Critical Criminology

Critical Criminology

· NARRATOR: Dr. Harold Shipman was a well-liked GP trusted by his patients.

· 00:41

DENNIS MAHER: Everybody, without exception, had the highest praise for Dr. Shipman, what a wonderful doctor he was, and people said that he was very, very accessible.

· 00:53

NARRATOR: Nobody believed that he could possibly have killed one of them.

· 00:56

SPEAKER 1: I couldn't believe it. I think my mouth must have dropped open. Oh my god. And then, of course, it all started to come out. And in fact, I sent him a card to support him at that time.

· 01:11

NARRATOR: He was arrogant--

· 01:12

RICHARD BADCOCK: Even with me, he was a very controlling man.

· 01:15

NARRATOR: --and believed he was invincible.

· 01:16

HAROLD SHIPMAN: I'll let you take a photograph and then go away. And I'm sure you've had enough time to take a decent photograph.

· 01:22

REPORTER: Is it possible for you just to say anything at all?

· 01:25

HAROLD SHIPMAN: I'm walking to surgery to do my surgery.

· 01:27

REPORTER: You have said you have nothing to hide.

· 01:28

NARRATOR: But this was just the start of the revelations. He's been killing for years.

· 01:33

DEBBIE BARTLETT: Nasty, callous, heartless bastard.

· 01:36

NARRATOR: Many think Shipman started killing as a Manchester GP in the 1990s, but he killed for the first time when he was just 25 years old, as a junior doctor in Yorkshire.

· 01:47

MARGARET SIVORN: If he did get hold of any controlled drugs, I don't know how he did it.

· 01:52

NARRATOR: He also became addicted to powerful painkillers and lied, deceived, and manipulated everyone around him to obtain them and other lethal drugs.

· 02:02

PETER DEVINE: His veins in his arms and his legs were collapsed and he said he looked like a drug addict.

· 02:10

NARRATOR: When his habit was discovered, he should have been struck off, but instead turned up here in Hyde, near Manchester. By this time, he'd already killed or was suspected of killing 30 of his patients. In Hyde, he would murder over 200 more. On the 10th anniversary of Shipman's death, this is the definitive account of how a popular and respected GP became Britain's most prolific serial killer.

· 02:39

SPEAKER 1: An evil man, control freak. A horrible person. [MUSIC PLAYING]

· 02:57

NARRATOR: This is Hyde, seven miles east of Manchester. It's a small town that built its foundations on the success of cotton mills during the Industrial Revolution. But in 1998, Hyde became better known for more sinister reasons.

· 03:14

ROY SAXTON: You've got to trust the doctor.

· 03:16

ANGELA WOODRUFF: I mean a doctor, you just think, well, it's the doctor. You wouldn't imagine that he was going to kill a lot of people.

· 03:24

BERNARD POSTLES: It's a massive allegation to make against anyone, but to make it against somebody who is seen as a pillar of the community.

· 03:34

NARRATOR: Doctor Harold Shipman was a community GP for almost 25 years.

· 03:39

JEREMY DIRCKZE: He had this reputation of looking after his patients from cradle to grave. He prided himself on personal care. He would look after patients at home where maybe we would send them to hospital He took pride in that and he had a reputation of always being available for patients. He would go beyond the normal call of duty. He was the old-fashioned doctor who looked after them, did everything for them,

· 04:09

and they had absolute confidence in.

· 04:11

SUSAN BOOTH: He used to do a lot of preventative medicine. There used to be a cigarette factory in Hyde and he campaigned quite vigorously to get that closed down.

· 04:26

NARRATOR: He was Hyde's most sought after GP and had over 3,000 patients on his books, one of whom was Kathleen Grundy. The 81-year-old former Lady Mayor was a fit, healthy, and hardworking member of her local community.

· 04:41

ANGELA WOODRUFF: She was a very buzzy person, wasn't she? A very buzzy person, yeah.

· 04:45

PHIL WOODRUFF: Well, I mean she did do quite a number of charitable things and also community things. She used to work in the theatre concerns shop in the center of Hyde.

· 04:56

NARRATOR: She was also a loyal patient of Dr. Harold Shipman. So when he asked her to take part in a research project, he knew she wouldn't hesitate to say yes.

· 05:08

PHIL WOODRUFF: She told us that Dr. Shipman had said that there was some kind of survey being done which was looking at old people who were particularly well.

· 05:18

NARRATOR: On the 10th of June, 1998, Shipman asked Kathleen to visit his surgery to sign the relevant consent documents.

· 05:26

PHIL WOODRUFF: Shipman arranged for her to sign a document which with witnesses in the surgery. Probably she was being asked to sign some consent form for this hypothetical survey.

· 05:40

NARRATOR: Two weeks later, at 8:30 AM, Shipman arrived to Kathleen Grundy's home, 79 Joel Lane, as they'd agreed. [DOORBELL RINGING] Once inside, he told Kathleen to lie down on the sofa and roll up her sleeve to give her what she thought was a blood sample. Without hesitation, he injected with a fatal dose

· 06:10

of diamorphine. [MUSIC PLAYING]

· 06:37

ANGELA WOODRUFF: I was just at work as normal and then I had this telephone call from the police saying that my mother had died.

· 06:48

NARRATOR: The next day, the Woodruffs to see Kathleen Grundy's GP Dr. Harold Shipman, at his surgery. He told them he'd signed her death certificate, as he'd examined her after her death and there was no question as to the cause.

· 07:07

PHIL WOODRUFF: He gave us the death certificate and he said, I've put old age. And I mean we knew perfectly well that that wasn't right. But then he sort of vaguely implied that he'd seen her recently and so he knew the case so it wans't-- and he was basically trying to say that he was going to avoid a postmortem because that would be unpleasant for us.

· 07:29

NARRATOR: So the Woodruffs buried Kathleen in her local cemetery and mourned her passing. But three weeks after her mother's death, Angela received another shock.

· 07:40

ANGELA WOODRUFF: The will, which some solicitors sent to me.

· 07:45

PHIL WOODRUFF: The fact that it had left all of the estate to Shipman, which I mean he should know Kathleen and her relationship to us, to the family. That would have been extraordinary unlikely.

· 08:00

NARRATOR: The will had been typed and raised concern straightaway.

· 08:04

PHIL WOODRUFF: Everything about the way the will was constructed-- I mean it was on a form, the sort of form you would buy from Woolworth's or something, or from a stationer's And it was typed on a very poor typewriter with dreadful type. I mean even the English wasn't all that great. And I mean Kathleen had a beautiful handwriting.

· 08:33

ANGELA WOODRUFF: Well, I knew that my mother wouldn't want any money to go to the boys or me or whatever. So it was very strange. And then you've got Shipman and it's apparently all going to him. And I just couldn't understand it.

· 08:50

PHIL WOODRUFF: We decided we'd go and try and find these witnesses and find out if these witnesses knew anything about such a document.

· 08:58

NARRATOR: After interviewing the couple that Shipman had duped into witnessing the will, the Woodruffs concluded the doctor had murdered Kathleen for profit. They went straight to the police.

· 09:09

BERNARD POSTLES: Had Angela not come forward, there is no doubt that he would have continued to murder people. There was nothing that was going to stop him. He'd been murdering people for years and getting away with it.

· 09:21

NARRATOR: Soon the world would come to know the name Dr. Harold Shipman. But no one knew then that he'd actually started killing at the beginning of his career, in a hospital in Yorkshire. On the 23rd of July, 1970, the General Medical Council registered doctor 147-0473 as a Dr. Harold Shipman. He'd barely passed his finals, but he landed work

· 09:56

as a junior doctor in Pontefract General Hospital.

· 10:02

MARGARET SIVORN: He was brilliant. He'd got a brilliant mind. he was a brilliant doctor. I can't understand it.

· 10:13

NARRATOR: He worked across all wards, but specialized in pediatrics, obstetrics, and gynecology. Shipman, known as Fred, had the respect he craved. He had the trust and power only a white coat can bring.

· 10:32

MARGARET SIVORN: The consultants liked him, he got on well with his colleagues, the patients absolutely couldn't ever say a bad thing about him. They felt calm and comfortable with him and knew that he was looking after them properly. He was always professional, always. And you always felt at ease with him. He'd have a smile with them, a little joke with them,

· 11:02

but professional to his fingertips. He knew his stuff.

· 11:08

NARRATOR: The job involved long hours and a grueling schedule. And to get through his shifts, he began experimenting with a powerful and addictive opium derived drug called pethidine. He soon became addicted, but he was careful to hide his habit.

· 11:25

STUART HAMILTON: Drug addicts can become spectacularly clever at hiding what they're doing, and probably more so if it's a medically qualified person who knows what to look for. You inject the drugs in places where people wouldn't be looking. Injections in the groin, between the fingers are quite common, even sometimes on the genitals because it's not somewhere where somebody's going to see it. The obvious typical track marks that you see on the arms are really something you only see in somebody who isn't clever enough

· 12:03

to cover what they're doing.

· 12:06

NARRATOR: If Shipman has been caught abusing hospital drugs as a junior doctor, he could have been sacked. But he successfully deceived his colleagues about his habit.

· 12:17

MARGARET SIVORN: If he did get hold of any controlled drugs, I don't know how he did it because there would have been a discrepancy. Anyone else following, like if I was in charge and I'd got the keys, someone following you would soon find out that there was a discrepancy with these drugs and there would have been an inquiry, believe me. Why don't these drugs talley with the numbers that should be in the book?

· 12:40

NARRATOR: It was in Pontefract General Infirmary where it is now known Harold Shipman began his career of killing. He was just 25 years old.

· 12:49

MARGARET SIVORN: I want to believe that Fred did nothing of this at Pontefract. I'm selfish. That was the hospital I trained at and I want to believe that nothing went wrong.

· 13:00

NARRATOR: Drugs had helped get Shipman through the hardest workload he'd ever experienced. And during his four years at Pontefract General Infirmary, Shipman certified the death of 133 patients. The public inquiry strongly suspected him of killing at least 23, and perhaps even more, while working on the wards here.

· 13:24

MARGARET SIVORN: As I'm talking to you now, I'm lost for words. I'll be lost for words forever because I just can't think of how he's done it.

· 13:33

NARRATOR: The inquiry also confirmed that he definitely murdered three of his patients. Medicine had been Shipman's calling, but increasingly helping patients was about his own satisfaction, not theirs.

· 13:45

RICHARD BADCOCK: The process of care is essentially self-sacrificial. And the essence of Doc Shipman's medicine, although he was regarded as a competent doctor by many of his patients, most forget that, but the essence of his medicine was always that he delivered it on his own terms. And therefore, no self-sacrifice was involved at all.

· 14:10

NARRATOR: Harold Frederick Shipman, known as Fred, was born in Nottingham on the 14th of January, 1946, to Vera and Harold. He was the middle child of three. His father was a lorry driver but harbored a superiority complex. The Shipmans were snobs. They sent him to High Pavement Grammar School. Bob Studholme was in the sixth form with him.

· 14:37

BOB STUDHOLME: Fred Shipman would have won an absolutely identical blazer to this. And the only discrepancy we were allowed in uniform as sixth form boys was to wear a waistcoat. Before you went to High Pavement, you were aware of it, that it was a name to be reckoned with in the city in terms of education.

· 15:02

NARRATOR: In school, Shipman felt different and was treated as different. He never made friends and never joined in. But Shipman was a model pupil. Academically, he was nothing special, but he excelled at sport, particularly athletics and rugby.

· 15:17

BOB STUDHOLME: His sporting ability was the big thing. And he was a very determined sportsman. You knew that if Fred was involved, he was going to try and win.

· 15:27

NARRATOR: Shipman had no interest in clothes, music, or girls, and according to those that knew him, took life far too seriously. But his home life was serious. When he was just 17, his mother was diagnosed with lung cancer.

· 15:43

BOB STUDHOLME: What we didn't know and, of course, we know now is that his mother had the nurse twice a day because she had cancer. And she would receive morphine injections to comfort her and relieve the pain. And the nurse came morning and night. And I think when Fred, if Fred got away from school on time and went home after afternoon school, the nurse may well have been there attending to his mother

· 16:16

and seeing that she was comfortable for the night.

· 16:22

NARRATOR: In 1963, long before cancer was widely survivable, Vera Shipman was doomed to a long and painful death. The only other thing she looked forward to was a daily injection of morphine that would hold the pain at bay for another few hours. Young Shipman would watch as the needle was slid into his mother's arm and within seconds witness her pain subside.

· 16:49

The experience left an indelible mark on Shipman. He made up his mind to study to become a doctor.

· 16:57

RICHARD BADCOCK: One of his causes of upset was at not being able to control his mother not dying. I would regard that as a critical episode in its life and I would regard his involvement as her carer as a critical part of his later development.

· 17:22

NARRATOR: On Friday the 21st in June, 1963, Vera Shipman died.

· 17:30

BOB STUDHOLME: Fred Shipman occasionally walked to school with a mutual friend of ours, another rugby player. And on this one terrible occasion, this lad had walked up to school with Fred and on the way had said to him, have a decent weekend then, Fred? And he said, no, not really. My Mum died. This mutual friend eventually managed to say, well, what did you do?

· 17:58

And Fred said, I went out for a run. [MUSIC PLAYING]

· 18:09

RICHARD BADCOCK: Even with me he was a very controlling man. In the end, the only thing you can control is your own destruction. But in the process, it's sadly not uncommon for you to create a lot of destruction in the lives of other people.

· 18:29

NARRATOR: In October 1965, Shipman fulfilled his ambition and won a place at Leeds University Medical School. Working in the city at the same time was Primrose Oxtaby.

· 18:41

MIKAELA SITFORD: They met on a bus going from Weatherby to Leeds. He was going from his student digs and she was going from her parents' home to her job as a window dresser in Leeds city center. Eventually, the smiles turned to chats turned to dates. And she was 17 when she fell pregnant to him

· 19:08

and he was still in his first year as a medical student. So they were very young when they got together.

· 19:15

NARRATOR: Those that knew them described them as chalk and cheese. But Shipman and Primrose married on the 5th of November, 1966.

· 19:25

MIKAELA SITFORD: She was six months pregnant at the time. The pregnancy was said to break her mother's heart because there she was, this very religious, buttoned up lady who expected a lot from her daughters and Primrose, her youngest, had really let her down. Having said that, Primrose did live with her parents in the last weeks of her pregnancy and in the first few weeks of having the baby and then she moved into a tiny flat with Shipman in Leeds. I don't think Shipman enjoyed his student years like other students could because they

· 19:57

had to live on his student grant, which was tiny. They lived in a tiny flat. His course was full-on, as a medical degree obviously is. Although when he said to a nurse that he worked with later on in life, I was a bright boy, it wasn't supposed to happen, it was said without rancor. It was just a statement of fact. I think in those days, you got somebody pregnant, you married them and you got on with it.

· 20:24

NARRATOR: Soon after Shipman became a junior doctor in Pontefract, his second child was born. So now with two young children to care for, he began looking for better paying work elsewhere. He found it, and on the 1st of March, 1974, Shipman took up a position as a GP with Todmorden Group Practice in Yorkshire. Here, at last, Shipman would have the freedom to practice medicine on his own terms. By 1975, Dr. Harold Shipman was an established junior GP

· 21:03

in the small town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire.

· 21:07

PETER DEVINE: He would have been an outsider to the town, but I guess as a doctor he'd easily get to know people. And I think quite quickly, he made himself part of the community.

· 21:20

NARRATOR: Shipman soon impressed the other partners with his competence, enthusiasm, and hard work. But above all, he was popular with his patients, freely prescribing drugs to them.

· 21:31

PETER DEVINE: There was a story going around Todmorden at the time that if you wanted amphetamines, then the way to do it was to go to his surgery and ask for slimming tablet. And apparently, often you couldn't get into the surgery because it was so busy people were queueing out the door basically to get hold of these amphetamines. And they gave him this name, which was the Fat Doctor.

· 22:00

NARRATOR: Soon Shipman had persuaded his partners to let him modernize the practice record systems. Shipman threw himself into the task, reorganizing patient records and taking control of stock taking, disposal, and resupply of all controlled drugs.

· 22:20

PETER DEVINE: Large amounts of pethidine were being taken out. When the doctors discovered this, they decided to investigate further and they checked with some of the patients of Shipman who had purportedly been prescribed these drugs to discover that they haven't been prescribed the drugs at all.

· 22:41

NARRATOR: Shipman has been stealing pethidine, but he was a trusted doctor so nothing was done and he was free to continue his practice. Eva Lyons lived here at number 16 Keswick Close. She was 69 years old when Harold Shipman ended her life.

· 23:00

DEBBIE BARTLETT: My grandmother was full of energy, always active, always busy. She enjoyed dressmaking, baking, going off shopping. No cause for concern at all. Definitely full of energy, definitely.

· 23:16

NARRATOR: But in 1975, she was recovering from treatment for cancer.

· 23:21

DEBBIE BARTLETT: We didn't recognize her. I mean it was horrible how ill she was. And then she started to recovere and she came home and she was spending time sitting out in the garden, she was making plans for the future. We had no cause to think that her death was imminent.

· 23:39

NARRATOR: On the 17th of March, Eva was at home with her husband when Shipman made an unannounced visit.

· 23:45

DEBBIE BARTLETT: It was something like 11:00 at night and he came in to see my grandmother. And she'd gone to bed. She was in bed. She wasn't up, she wasn't in pain. She was in bed and he arrived at the house in this darkness. And he came in and he wanted to see my grandmother.

· 24:02

NARRATOR: Though surprised by the visit, Eva's husband, Richard, let Shipman in and he moved straight to Eva's side to comfort her. Shipman unlocked his briefcase and took out a syringe. [HEART BEATING]

· 24:33

But Shipman wasn't sedating her. He knew the dose he needed to kill Eva. And instead of sleeping, she became unconscious, her breathing shallow, her blood pressure depressed. As Shipman comforted her husband, Eva Lyons quietly slipped away.

· 24:57

DEBBIE BARTLETT: Grandma died this day, March, Monday the 17th. And I wrote my entry in the diary, grandma died today. Mom's going up tomorrow. I'm very upset. Why her? She tried so hard. I've written in my little diary that I kept. So they must have told me that night. They must have either woken me up or told me that night. And my grandfather clearly did think there was something suspicious because he used the phrase to myself when I was sat there and my mother,

· 25:29

I think the doctor helped her on her way.

· 25:33

NARRATOR: Shipman had Eva Lyons' body cremated. There would never be any trace of his crime.

· 25:38

DEBBIE BARTLETT: My grandfather, I think, was flattered.

· 25:42

What a wonderful doctor calling in at 11:00 at night to see my wife. Wow, what a nice bloke and all that sort of thing. And they didn't question it.

· 25:59

NARRATOR: In his three years in Todmorden, Shipman killed eight of his patients. But while his killing remained undetected, his own health problems did not. In May 1975, an ambulance was called to the family home. High on pethidine, Shipman had blacked out and fallen in his bathroom. He was already an accomplished liar and convinced his colleagues he had epilepsy. But in November, a local pharmacist noticed the high levels of pethidine supplied to Shipman

· 26:35

and told the other GPs. Shipman confessed. His shocked colleagues demanded his immediate resignation, called the police, and found him a place as a patient at this psychiatric hospital while the police investigated.

· 26:56

PETER DEVINE: Shipman was then arrested and charged with obtaining pethidine by deception. The practice fired him because of this drug misuse.

· 27:09

NARRATOR: After being sacked, Shipman appeared at Halifax Magistrates Court in January 1976.

· 27:18

TV NEWS REPORTER: Dr. Fred Shipman was to make the headlines for the first time. He was convicted of dishonestly obtaining drugs, of forging NHS prescriptions, and of unlawful possession of pethidine. Dr. Shipman could have been struck off the medical register for these offenses, but the authorities were lenient. He was fined just 600 pounds.

· 27:37

PETER DEVINE: He got fined 600 pounds for it and that was like just quite bizarre really that here's a doctor who, according to the medical examiners who actually did a medical examination of him, he said his veins in his arms and his legs were collapsed and he said he looked like a drug addict. And he estimated that Shipman has been

· 28:06

a drug addict for five years. On that assumption, that meant that when he was in Pontefract, he was also a drug addict.

· 28:15

NARRATOR: On the 28th of April, 1976, the Penal Cases Committee of the General Medical Council wrote to him and merely warned him of his conduct.

· 28:24

PETER DEVINE: He should have definitely and stopped when he was at Halifax Magistrates Court in 1976. That would have been a perfect opportunity for him to have been struck off and never allowed back in again.

· 28:39

NARRATOR: The GMC could have struck him off. Instead, Shipman was free to continue his medical career. But despite promising them he would never enter general practice again, he saw an advert in the British Medical Journal for a GP position and he applied. The practice was in Hyde, greater Manchester, 25 miles away from where people knew about him and his habits. The advert had been placed by the partners of the Donneybrook

· 29:14

practice. The partners there seemed willing to forget Shipman's past misdemeanors. I

· 29:21

SUSAN BOOTH: If you had somebody who had a previous addiction to drugs who was applying for a job with you, I think you'd have to be extremely cautious taking them on as a partner. It doesn't mean to say that you wouldn't.

· 29:34

JEREMY DIRCKZE: I don't think it's unreasonable that they gave him a chance if they were satisfied that it wasn't a problem at the time. If that doctor has recognized addiction, has been through rehabilitation, has then been given the sort of all clear that he's beaten that addiction and he's functioning normally, then I think you have to give everybody a chance. Obviously, if he was still actively addicted and in a medical situation, it wouldn't

· 30:05

be an appropriate position to have that doctor. But everybody makes mistakes in their life and deserves a chance if they can show that they've got through that and been OK'd by whoever was looking after them.

· 30:21

NARRATOR: So Shipman got the job and the family moved to a house in Londondale, just 15 minutes from Hyde. Shipman's reputation, both good and bad, began to grow.

· 30:32

SUSAN BOOTH: There was a central meeting room and we used to have meetings on a Friday lunchtime where someone would come and present new medical things, new drugs and so forth, and he would come to that. Quite an arrogant person, wanted to say a lot at the meetings, wanted to give his opinion all the time.

· 30:57

JEREMY DIRCKZE: He had a reputation of being very much doing what he wanted when he wanted and you don't question him.

· 31:08

NARRATOR: But the people of Hyde warmed to him quickly.

· 31:10

SUSAN BOOTH: People thought a lot of him and as I say, wanted to be his patient. He had to full list. People waiting to get on his list most of the time.

· 31:22

DENNIS MAHER: Everybody, without exception, had the highest praise for Dr. Shipman, what a wonderful doctor he was and people said he was very, very accessible. You could even go and see him on a Saturday, which was very unusual. Even sometimes he would open his surgery on a Sunday. He took great care of people who were sick. He would visit people at home.

· 31:52

They found him easy to talk to. He listened to people. Shipman excelled at this.

· 32:01

ROY SAXTON: I thought he was a wonderful doctor. Everybody seemed to think he was wonderful. He was very, very well thought of-- very well thought of.

· 32:12

HELEN OGBORN: He was somebody who was willing to do home visits, he was somebody who was willing to perhaps squeeze people in to be able to see them. And from that point of view, that felt really good.

· 32:25

NARRATOR: Shipman didn't kill in his first year in Hyde. Instead, he started hoarding the lethal drug diamorphine.

· 32:33

BERNARD POSTLES: He would go along to the pharmacy near to his surgery, having written out a prescription for a patient that didn't need it. He would also make out a prescription for somebody who actually did need the morphine. But he would make up the prescription for more than they actually needed so he would collect more from the pharmacy and then go and deliver it at their home

· 33:00

but only deliver a part of it and he would steal the rest. And the third way that he was doing it was that he would go along to somebody who had died, usually a cancer victim because they had morphine at their home because they'd been administered it for pain relief in the weeks and months before their death, and he would actually offer to actually take away any residue, offer the relatives that he would take it away. And he would take it away and he would keep that. And he would use that diamorphine gathered together

· 33:31

in that way to actually murder his patients.

· 33:34

STUART HAMILTON: All doctors, when they graduate from medical school, one of the proudest days of our lives, really, we give the Hippocratic oath and we swear to help, to do no harm. And really, he betrayed everything that we are taught to believe as medical practitioners, that what we do is for people's good, it's to help. He basically turned everything that medicine

· 34:03

is about on its head.

· 34:06

NARRATOR: By 1978, Shipman had got to know his patients well. He was seeing them more and more at home, rather than at the Donneybrook surgery. He would now establish the method of killing recognized by many as his MO.

· 34:21

BERNARD POSTLES: He selected people who were vulnerable in the community and it tended to be people who were living alone.

· 34:29

NARRATOR: Sarah Marsland was 86 and was healthy and independent but had become depressed after the death of one of her daughters. She was to be Harold Shipman's first official victim of 1978.

· 34:42

ROY SAXTON: Grandma Marsland was quite a healthy woman. She walked a lot, but she had not been very well over the last two or three weeks before she actually died.

· 34:59

NARRATOR: On the 7th of August, Harold Shipman paid a visit to Sarah Marsland at her home. No one knew he was there until Sarah's daughter, Irene, let herself in. She found him in her mother's bedroom, leaning over her body. Shipman told Irene he'd found her unconscious downstairs but had moved her to her bed and tried to resuscitate her. Naturally, Irene believed him and the family simply

· 35:26

buried Grandma Marsland and mourned her loss.

· 35:31

ROY SAXTON: At the time, we did not know that Grandma Marsland was involved. We never thought anything about Grandma Marlsnad being involved. And it wasn't until it come up later.

· 35:44

NARRATOR: Shipman had almost been caught in the act, but his escape revealed his proficiency at lying. And again because he was a doctor, no one questioned his behavior.

· 35:54

ROY SAXTON: He was a governor at the school where me children went. So you trust the doctor, don't you? You've got to trust the doctor.

· 36:03

NARRATOR: Shipman had almost been found out in the killing of Sarah Marsland. The following year, he came even close to being caught again.

· 36:12

JACK SHELMERDINE: He gave my father an injection. I think the expression was to rest him through the night.

· 36:23

NARRATOR: Harold Frederick Shipman qualified as a doctor in August 1971. It's now known the very first suspicious death took place in May 1972, when Shipman was a junior doctor in Pontefract. But it was as a GP in Hyde where he established his MO. How did he get away with it for so long?

· 36:47

BERNARD POSTLES: Shipman was always the first person on the scene. Shipman had been the last person to see the deceased.

· 36:58

NARRATOR: Shipman always saw his patients days or hours before they died and was always present after death to sign a death certificate. Under British law, if someone dies at home and their GP knows the cause of death, they can sign the certificate but those certificates still had to be counter signed by a colleague.

· 37:20

SUSAN BOOTH: A, your confirming that the person is dead and B, you are confirming the cause of death, although that's a difficult thing to confirm because the only information you're going on is what the doctor who filled out the part one and the death certificate has told you. I would say all of that is based on trust because it's very rare that you can look at a body

· 37:49

and know what the person has died of.

· 37:53

NARRATOR: But Shipman also managed to avoid much suspicion because he arranged for as many of his victims as possible to be cremated. A second doctor is also needed to counter sign cremation forms.

· 38:09

JEREMY DIRCKZE: You basically trusted the history and the story that the doctor would relay to you. And in fact, of any doctors, Dr. Shipman's was probably the most detailed histories that we used to get it, always very plausible and there was no reason to doubt was he was telling us.

· 38:29

NARRATOR: No one ever questioned Shipman's paperwork, mainly because he'd also started to back date his patients' medical records.

· 38:38

BERNARD POSTLES: When he'd murdered one of his patients, quite often he would go back to his surgery and then insert a record which he backdated for perhaps one or two weeks which he then used to corroborate what he actually put on the death certificate.

· 38:56

NARRATOR: But he did make mistakes. On the 17th of November, 1979, Hyde resident Jack Shelmerdine started feeling breathless.

· 39:07

JACK SHELMERDINE: It was late in the evening and my father deteriorated. He was finding it difficult to breathe. So we call Dr. Shipman and he came to see him.

· 39:22

NARRATOR: He'd only been in Hyde for two years, but already Shipman was a firm favorite.

· 39:28

JACK SHELMERDINE: There were I think six doctors in the Donneybrook practice, and if you saw someone else they were writing the prescription before you'd closed the door and Dr. Shipman didn't. He listened to what you had to say.

· 39:44

NARRATOR: But that night, the Shelmerdines would experience the darker side of Harold Shipman.

· 39:49

JACK SHELMERDINE: I was in the room because I distinctly remember he'd given my father an injection. I think the expression was to rest him through the night.

· 40:01

NARRATOR: Shipman left the scene, but he'd underestimated the dose. The 77-year-old did not die straight away.

· 40:09

JACK SHELMERDINE: I was concerned that my father was still unconscious, still asleep, as we were thinking. And I rang Dr. Shipman and I remember his words were, oh, well, he might well make it. Those words, he might make it seemed odd to me.

· 40:34

NARRATOR: Shipman called an ambulance and Jack was rushed to hospital, where he fell into a coma that lasted 30 hours. His son stated at his bedside throughout, but the next afternoon Jack, Sr. died.

· 40:49

JACK SHELMERDINE: And I just wondered whether questions ought to be asked. I wasn't thinking in terms of Dr. Shipman having done anything. We were more inclined to think that the hospital had done something wrong rather than Shipman.

· 41:06

NARRATOR: To his family, the good Dr. Shipman was beyond reproach.

· 41:11

JACK SHELMERDINE: It's an odd situation that he killed my father and that I still think he was a good doctor. The two don't seem reconcilable. But I can't explain the attitude I have.

· 41:31

I mean logic says you should hate the man, but I don't know.

· 41:42

NARRATOR: The murder of Jack Shelmerdine illustrated the true extent to which Shipman's patients trusted him, a trust that would let him get away with murder for years to come.

· 41:52

JACK SHELMERDINE: It is murder, but I would like to think of it as euthanasia. Twisted logic, that's life.

· 42:03

NARRATOR: Up to 1985, Shipman's murderous activities at the Donneybrook practice accounted for the deaths of 22 of his patients.

· 42:14

PETER DEVINE: There were 22 certificates which he'd signed, but that wasn't all of the deaths he was involved with. That's a shocking number of deaths if you think about it over a period of 19 months.

· 42:35

NARRATOR: But now that he had learned how to cover his tracks, how to hoodwink his partners, he accelerated his killing. Soon he would go it alone with his own practice and his own patient list running into the thousands. In his first decade as a serial killer, he had struck 31 times. In his next, he would murder 168.

· 43:03

SPEAKER 2: He said, well, how bad would you like it to be? The only way she's going out of here is by Robinson's and Jordan's, which was the funeral directors.

· 43:12

SPEAKER 3: They said that they had found morphine in me mom's body and they would be charging him with me mom's murder.

· 43:34

NARRATOR: To catch this serial killer, the police had to dig up his victims from their place of rest.

· 43:40

DENNIS MAHER: You became very aware of the smell.

· 43:46

NARRATOR: And to unravel is well covered tracks.

· 43:50

BERNARD POSTLES: He wasn't as clever as he thought he was in being able to explain his way out of this.

· 43:55

NARRATOR: With exclusive access to Shipman's own prison letters.

· 43:58

SPEAKER 4: He says that the CID was selfish, pompous, self-important, and glory-hunting.

· 44:07

NARRATOR: How did Britain's most prolific serial killer get away with murder for 27 years?

Question:

Given the information you have regarding Harold Shipman, explain under which theory of "critical criminology" you would argue he operated. State your position, reasoning, and support.

Your paper should be 2-3 pages in length and conform to the writing standards. Include at least two scholarly references in addition to the course textbook.