Serial Killer Doctors by Patrick Turner

Author:Patrick Turner [Turner, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime, Retail, Nonfiction
Amazon: B009RUVY7C
Publisher: Oxford Publishing Ventures Ltd
Published: 2012-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

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Harold Shipman

The list of the world’s most prolific serial killers makes dreadful reading. It contains names such as Luis Alfredo Garavito, a Colombian who killed 138 street children in the nineteen-nineties, and his countryman, Pedro Alonso Lopez, who killed 110 young girls between 1969 and 1980. At the top of the list, however, and earning the unenviable title of the world’s most prolific serial killer, is the quiet, bearded Yorkshireman, Harold Shipman, responsible for the deaths of at least 218 of his patients. In fact, the enquiry that followed his conviction examined the cases of 500 of his patients and concluded that the death toll might even have been greater and in its report it stated that there was genuine suspicion that he had killed another 45, although there was insufficient evidence to establish real certainty. Some sources place the number of people who were killed by him closer to 1,000.

What drove a doctor to carry out such heinous acts over such a long period? There are many hypotheses. One is that he was, quite simply, a psychopath and his acts were no more than a manifestation of the classic tendency of the psychopath to control and manipulate. There is a view that it was a fascination with the power of drugs that led him to kill. He liked to experiment with them, this theory suggests, playing with the individual doses he gave his patients and seeing just how much they could take before the drugs proved fatal. Or perhaps it was a morbid fascination with death that caused him to bring it to so many people? Then again, Shipman had enjoyed a particularly complex relationship with his mother, Vera, watching her die from lung cancer while he was still a child. Perhaps the fact that he mainly targeted elderly ladies suggested that he was merely trying to recreate her death every time he killed a patient.

Indeed, the young Harold Shipman – or ‘Freddy’ as his mother called him – was certainly the favourite of her three children. Born Harold Frederick Shipman in 1946 in Nottingham, he was the second of four children. His father was a lorry driver and Vera, his mother, was a very fussy woman, especially where her children were concerned. In fact, there were many in the neighbourhood who considered her an out-and-out snob. Freddy, it would appear, inherited some of the airs and graces of his mother and is remembered as having a similarly superior air that alienated him from other children. It was not helped by the fact that his mother always made him wear a tie.

He worshipped Vera which made it all the more difficult for him when she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He would run home from school to make her a cup of tea and sit by her sick bed chatting about his day. He would undoubtedly have watched in morbid fascination as doctors came and went during his mother’s last months, injecting her with morphine to alleviate the pain from which she was suffering.

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