the smell of cyanide, and tests confirmed a lethal dose. Harvey admitted poisoning the man and was charged with his murder on April 6, 1987. That might have been the end of it. Nurses on his ward, who said their earlier complaints had been brushed aside, began calling Pat Minarcin, the evening anchor at WCPO-TV in Cincinnati, with names of other patients who had died. On June 23, 1987, the station broadcast a half-hour special report arguing that there had been more deaths. A special grand jury took up the case, and bodies were exhumed.
Facing the possibility of a death sentence, Harvey offered a full confession in exchange for life terms. On August 18, 1987, he pleaded guilty in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court to 24 counts of aggravated murder, four counts of attempted aggravated murder and one count of felonious assault, and was sentenced to three consecutive life terms. The prosecutor, Arthur Ney, called him a compulsive killer who was sane and competent, and said the motive was not mercy. In November 1987 Harvey pleaded guilty in Laurel Circuit Court in Kentucky to eight counts of murder and one count of voluntary manslaughter for deaths at Marymount, and further Ohio counts followed. News reports since have given his total as 37 killings. His own estimates ran far higher.
On March 28, 2017, Harvey was found beaten in his cell at the Toledo Correctional Institution, and he died two days later, aged 64. A fellow inmate, James Elliott, later pleaded guilty to his murder.
Jane Toppan was born Honora Kelley in Boston to Irish immigrant parents and was placed as a child with a Lowell family whose surname she took, though she was never adopted. She trained as a nurse at the Cambridge Hospital and at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where co-workers complained of her gossip and of missing money and uniforms, and where she was reported to have asked questions about poisons and their antidotes. By the 1890s she was a sought-after private nurse in Cambridge.
In the summer of 1901 she was looking after a Lowell family at their cottage in Cataumet, on Cape Cod. Within weeks the mother, both married daughters and the father were dead. Exhumations followed, poison was found, and Toppan was arrested at Amherst, New Hampshire, on October 29, 1901. A Barnstable County grand jury indicted her for three of the deaths. On June 23, 1902, she was tried at Barnstable for the death of one of the daughters. Medical experts for both sides agreed that she was insane, the trial lasted about eight hours, and the jury returned a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. She was committed to the Taunton Insane Hospital for the rest of her life.
During her psychiatric examination she was reported to have confessed to 31 killings, and Boston Magazine records that she later told a reporter she had meant to be found insane so that she might one day be released. Not one of those confessions was tested in court, and she was never convicted of any crime. She died at the Taunton hospital in August 1938; accounts give the day as the 17th, 18th or 22nd.
Michael Swango grew up in Quincy, Illinois, and trained as a physician at Southern Illinois University. In July 1983 he began a surgical internship at Ohio State University Hospitals in Columbus. On January 14, 1984, a 19-year-old patient there, a University of Illinois gymnast recovering from injuries after a car struck her bicycle, died after he injected her with potassium. Nurses on the floor raised the alarm about Swango that winter and were not believed.
Back in Quincy he worked on an ambulance crew, and in 1985 a jury convicted him of aggravated battery for putting arsenic in the food and drink of his co-workers. None of them became seriously ill. The judge, Dennis Cashman, gave him the maximum the law allowed, five years, and later said he had judged Swango "a very dangerous person." He was released in August 1987.
He spent the next decade getting back into medicine by hiding that conviction, at one point under another name, with hospital posts in South Dakota and New York and, in the mid-1990s, at a Lutheran mission hospital in Zimbabwe, where patients died and the authorities later charged him with murder. In New York he was assigned to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northport, Long Island. There, between July and October 1993, he killed three veterans, aged 60, 70 and 73, by injection, according to the federal indictment, and injected a fourth, who survived.
Federal agents arrested him at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago on June 27, 1997, on a fraud warrant, as he was setting out for a hospital job in Saudi Arabia. He pleaded guilty to lying about his record and was sentenced to 42 months. Days before he was due for release, on July 11, 2000, the United States Attorney in Brooklyn, Loretta E. Lynch, announced murder charges. On September 6, 2000, in federal court in Central Islip, he pleaded guilty to the three Northport murders and two fraud counts, admitting that he had killed each man by "administering toxic substances which I knew were likely to cause death." Judge Jacob Mishler sentenced him to three consecutive life terms without parole. Under the agreement, prosecutors did not seek death and Zimbabwe dropped its charges. On October 18, 2000, in Columbus, he pleaded guilty to the aggravated murder of the young gymnast and was sentenced to life.
The author James B. Stewart, whose 1999 book on the case examined how hospitals let him keep working, put the toll at 35 or more. That is an estimate; four murders are on the record. In October 2026 the Federal Bureau of Prisons listed him at the Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado, with a release date of "LIFE."
Harold Shipman was born in Nottingham on January 14, 1946, the son of a lorry driver, and graduated from Leeds University Medical School in 1970. After hospital posts at Pontefract General Infirmary he joined a general practice in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, in 1974. A 1976 drug conviction did not end his career. He moved to Hyde, on the eastern edge of Greater Manchester, in 1977, and from 1992 he ran his own surgery in the town, a busy, respected single-handed practice.
The case against him began with a will. On June 24, 1998, an 81-year-old patient died at home after a visit from Shipman, who certified the death himself and gave old age as the cause. That day a will arrived at a firm of solicitors in Hyde leaving her whole estate to her doctor. Her daughter, a solicitor in Warwickshire, refused to believe it and took her suspicions to the police. An earlier police inquiry that spring, prompted by a local doctor who had noticed the number of cremation forms Shipman was asking colleagues to sign, had found nothing. This time the body was exhumed on August 1, 1998, toxicologists found morphine, and police found the typewriter on which the will had been typed. Shipman was arrested on September 7, 1998.
He was charged with the murders of 15 women patients killed between 1995 and 1998, all of whom he had certified as dying of natural causes. The trial began at Preston Crown Court on October 5, 1999. He denied every charge and gave evidence himself. On January 31, 2000, the jury convicted him of all 15 murders and of forging the will. Mr. Justice Forbes passed 15 life sentences and told him that in his case life must mean life.
A public inquiry under the High Court judge Dame Janet Smith then examined the deaths of hundreds of his patients. Her first report, in July 2002, found that he had killed at least 215 people between 1975 and 1998, 171 women and 44 men aged from 41 to 93, and found a real suspicion in 45 more. A clinical audit for the Chief Medical Officer had already found that Shipman was present at about 20 percent of the deaths he certified, against a norm of 0.8 percent. The inquiry’s later reports, on the police, on coroners and death certificates, on controlled drugs and on the General Medical Council, set out how a family doctor had been able to certify his own victims' deaths for more than two decades. In its 2007 response, the government described Shipman as responsible for the murder of around 250 of his patients. Those are the findings of an inquiry; he was convicted of 15.
Shipman never admitted a single killing. On January 13, 2004, the day before his 58th birthday, he was found hanged in his cell at Wakefield prison. The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman concluded that his death could not have been predicted or prevented. The reform the inquiry first proposed in 2003, independent medical examiners to scrutinize deaths, came into force across England and Wales on September 9, 2024.
Hu Wanlin, from Sichuan, had a primary-school education and no medical training. He had already spent long years in prison in the 1970s and 1980s, the South China Morning Post reported, on convictions including subversion, human trafficking and fraud. According to a report carried by INQUIRER.net in 2014, he began treating people while serving a life sentence for killing a businessman, and those activities were stopped in 1996 after 13 patients died.
Released in 1997, he set up hospitals in Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces, promising cures through qigong, and patients arrived in large numbers after an influential writer reported on his cures. He held that disease was caused by water, and his remedies relied on strong salts. The authorities stopped him again. A Henan intermediate court found him guilty of offering unauthorized medical services and of causing the deaths of 146 patients, the Morning Post reported, and sentenced him to 15 years. The INQUIRER.net report gives the 2000 case as three further deaths, among them a former mayor of Luohe city in Henan, and counts at least 16 deaths in all. The Global Times dates that sentence to 2001. Hu was convicted of practicing medicine illegally, not of murder.
He was released early in 2011. In August 2013 a 22-year-old college student died in a hotel in Xin’an County, in Henan, after taking a substance Hu supplied at a health retreat. On November 19, 2014, the Luoyang Intermediate People’s Court again convicted him of practicing medicine without a license, causing a death, sentenced him to 15 years and fined him 200,000 yuan. He was 65.
Maxim Vladimirovich Petrov, born in 1965, worked as a medic at one of St. Petersburg’s ambulance substations. From the summer of 1997 he called on elderly people at home, introducing himself as a doctor from their district clinic, and robbed them. He chose them from the clinic’s own chest X-ray screening lists, which gave him names, ages and addresses. For about two years the people he robbed survived. From 1999 some of them did not, and fires were set to cover his tracks. Among the dead, Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported, were a former ballerina of the Mariinsky Theatre and her mother.
Detectives saw that the January 2000 victims lived close together and were patients of the same clinic. They went through its uncollected test results and waited in the apartments of the pensioners on the list. On January 17, 2000, Petrov was caught trying to enter the home of a woman about to turn 77, carrying syringes and the clinic’s screening receipts. He confessed, showed investigators the scenes, and then at trial withdrew the confession. A shoe print, a handwriting match, stolen property and the testimony of survivors held. On November 21, 2003, the St. Petersburg City Court convicted him of multiple murder, attempted murder and robbery and sentenced him to life. The Supreme Court of Russia dismissed his appeal on June 24, 2004. Russian press reports put the toll at 11 murders and 46 robberies.
In 2012 the European Court of Human Rights found that Russia had violated his rights through overcrowded remand conditions, his transport to court and police statements that presented him as guilty before the verdict, and awarded him 15,000 euros. In March 2025, after 25 years in custody, he was reported to be seeking parole from the special-regime colony in Solikamsk known as the White Swan; the regional prison service said early release was not expected soon.
Kermit Gosnell ran the Women’s Medical Society clinic in West Philadelphia, which served low-income women, and presented himself as an advocate for the poor and desperate. The clinic was raided in February 2010 during an investigation into prescription drug trafficking. State authorities had not routinely inspected Pennsylvania’s abortion clinics for 15 years, and after the case two senior state health officials were dismissed. Gosnell was arrested in January 2011.
On May 13, 2013, after ten days of deliberation, a Philadelphia jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of three infants born alive at the clinic, with other charges, and acquitted him of a fourth murder count. It also convicted him of involuntary manslaughter in the death of a 41-year-old patient, a refugee from Bhutan, who died of a drug overdose after coming to him for an abortion, and of performing 21 abortions past Pennsylvania’s 24-week limit. To avoid a possible death sentence he agreed not to appeal, and he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He died on March 1, 2026, aged 85, at a hospital outside the prison system, having last been held at the State Correctional Institution at Smithfield; prison officials announced the death on March 23.
Set side by side, these cases share less than their reputations suggest. Cream, Petiot, Shipman, Petrov and Gosnell were convicted of murder by juries or judges, and Harvey and Swango on their own guilty pleas. Holmes was convicted of a single murder, and the rest of his legend outgrew the proof. Hazzard and Hu were convicted of manslaughter and of illegal medical practice. Ishikawa was convicted of five deaths by omission out of perhaps a hundred. Toppan was found insane. Adams was acquitted. Clements and Mengele died without facing a court. What recurs across a century and a half is the means rather than the motive: a death certificate signed by the person who caused the death, a drug cabinet no one checked, a colleague’s warning set aside, and patients who were old, poor, sick or desperate enough that their deaths surprised no one.
• 1876: Thomas Neill Cream graduates in medicine from McGill University.
• 1881: Cream is convicted of murder in Illinois and sentenced to life.
• 1884: Herman Webster Mudgett (H. H. Holmes) graduates from the University of Michigan’s medical school.
• October 1891 to April 1892: Ellen Donworth, Matilda Clover, Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell die of strychnine poisoning in Lambeth.
• November 15, 1892: Cream is hanged at Newgate after his conviction for Matilda Clover’s murder.
• September 1894: Benjamin F. Pitezel is found dead in Philadelphia.
• November 2, 1895: Holmes is convicted of Pitezel’s murder.
• May 7, 1896: Holmes is hanged at Moyamensing Prison.
• Summer 1901: four members of a Lowell family die at Cataumet, Cape Cod; Jane Toppan is arrested on October 29.
• June 23, 1902: Toppan is found not guilty by reason of insanity at Barnstable.
• 1911: a patient dies at Linda Hazzard’s clinic in Olalla, Washington; Hazzard is convicted of manslaughter in 1912.
• May 30, 1943: Josef Mengele is posted to Auschwitz.
• October 31, 1944: Marcel Petiot is arrested in Paris.
• April 4, 1946: Petiot is convicted of 24 premeditated murders; he is guillotined on May 25.
• 1947: Robert Clements dies in Southport.
• January 15, 1948: Miyuki Ishikawa and her husband are arrested in Tokyo; on October 11 the Tokyo District Court convicts them of five infants' deaths by omission.
• April 1957: John Bodkin Adams is acquitted of murder at the Old Bailey.
• February 7, 1979: Mengele drowns in Brazil; his remains are identified in 1985.
• August 18, 1987: Donald Harvey pleads guilty in Cincinnati to 24 counts of aggravated murder.
• 1993: Michael Swango kills three veterans at the Northport VA Medical Center.
• September 7, 1998: Harold Shipman is arrested in Hyde.
• January 17, 2000: Maxim Petrov is caught in a police ambush in St. Petersburg.
• January 31, 2000: Shipman is convicted of 15 murders at Preston Crown Court.
• September 6, 2000: Swango pleads guilty to the Northport murders; on October 18 he pleads guilty in Ohio.
• July 2002: the Shipman Inquiry finds he killed at least 215 patients.
• November 21, 2003: Petrov is convicted and sentenced to life.
• January 13, 2004: Shipman is found hanged at Wakefield prison.
• May 13, 2013: Kermit Gosnell is convicted in Philadelphia.
• November 19, 2014: Hu Wanlin is sentenced to 15 years in Luoyang.
• March 30, 2017: Harvey dies after a beating at the Toledo Correctional Institution.
• September 9, 2024: the medical examiner system proposed by the Shipman Inquiry comes into force in England and Wales.
• March 1, 2026: Gosnell dies in Pennsylvania state custody.