Featured Image Credit: Greater Manchester Police
Topics: Psychology, True crime, Crime, Health, Mental Health
Liv Bridge
Topics: Psychology, True crime, Crime, Health, Mental Health
When one of the world's most prolific serial killers was finally caught and charged, members of the community had an unbelievable reaction.
Harold Shipman is a well-known name in most households in the UK as the English doctor who disguised himself in plain sight, murdering as many as 260 of his patients, if not more, over a period of three decades spanning 1970 to 1998.
Known as 'Fred' when he grew up in the 1950s, it would be more than 50 years later that he would gain the nicknames like 'Doctor Death' and 'The Angel of Death' for his heinous crimes.
However, not everyone was convinced by the GP's murderous intent.
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According to criminologist professor, David Wilson, who spoke to LADBible Group's Honesty Box amid the release of the Murder UK series, some of Shipman's patients worked to protest Shipman's innocence, apparently shocked and in disbelief.
Wilson said: "When Harold Shipman was first arrested and charged with murder, the other patients in his practice set up a 'Harold Shipman legal fighting fund' to pay for his legal expenses."
Indeed, it was difficult for members of the community to believe their family-friendly GP from Nottingham was actually a prolific serial killer living in their midst, targeting largely vulnerable, elderly women.
The case uncovered Shipman became somewhat fascinated with death after his mother died of lung cancer when he was 17.
Two years after her death, Shipman was accepted into Leeds University medical school and by 1974, he was married, a father-of-two and joined his first medical practice.
He was forced to leave the surgery the following year as he was found forging prescriptions for a painkiller for his own use, but then was accepted to join another medical center in Hyde, Greater Manchester, where he resumed his career without any hiccups throughout the 1980s.
In 1998, a doctor raised the alarm about the high death rate among Shipman's patients and later a taxi driver, who had driven many elderly patients to the hospital in good health, said he suspected the doc had killed 21 patients.
Police dropped the case until it caught the eye of a grieving solicitor, Angela Woodruff, whose 81-year-old mother, Kathleen Grundy, not only died after Shipman visited her home but had a dodgy will.
Grundy's will mysteriously left the bulk of her estate to the doctor, which led the lawyer to believe her mother had been murdered for financial gains.
A post-mortem on her exhumed body revealed she died of a morphine overdose at the time Shipman visited - and the subsequent police raid on his home unravelled the extent of his monstrous crimes.
Medical records, a collection of jewellery and an old typewriter - where the doctor forged the will - were recovered and police found he had altered medical records to cover his tracks.
In 2000, Shipman was found guilty of 15 murders and one forgery, which put him behind bars for 15 life sentences and four years for forgery, which the judge commuted to a 'whole life sentence', removing any possibility of parole.
When he started his killing spree and how many victims Shipman murdered during his career remains a mystery, though The Shipman Inquiry in 2002 estimates he killed between 200 and 284 people which could've started in his first GP job back in 1975.
Shipman died by suicide on January 13, 2004, in his Wakefield prison cell at the age of 57.
Murder UK is an original production from TRUE CRIME, the leading channel in the UK specialising in crime documentary programming, and is now available to stream via TRUE CRIME's free catch-up app, WATCH FREE UK.