The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (59 page)

Dr Harold Shipman

Even before it was suspected that Jack the Ripper had had medical training, doctors have been looked upon with a hint of suspicion.
After all, they not only have our lives in their hands, as the saying goes, but they also have the skills and tools to kill with comparative ease.

Fortunately, killer doctors are a great rarity.
The sort of people who are drawn to care for others – and to spend years training to do so – are not very likely to choose to become murderers as well.
As always, however, there are exceptions to the rule.
In fact, it was a doctor who was possibly the most prolific serial killer known to criminologists.

In September 1998, police arrested Manchester GP Harold Frederick Shipman, on suspicion of murder.
At the time, even investigators found it hard to convince themselves that this pleasant-mannered man, with a practice of over 3,000 patients, could be a killer.
But as the evidence mounted, they began to suspect that he was actually the most ruthless killer in British legal history.

It is clear from what we know about his life and background that Shipman was not one of those people who impress others with their vitality and charisma.
On the contrary, he seemed a rather quiet and colourless little man.
Born in Nottingham in 1946, he struggled out of his dull working-class background because he wanted to live up to the expectations of his mother, Vera.
‘Fred’ was her favourite, and she deeply believed in him.
When she died of cancer when he was 17, he felt he had to justify her belief in him, and in spite of an initial failure, got into Leeds University Medical School, where he was a less than brilliant student.

His problem was always a certain lack of self-belief.
At medical school he remained a loner, without close friends and without even that indispensable appendage of the randy medical student, a girlfriend.

Then came the event that transformed his life.
On the bus that took him to medical school every morning, he noticed a plump, quiet girl among the teenagers.
Primrose Oxtoby was a ‘plain Jane’, who was completely under the thumb of her parents.
They were so strait-laced that they would not even allow her to attend a youth club – and Primrose would never have dreamed of trying to assert herself.

She was three years Shipman’s junior, and when he realised that she regarded him with wide-eyed admiration, he was hooked.
Because she adored him, this quiet, shy virgin became an addiction.
Unfortunately, soon after she surrendered her virginity, she discovered she was pregnant.
They married in 1966, but her parents were so shocked that they disowned her.

Shipman later admitted her pregnancy was ‘a mistake’.
But it was a mistake he had to live with, and his daydreams of a great career in medicine were over.
And Primrose was not even a very good housekeeper – police who later came to search their house were shocked by the dirt and general untidiness.

There followed three years in which Shipman was a junior houseman in Pontefract General Infirmary.
It was dull, grinding work, and by now there was a second baby.

His first professional appointment as a GP came in March 1974, in the small town of Todmorden, in the Pennines.
And it was there Dr Shipman became a drug addict.
He claimed later that he began taking pethidine, a morphine derivative, because of a back injury.
Whether the excuse was true or not, Shipman certainly found that pethidine made life seem brighter and more bearable.
He obtained the drug by forging prescriptions or over prescribing it for patients who needed it, then keeping the extra.

One year later, Dr John Dacre, a senior partner in the practice, checked the prescriptions and asked Shipman what was happening.
Shipman confessed, and begged for a second chance.
This was denied him, and at his trial for forging prescriptions in February 1976, he was temporarily suspended as a doctor and fined £658.
Primrose had to temporarily return to live with her disdainful family.

And it was probably after his drug habit had been exposed that Shipman turned into a killer.
At least one man in Todmorden, the husband of Eva Lyons – who was dying of cancer – believed that Shipman injected his elderly wife with an overdose of morphine as a ‘mercy killing’.
Soon thereafter, eight more elderly patients were found dead after Shipman had been to see them.

It was a year later, in 1977, that Shipman became a member of the Donnybrook House practice in Hyde, Greater Manchester, an area made notorious by former resident Ian Brady
(see here)
.

By this time Shipman had developed the characteristics of a male whose attempts to express his dominance have always been frustrated: touchiness and swollen self-esteem.
He enjoyed bullying, and taking his frustrations out on those over whom he had authority.
He was once so brutal to a young female drugs representative, out on her first assignment, that she burst into tears.
If a receptionist forgot his coffee, he was seen to go white with rage.
And when his wife once rang him to say that she and the kids were hungry and waiting to eat dinner he snapped: ‘You’ll wait until I get there.’

Oddly enough, his patients felt that he was the ideal doctor – caring, patient and endlessly helpful.
But then, a man of Shipman’s immense self-centredness would have wanted to be seen as a good doctor: it was important to him to be admired.
But for those who had nothing to contribute to his self-esteem, he could scarcely bring himself to be polite.

Shipman came under suspicion after the sudden death of elderly patient Kathleen Grundy, on June 24, 1998.
Mrs Grundy had apparently left a will in which her considerable fortune – over £300,000 – was left to her doctor, Harold Shipman.
But the will was carelessly typed, and two witnesses who had also signed it would later explain that they had d one so as a favour to Dr Shipman, who had folded the paper so they could not see what they were signing.

Mrs Grundy’s daughter, Angela Woodruff, reported her suspicions to the police.
Detective Inspector Stan Egerton noted that this looked like a case of attempted fraud.
But could it be more than that?
The death rate among Shipman’s patients, especially elderly women, was remarkably high.
On the other hand, there seemed to be no other cases in which Shipman had actually benefited from the death of one of them, at least, not in their wills.
(In fact, when Shipman was finally arrested, police found a large quantity of valuable but old-fashioned jewellery – worth around £10,000 – which was apparently stolen from dead patients.)

The above average death rate had been noted by one of Shipman’s colleagues, Dr Linda Reynolds.
In 1997, she had realised that Shipman seemed to have been present at the deaths of an unusually high number of patients – three times as many as might have been expected – and reported her suspicions to the local coroner.
This all came to nothing because there seemed to be no reason why a popular GP should kill his patients.

Mrs Grundy’s body was now exhumed, and the post mortem showed that she had died of an overdose of morphine.
(This is easy to detect because morphine remains in the system for a long time after death.) After that, another fourteen exhumations of Shipman’s patients revealed the same thing.
Moreover, it was clear that these fifteen were only a small proportion of the victims.

When he was questioned on suspicion of fifteen murders, Shipman angrily denied any wrongdoing.
He was sure that he had covered his trail so carefully that he was safe, but the investigators soon discovered that he had made extensive changes in his patients’ records to make them seem more ill than they actually were.
He was almost certainly unaware that the computer automatically registered the date and time of every one of these changes.

On 7 October 1998, Shipman was full of self-confidence when he was interviewed by the police and confronted with evidence of his crimes.
But when a woman Detective Constable began to question him about changes he had made in the patients’ records, pointing out that many of them had been made within minutes of the death of the patient, he began to falter and flounder.
That evening he broke down and sobbed.

Yet there was no confession.
From that moment onward, he simply refused to cooperate during interviews, often sitting with his back to the interviewer and refusing to speak.

In most cases of serial murder, there is a clear sexual element.
Where Shipman was concerned, the only hint of a possible sexual hang-up can be found in the case of 17-year-old Lorraine Leighton, who went to see him about a lump in her breast.
In her case, Shipman abandoned the kindly, sympathetic manner that endeared him to so many patients, and made such rude comments about the size of her breasts that she fled the surgery in tears.

One thing that seems clear is that Shipman felt no guilt about killing his patients.
After his imprisonment, someone said something that implied a comparison between him and Myra Hindley; Shipman snapped: ‘She is a criminal.
I am not a criminal.’

He was given fifteen life sentences for murdering fifteen of his elderly patients by injecting them with lethal doses of diamorphine (medical heroine).
Yet a government report later concluded he possibly murdered between 215 and 260 people over the 23-year period of his general practice.

Statistically speaking, Shipman had 236 more in-home patient deaths than would normally be expected for an average doctor working in the geographical areas that he did.
Unfortunately, as Shipman was found hanged in his cell on the morning of 13 January 2004, and disinterment and effective forensic autopsies on so many bodies is practically impossible, we will probably never know just how many people Harold Shipman murdered.

Why he became a murderer is also difficult to comprehend.
Unlike most serial killers, there seems to have been no sexual or sadistic element to Shipman’s murders: he killed most of his victims in their own homes, convincing them that he was giving them a normal, harmless drugs injection, soothing them before administering the fatal dose with his most gentle bedside manner and, as often as not, a nice cup of tea.
But these were definitely not mercy killings: although all his known victims were elderly, few were actually seriously ill or even in particular discomfort.

As Shipman is now dead, apparently leaving no confession or diaries, we can only guess at why he killed.
One possibly important fact may be that Shipman, at the age of seventeen, had watched his mother die of lung cancer.
He would hurry home from college to comfort and chat with her, but it was only a daily injection of morphine, given by her GP, that visibly eased her pain.

Was Shipman masochistically re-enacting his mother’s own death each time he injected a lethal dose of diamorphine into an elderly patient?
Given his character, it seems more likely that he simply enjoyed the god-like power of handing out death.
To him his victims, like everyone else in his life, lived and died for the sole purpose of feeding his bloated ego.

The Snowtown Bodies in Barrels Case

Evidence of Australia’s worst known case of serial killing was first discovered in Snowtown, a tiny hamlet of just over five hundred inhabitants about a hundred miles north of the city of Adelaide.
On 20 May 1999, police in Adelaide searched a derelict bank and found six black plastic barrels in the abandoned vault.
The barrels contained the remains of eight corpses, some dismembered and all partially dissolved in hydrochloric acid.

Forensic investigation revealed that the barrels had only recently been hidden in the vault, while most of the victims had been dead for months or years.
Evidence of at least one murder was also found in the vault itself, together with a variety of gruesome implements.
These included ropes and electrical tape, a selection of knives, a shotgun, a saw covered in dried blood and a welding machine that could administer powerful electric shocks.
Pathologists examining the human remains found evidence that these items had been used to torture the victims before they were killed.

The day following the discovery, investigating officers arrested three men in the northern suburbs of Adelaide: John Justin Bunting, aged 32, Robert Joe Wagner, 27, and Mark Ray Haydon, 40.
A few days later they also arrested James Spyridon Vlassakis, aged 19.
Digging in Bunting’s garden at that time also uncovered two more corpses.

As the investigation and identification of the victims progressed, a bizarre story emerged.
The ringleader of the killers was John Bunting, a short but powerfully built abattoir worker, originally from Queensland.
Questioning the teenager Vlassakis, who turned Queen’s evidence to get a lighter sentence, revealed Bunting’s declared motivation for the murders: he claimed to be a crusader for justice.

Police forces around the globe dread and generally make great efforts to arrest vigilantes, since such people generally go beyond the law to punish those that they feel are ‘the real criminals’.
In John Bunting’s case, however, he had become a far worse monster than any of the victims that he had chosen for ‘execution’.

Even on the most cursory examination, Bunting’s claim to be a hero – doing the job that he felt that the police and justice system failed to do – was obviously a self-delusional sham.
He particularly targeted anyone known or rumoured to be a paedophile, but he also tortured and murdered people for being gay, because they used illegal drugs and, in one case, for being obese.
This, combined with his willingness to accept the flimsiest rumour as definite proof that someone was a paedophile, indicates that Bunting’s vigilantism was merely a cover for his own sadistic and homicidal tendencies.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing, many details of the Bunting case remain uncertain, largely because the authorities have placed a large number of suppression orders on matters pertaining to it – over 250, in fact.
Indeed, one of these uncertain details is just why so many suppression orders are necessary.

It seems that Bunting was himself an abused child, from which experience, presumably, sprang his pathological hatred of homosexuals and paedophiles.
Bunting had arrived in Adelaide in the early 1980s, intending to move on to Perth, but his car broke down and he never found the motivation to move on.
Bunting’s first contact with the Adelaide gay community came through his then lover, Suzanne Allen.
Through her he met, and pretended to befriend, a local transvestite and paedophile called Barry Lane.
Sometime in the early 1990s Lane, in turn, introduced Bunting to Robert Joe Wagner.
Like Bunting, Wagner had been sexually abused as a child.
He had run away from home at fourteen and had ended up under Barry Lane’s ‘protection’.
Although heterosexual, Wagner had been forced to be Lane’s lover for four years.
He was thus, understandably, filled with seething resentment.
Bunting got Wagner away from Lane’s clutches and began to mould his anger into something that he could use in his own plans.