Harold Shipman | Doctor Death | Serial Killer Documentary

Harold Fredrick Shipman (14 January 1946 – 13 January 2004) was a convicted English serial killer. A doctor by profession, he is among the most prolific serial killers in recorded history with 218 murders being positively ascribed to him, although the actual number is likely much higher. On 31 January 2000, a jury found Shipman guilty of 15 murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and the judge recommended that he never be released. The whole life tariff was confirmed by the Home Secretary a little over two years later. After his trial, the Shipman Inquiry, chaired by Dame Janet Smith, investigated all deaths certified by Shipman. About 80% of his victims were women. His youngest victim was Peter Lewis, a 41-year-old man. Much of Britain's legal structure concerning health care and medicine was reviewed and modified as a direct and indirect result of Shipman's crimes, especially after the findings of the Shipman Inquiry, which began on 1 September 2000 and lasted almost two years. Shipman is the only British doctor found guilty of murdering his patients. Shipman died on 13 January 2004, after hanging himself in his cell at Wakefield Prison in West Yorkshire. Harold Frederick Shipman was born in Nottingham, England, the second of four children of Vera and Harold Shipman, a lorry driver. His working class parents were devout Methodists. Shipman was particularly close to his mother, who died of cancer when he was 17. Her death came in a manner similar to what later became Shipman's own modus operandi: in the later stages of her disease, she had morphine administered at home by a doctor. Shipman witnessed his mother's pain subside in light of her terminal condition, up until her death on 21 June 1963. Shipman received a scholarship to medical school, and graduated from Leeds School of Medicine in 1970. He started work at Pontefract General Infirmary in Pontefract, West Riding of Yorkshire, and in 1974, took his first position as a general practitioner (GP) at the Abraham Ormerod Medical Centre in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. In 1975 he was caught forging prescriptions of pethidine for his own use. He was fined £600, and briefly attended a drug rehabilitation clinic in York. After a brief period as medical officer for Hatfield College, Durham, and temporary work for the National Coal Board, he became a GP at the Donneybrook Medical Centre in Hyde, Greater Manchester, in 1977. Shipman continued working as a GP in Hyde throughout the 1980s and founded his own surgery on Market Street in 1993, becoming a respected member of the community. In 1983, he was interviewed on the Granada television documentary World in Action on how the mentally ill should be treated in the community.