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Harold shipman: seeking death instead of treatment

"Dr death"Most commonly known by Harold Shipman, was a British doctor born on January 14, 1946, Nottingham, England and died January 13, 2004, Wakefield; also k...

bteotfw19 4 min read · 2 months ago

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"Dr death"

Most commonly known by Harold Shipman, was a British doctor born on January 14, 1946, Nottingham, England and died January 13, 2004, Wakefield; also known for being one of the deadliest serial killers in history. I know it seems unbelievable; how would a doctor be THAT horrible, it doesn't make sense right? and if some of you find his story relatable, then seeing a therapist won't hurt. Let's get into the story without further ado.

Harold murdered about 250 of his patients, according to an official inquiry into his crimes. In 2000 he was declared guilty on 15 counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison; he died due to suicide four years later.

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A criminal's life

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Harold was born into a financially moderate family in Manchester, a brilliant child who was interested in medicine, as he watched his mother inject morphine to ease the pain she suffered while dying from lung cancer. In 1966 he got married to Primose Oxtoby, later having four children.
Shipman received a medical degree from Leeds University in 1970, and a few years later, he became a general practitioner in Todmorden, Lancashire. In 1975, after it was discovered that he had written multiple fraudulent prescriptions for the opiate pethidine, to which he had become addicted, he was forced out of his practice and into drug rehabilitation.

In 1977, he found work as a general practitioner in the town of Hyde in Greater Manchester, where he gained respect and developed a flourishing practice. Over the years complaints and suspicions about elderly people who died in his care, but of course for someone as bright as him, the police closed the investigation after several months of searching due to insufficient evidence.

Two months later, one of his patients, an 81-year-old woman, was discovered dead in her home after only two hours of Shipman's visit. Her family was shocked by her sudden death (she appeared to be in good health), what was stranger, is her change of will to benefit Harnold (it included her entire estate, valued at some £400,000, to him) as he also insisted that no autopsy was necessary. The family went to the police, and an investigation uncovered 14 other suspicious deaths. All of the victims had received lethal doses of the painkiller diamorphine and that Shipman had signed a death certificate attributing the incident to natural causes.

He was eventually arrested, and in 2000 he was convicted on 15 counts of murder and a singular count of forgery and sentenced to life in prison. As for me, I've never seen a wife more loyal than his, she stayed by his side and supported him throughout his trial and visited him almost daily. In 2004, Dr death died by suicide, hanging himself in his cell.

Victims and motive

A government inquiry was to determine the number of victims Shipman may have murdered; in 2005 an official report found that he had killed an estimated 250 patient beginning in 1971. His motives were unclear, some speculated that he was avenging the death of his mother (yet again, if this was true, he had no right in killing innocent patients that had nothing to do with the death of his mother that was suffering from lung cancer, not from people), while others suggested that he was practicing euthanasia; removing from the population older people who might otherwise have become a burden to the health care system. A third possibility was that he derived pleasure of knowing that as a doctor, he had the power of life or death over his patients and killing was a way of expressing his power.

Despite his forgery of the will of one of his victims, financial gain appeared not to be his ulterior motive.

One question that made investigators rethink it all was how such a big number of deaths could have occurred without enough concerns and suspicions of foul play. Even weirder; Shipman's patients were normally healthy shortly before their encounters with him. The fact that he took advantage of his patients' trust in him as a doctor, made his crimes particularly horrible and shameful to the public.