Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time (23 page)

‘Fred said that there were two other bodies in shallow graves in the woods but there was no way they would ever be found,’ she told the interviewer. ‘He said there were twenty other bodies, not in one place but spread around and he would give police one a year. He told me the truth about the girls in the cellar and what happened to them so I don’t see why he would lie about other bodies.’

She also said that West had confessed to the murder of Mary Bastholm. She was one of two young woman ‘in shallow graves in the woods, but there was no way they would ever be found’.

‘No one has even scratched the surface of this case,’ said the documentary’s producer. ‘Social services had three hundred missing-people files and one hundred missing girls. There were two girls from Jordansbrook children’s home who were making a living as prostitutes from twenty-five Cromwell Street.’

The programme also described how West had told his solicitor that he believed ‘the spirits of his victims were coming up through the floor from the cellar where they were entombed’.

‘When they come up into you it’s beautiful,’ West is alleged to have said. ‘It’s when they go away you are trying to hold them, you feel them flying away from you and you try to stop them. You can’t send them back to where they were.’

Soon after this Rosemary West abandoned her appeal and told the press that she had resigned herself to spending the rest of her life in Durham’s high-security prison. She also apologised to her step-daughter Anne-Marie for ‘the abuse she suffered’ and expressed a desire to be reconciled to her.

Then, on 22 January 2003, the BBC reported that ‘the wedding between jailed serial killer Rose West and session musician Dave Glover has been called off – just days after it was announced. The pair have been writing to each other for a year, but Mr Glover is reported to have pulled out because of the publicity.’ Bass player Glover, 36, had been working regularly with the band Slade for 18 months, but his contract was then terminated.

A spokesman for the band said: ‘It has all come as an incredible shock. At no point had Dave Glover discussed this. It’s like marrying Hitler.’

West and Glover had announced their intention to marry on 19 January. Rose West explained that she wanted to give ‘this young man his life back’.

Chapter 18

Doctor Death

Name: Dr Harold Shipman

Nationality: English

Number of victims: 215+

Favoured method of killing: injecting pethidine/morphine

Born: 1946

Profession: GP

Married: yes

Reign of terror: early 1970s–98

Dr Harold Shipman is thought to be the most prolific serial killer ever. He is said to have killed at least 215 people and perhaps as many as 400 over a career of murder that lasted nearly 30 years. Yet he was an ordinary GP working in the English Midlands.

Born into a working-class family in Nottingham on 14 June 1946, Harold Frederick Shipman was known as Fred or Freddy. Although the family lived in a red-brick terraced council house like any other, under the influence of his mother, Vera, they set themselves apart from others.

 ‘Vera was friendly enough,’ said a neighbour. ‘But she really did see her family as superior to the rest of us. Not only that, you could tell Freddy was her favourite, the one she saw as the most promising of her three children.’

Shipman’s sister Pauline was seven years his senior, his brother Clive, four years younger than him. But he was the apple of his mother’s eye and she decided that it was Harold that was going make a success out of life. She also decided who Harold could play with and, to set him apart from the other boys, she insisted that he wore a tie while the others dressed more casually.

A confident and clever child, Shipman did well at junior school and was accepted by High Pavement Grammar school. There he failed to shine in the classroom, but made his way by dogged hard work.

Where he did shine was on the running track and the football field. But he did not involve himself in the camaraderie of sport. His unshakeable belief in his innate superiority alienated those who would otherwise have been his friends. An isolated adolescent, he had to cope as his beloved mother wasted away with terminal lung cancer. He would race home after school to make her a cup of tea and chat with her. It was clear that she found great solace in his company. It is thought that Shipman learned his engaging bedside manner then. He would also play out his mother’s deathbed scene over and over with the elderly women that would become the majority of his victims.

Towards the end of her life, Vera was in great pain. Shipman watched in fascination as the family doctor injected her with morphine. It took away the pain, but it did not stop Vera growing thinner and frailer. Then on 21 June 1963, at the age of 43, his mother died. Shipman himself was just 17. The loss seems to have left him with no regard for human life or feelings towards others.

Two years after his mother died, Shipman was admitted to Leeds University Medical School, after re-sitting the entrance examinations. At university he was a loner and most of the teachers and his fellow students at Leeds could barely remember him. Those who did claim that he looked down on them, seemingly bemused by the way his fellow students behaved.

‘It was as if he tolerated us,’ said one. ‘If someone told a joke he would smile patiently, but Fred never wanted to join in. It seems funny, because I later heard he’d been a good athlete, so you’d have thought he’d be more of a team player.’

However, on the soccer pitch he revealed another, darker side. His intense need to win made him extremely aggressive both on and off the ball.

At school, Shipman had never shown much interest in girls.

‘I don’t think he ever had a girlfriend,’ said one teacher. ‘In fact, he took his older sister to school dances. They made a strange couple. But then, he was a bit strange, a pretentious lad.’

However, at university he quickly acquired a girlfriend. She was daughter of his landlord, a 16-year-old window-dresser name Primrose, three years his junior. She also came from a strict background with a mother who controlled her acquaintanceships. No calendar girl, Primrose was delighted to have found a boyfriend. They married in November 1966 when she was 17 and five months pregnant.

Shipman’s sense of superiority was not dented even when he had to re-sit a number of exams at medical school. But he eventually got the grades to graduate and moved on to a mandatory period of hospital training, becoming a junior house doctor at Pontefract General Infirmary. It is thought that he began his career of killing there – murdering at least ten patients, including a four-year-old girl.

In 1974 he joined a medical practice in Todmorden in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. By this time he had two children. In this small Yorkshire town, Shipman blossomed. No longer the withdrawn loner, he was suddenly outgoing and became respected by both his patients and his fellow practitioners, who welcomed the up-to-date information they got from a young doctor, fresh from medical school. But the staff under him at the practice saw a different side of Shipman. He was often rude and liked to belittle his juniors, frequently berating them as ‘stupid’. He also had a way of manipulating the other doctors and the general opinion was that he was a control freak – though he was also seen as hard-working, enthusiastic and sociable.

But soon problems surfaced. He began having blackouts. He told the other partners he suffered from epilepsy. However, the true reason for the blackouts was soon revealed. The practice’s receptionist Marjorie Walker discovered some discrepancies in the local chemists’ narcotics ledgers. The records showed that Shipman had been prescribing large amounts of pethidine – a morphine-like analgesic whose addictive properties are still in dispute – in the names of several patients and on behalf of the practice itself. These discrepancies were investigated by partner Dr John Dacre.

The matter came to a head at a staff meeting. Partner Dr Michael Grieve recalled the scene: ‘We were sat round with Fred sitting on one side and up comes John on the opposite and says, “Now young Fred, can you explain this?”’

Dacre then laid before Shipman all the evidence that he has been collecting. It clearly showed that Shipman had been prescribing pethidine to patients who never received it.

‘In fact, the pethidine had found its way into Fred’s very own veins,’ said Grieve.

Realising his career was on the line, Shipman begged for a second chance. When this was refused, Shipman hurled his medical bag to the ground. His colleagues were shocked by this petulant outburst. Soon after, Shipman’s wife Primrose stormed into the room, screaming that her husband would never resign.

‘You’ll have to force him out!’ she shrieked.

Indeed, that is what they did. Shipman left Todmorden and checked into a drug treatment centre in York. He was found guilty of forgery and prescription fraud, and was fined £600, but he was not struck off by the General Medical Council.

‘If Fred hadn’t, at that point, gone straight into hospital,’ said Grieve, ‘perhaps his sentence would have been more than just a fine. I think it’s perhaps the fact that he put his hand up and said “I need treatment” and went into hospital, and then the sick-doctor routine takes over.’

This was probably also the reason he was not struck off the medical register.

There is now some doubt that Shipman had been using all the pethidine himself and there are those who believe that Shipman had been using it to kill patients in Todmorden.

Two years later, Shipmen got a post at the Donnybrook Medical Centre in Hyde, Greater Manchester, with surprising ease.

‘His approach was “I have had this problem, this conviction for abuse of pethidine”,’ said Dr Jeffery Moysey of the Donnybrook Centre. ‘“I have undergone treatment. I am now clean. All I can ask you to do is to trust me on that issue and to watch me”.’

But they did not watch him closely enough. Again, he appeared to be a dedicated, hard-working doctor, who earned his colleagues’ respect and his patients’ trust. And, again, he was seen as bullying and abusive by those under him – though he was skilled at masking this in front of his peers. But this time there were no blackouts, and no suspicion of drug abuse. This left him free to kill.

He stayed at the Donnybrook clinic for 16 years. Then in 1993, after falling out with the partners, he set up on his own as a GP with Primrose as his part-time receptionist. Such was his reputation in Hyde that he attracted a large number of patients. It is not known how many of them he killed.

The first person to suspect that something was wrong was local undertaker Alan Massey. He noted that Shipman’s patients seemed to be dying at an unusually high rate. But there was also a curious pattern to their deaths and a strange similarity to the corpses when he called to collect them.

‘Dr Shipman’s always seem to be the same, or very similar,’ said Massey. ‘They could be sat in a chair, could be laid on the settee, but I would say ninety per cent were fully clothed. There was never anything in the house that I saw that indicated the person had been ill. It just seems the person, where they were, had died. There was something that didn’t quite fit.’

The undertaker was so troubled that he questioned Shipman about it.

‘I asked him if there was any cause for concern,’ said Massey. ‘He just said: “No, there isn’t.”’

Shipman showed Massey the book in which he recorded the details of death certificates he had issued. In it, he entered the cause of death and noted any causes for concern. He assured Massey that all the deaths were straightforward. There was nothing to worry about. Anybody who wanted to inspect the book had free access. As Shipman showed no unease when questioned, Massey was placated and took no further action. But his daughter, Debbie Brambroffe, who was also in the business, was not so easily mollified. She enlisted the support of Dr Susan Booth, who came from a nearby practice.

By law a doctor from an unrelated practice must countersign cremation documents. The fee paid for this service is known cynically as ‘cash for ash’. So when Dr Booth turned up at the funeral parlour of countersign some of Shipman’s cremation forms, Brambroffe told her of her misgivings.

‘She was concerned about the number of deaths of Dr Shipman’s patients that they’d attended recently,’ said Dr Booth. ‘She was also puzzled by the way in which the patients were found. They were mostly female, living on their own, found dead sitting in a chair fully dressed – not in their night-clothes lying ill in bed.’

Booth confided in her colleagues and one of them, Dr Linda Reynolds, contacted the coroner John Pollard. He, in turn, contracted the police. Shipman’s medical records were examined surreptitiously, but nothing untoward was found as the causes of death and treatments matched perfectly. What the police did not then know was that Shipman re-wrote his patients’ notes after he had killed them.

Recently this preliminary investigation has been widely criticised as the police did not check to see whether Shipman had a criminal record. Nor did they consult the General Medical Council. Had they discovered Shipman’s history of drug abuse and forgery, they might have dug a little deeper and put an end to Shipman’s killing spree there and then.

Shipman was eventually stopped by the dogged determination of Angela Woodruff, the daughter of Kathleen Grundy who died suddenly on 24 June 1998. A former mayor, Mrs Grundy was a tireless worker for local charities and a wealthy woman. Even though she was 81, she had boundless energy and her death came as a shock to the many people who knew her.

When she failed to show at an Age Concern club where she helped serve meals to elderly pensioners, someone was sent to her home to find out if anything was wrong. They found her lying on a sofa, fully dressed. She was already dead, so they called her GP, Dr Shipman.

It transpired that he had visited Mrs Grundy a few hours earlier, and was the last person to see her alive. The purpose of his visit, he said, had been to take blood samples for a study on ageing. Shipman then pronounced her dead and her daughter, Angela Woodruff, was contacted. Shipman assured Mrs Woodruff that a post-mortem was unnecessary as he had seen her mother shortly before her death.

After Mrs Grundy was buried, Mrs Woodruff got a phone call from a firm of solicitors who claimed to have a copy of Mrs Grundy’s will. Woodruff was a solicitor herself and her firm had always handled her mother’s affairs. They held a will that Mrs Grundy had lodged with them in 1996.

The moment Woodruff saw the new document, she knew it was a fake. It was a form that you can obtain from a post office or newsagents. And it was filled in sloppily, poorly worded and was badly typed.

‘My mother was a meticulously tidy person,’ she said. ‘The thought of her signing a document which is so badly typed didn’t make any sense. The signature looked strange, it looked too big.’

It also asked for the body to be cremated, which Woodruff knew was not her mother’s wish. And, tellingly, it left £386,000 to Dr Shipman.

‘It wasn’t a case of “Look, she’s not left me anything in her will,”’ Woodruff said. ‘But the concept of Mum signing a document leaving everything to her doctor was unbelievable.’

The obvious conclusion was that Dr Shipman had murdered her mother for profit. Mrs Woodruff went to the Warwickshire police, who passed the investigation on to the Greater Manchester force where it ended up in the hands of Detective Superintendent Bernard Postles. Once he saw the new will, he agreed with Angela Woodruff’s conclusions.

‘You only have to look at it once and you start thinking it’s like something off a John Bull printing press,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to have twenty years as a detective to know it’s a fake.’

A post-mortem was required to get conclusive proof that Kathleen Grundy had been murdered, so the police applied to the coroner for an exhumation order. Such orders are rare. The Greater Manchester Police is one of the largest police forces in the country. It was formed in 1974 and since then there had not been a single disinterment.

‘We did not have one officer who had ever taken part in an exhumation,’ said Detective Superintendent Postles. ‘We had to ask the National Crime Squad for advice.’

By the end of the investigation of the Shipman case, Greater Manchester Police would be all too familiar with exhumation.

Mrs Grundy’s body was disinterred one August night amid gusting wind and driving rain just five weeks after she had been buried in Hyde. The mud-streaked coffin was opened and hair and tissue samples were taken for analysis. At the same time, Shipman’s office and home were raided, so he had no chance to conceal or destroy any evidence. Shipman showed no surprise at this turn of events. Rather, he registered bemused contempt as the warrant was read.