Shipman killed 215 patients, inquiry rules

GP is UK's worst serial killer
He could have killed 250
Victims: 171 women and 44 men

Staff and agencies
Friday July 19, 2002

Harold Shipman murdered 215 of his patients, the judge heading the official inquiry into the family GP's crimes said today, confirming him as Britain's worst serial killer.

Dame Janet Smith, a high court judge, added that there was a "real suspicion" that the doctor, from Hyde, Greater Manchester, could have claimed another 45 victims during a killing spree that went unchecked for 23 years.

The systems in place "provided no safeguard at all", the inquiry found, and it was "deeply disturbing" his killings did not arouse suspicion for so many years.

Her first report into Shipman's killings said that he began murdering patients in 1975, just a year after entering practice in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, and claimed all his other victims in Hyde before he was finally arrested in 1998.

Dame Janet, who has been hearing evidence since June last year at Manchester town hall, delivered decisions in 494 cases. She decided that the first of Shipman's victims was Mrs Eva Lyons, who he murdered in March 1975 while at the Abraham Ormerod medical practice in Todmorden.

Another 71 patients were killed during Shipman's time at the Donneybrook House group practice in Hyde. The remaining 143 were murdered at Shipman's single-handed practice that he set up in Market Street, Hyde, in 1992.

Of his victims, 171 were women and 44 were men, with the oldest being 93-year-old Ann Cooper and the youngest 41-year-old Peter Lewis.

The inquiry examined a total of 888 cases. Dame Janet said there was "compelling evidence" in 394 of them that Shipman was not responsible for the death. She said there were 38 deaths where there was "so little evidence, or evidence of such poor quality, that I was unable to form any view at all".

Dame Janet said in the report: "No one reading this report can fail to be shocked by the enormity of the crimes committed by Shipman and to feel, as I do, the deepest sympathy for his victims and their families. His activities have brought tragedy upon them and also upon the communities in which he practised and which gave him their trust."

The judge said at a news conference that the 215 total was "as complete and accurate" a figure of Shipman's crimes that may ever be published. She said she had not been able to determine any clear motive for the killings.

The official spokesman for the prime minister, Tony Blair, said the horror of the killings should not "erode the bond of trust" between doctors and patients.


GP obtained huge heroin supplies

Shipman had been convicted of drugs offences in 1975 and had declared his intention never to carry controlled drugs again. Yet he was able to obtain large quantities.

He claimed his victims' lives with injections of diamorphine - the clinical name for heroin - and then falsified his computer records to create fictitious symptoms to explain away their deaths. The inquiry revealed that in 1996 he had obtained, in the name of a dying patient on a single occasion, enough diamorphine to kill 360 people.


'It must never happen again'

Dame Janet said the inquiry would now go on to direct its efforts to devising improved systems "so as to ensure such a terrible betrayal of trust by a family doctor can never happen again".

Shipman is to be sent a copy of the report in Frankland jail, Co Durham, where he is serving life for the murders of 15 patients, who were among the 215 patients on the inquiry's list of his victims. He was convicted of those 15 murders in Preston crown court in January 2000.

Primrose, Shipman's wife, refused to answer any questions from journalists after the report setting out the scale of her husband's crimes was published.

At her small semi-detached cottage in the village of Walshford near Wetherby in West Yorkshire, Mrs Shipman answered the door to reporters but quickly slammed it closed without comment. Mrs Shipman, 54, a mother of four, has stood by her husband.