Historically High - Harold Shipman: Doctor Death

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

This week we come to the chilling story of Harold Fredrick Shipman. Over Dr.Shipman's 28ish year medical career, he treated thousands of patients. He also may have killed 250 of his patients. The uncertainty isn't because he may not have killed them. The uncertainty is because he may have killed many more. The case of Harold Shipman is a bit of a head scratcher. His early life and motivations seem to differ from other serial killers. It would be great if we could interview him, but he took those secrets to the grave with him. It's time to dive in and see if we can come up with something that makes sense! Join us as we get Historically High on Dr.Death:Harold Shipman. Thanks for listening and don’t forget to hit subscribe, leave a 5-star rating and write a review. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's Psychopath Week or Serial Killer Week or just whatever you want to call it. It's murder in time. Dr. Death, Harold Shipman, the original Doctor Death. Glad we get to go back over to England for another serial killer. Oh, I forgot this was England. Yep. Yeah, so we're going back across the pond. I like being able to dive into some of these other psychopaths and serial killers from other countries because I find new stuff.

We're going to have a Moors murder's out. episode, which I had never heard about before. Did, is this the only other outside of the U.S. serial killer one we've done, aside from Jack the Ripper? Yeah, I think so. Okay. So we have another look into the English serial killer. I was going to say it's just the English world that develops the fucking serial killers.

I think there's plenty everywhere else, but nobody to this extent. And Harold Shipman, we'll get into his name. We're not going to call him Harold the whole episode. But his streak is so incredible and so confusing. And I don't say incredible in a good way. But when you can start getting into the triple digits of murders, that's a pretty big accomplishment. You've really done something.

We're talking about potentially on the high end. I have differing views on this, but 250 is right about where they put his number of kills. What's his time frame of operation? 70, depending on where you call it the first one, 75 to 98. Okay, so like 23 years?

He's had himself a run. But he has himself a run because he's a doctor, because he's a general practitioner. He has this veil that he can hide behind and this trust in a community that his patients loved him. His patients absolutely, They thought they won the lottery when they landed on his patient list.

But he's killing all of his patients. And it's not even all of his patients. It's not the sick ones. It's not the ones on the way out the door. There's really no rhyme to reason as to why he's killing these people. It's just some days your time is up. Some days he'll come and he'll give you. He will kill somebody.

Then go meet three other patients and check them out like a normal general practitioner. And then go home for the day. So he's intermixing just regular meetings with patients to check on a cough, a sore knee, a sore throat. And then he's just going and plunking somebody with a needle and killing them and going home and kind of doing the same thing all over again the next day. I'm trying to wrap my head around this. Oh, this is a learning episode, by the way. Hey, welcome to historically hi. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Oh, my God, he had his closet of me. so deep already. Harold is he's locked my brain up all week, just trying to figure this out. The only way that I can explain this is if we just get into it. All right.

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Let's get into this psychopath. I can't wait. Okay. Tell me about Harry. Harold Frederick Shipman. We're going to call him Frederick, Freddie, throughout this episode. Partially is because he's born January 14th, 1946. So pretty close to the end of World War II.

I mean, we're kind of right on the heels or heels. I want to say, they said it was like 14, 15 months, something like that. Oh, so he's like a war baby? Yeah. He's like a victory in Europe baby. He's technically a part of the baby boomer generation. And the reason he is, his father, Harold Sr. This is why we're going to call him Frederick,

because Harold Sr. just was the herald of the family. And his wife, Vera. He was the second of three children. He's born seven years after his sister. So his sister was born pre-World War II. Senior was a lorry driver who had served in World War II. in the Sherwood Forrester's regiment. So she's literally like when he's probably going over to fight,

like, I don't know if I'm going to die, let's get it in. And then he's born, he's like, oh my God, I didn't die. Let's get it in. Okay. Yeah, seven year break. I mean, that's a little long, I think, between kids. It matches up. But I'm sure he probably came home.

Like, God damn, we survived. I'm so pent up. We're back. as a Lori driver he's going to be long distance and Lori of course is a truck semi yeah semi was a word that I was looking for okay uh Lori just sounds cooler than a semi it's just fun to say his mom was a homemaker and Fred was kind of the apple of his mother's eye because he took to learning pretty well he was a very smart kid the family was devoutly Methodist

like to a fault they lived in this place called Edwards Lane Estate now an estate sounds like a beautiful place beautiful sprawling hills and all that I don't make that assumption because I've seen what they're calling neighborhoods now and everything

and sometimes the names are very misleading but back at this point I think it's something had to qualify as an estate it was basically the project oh seriously this Edwards Lane estate. Oh, so it was like ironic. It was kind of, I'm sure it was like lipstick on a pig. If we call this an estate, it's going to sound great. Oh, he's from the estate. Yeah.

It's a classy way to put an area where not necessarily the lowest class rungs would live, but somebody that's kind of lower to middle. But they were all very proud families. There were families that made sure that their lawn was taken care of, that their bushes were trimmed and everything was nice and proper. It was just an older, kind of cheaper area. I feel like this is the kind of neighborhood that you see in like the beginning of a Harry Potter movie where it's like out in the suburbs

but all the houses are like exactly the same. Very stepfordy. And these were like brick row houses. This wasn't like separate things. These were all connected together basically. So it's, it was just an area that had a lot of pride, but also an area that didn't

have a whole lot of money. didn't really matter about the neighbor kids too much because Vera didn't allow the kids to really do any fraternizing with the other kids. There was always this air that the shipment children and the shipments as a whole were, man, that thing is still in my lungs. They were kind of above everybody else. They were above their class while still being firmly set in the middle of their class. Yeah. And it rubbed off, I think, a lot on Fred. Fred being the smartest one of the three.

Oddly enough, the child that gets loved the most in this family turns out to be the serial killer. Vera does sound kind of like a bitch's name. Like all the other moms would be out there and being like, oh, Vera won't let her kids play with our kids. It does sound a little bit elitist. I can't even think of besides like Vera Wang, any other people that I can think of named Vera. No. Vera, it would be like the equivalent, I can't talk, the equivalent of like, the equivalent of like, the mom that would wear like

the matching velour track suit like dropping her kids off Either that or she's a bartender Vera feels like a lady that's slinging slinging suds Hmm She's a lady that goes over and kicks a jukebox It starts up I don't know

It's just what I see Are you Fonzie? Is this woman Fonzie? Fonzie and Vera That could have been Fonzie's girlfriend Or Fonzie's girlfriend In school He ends up qualifying for

this private school called the high pavement grammar school. Only one of the children in the family to do it. So immediately, of course, very hearing this, he's like, he's our golden child. He's going to be the first person with the last name shipment to go to college. And he excelled in regular school, but when it came time to go to high pavement grammar school, he fell behind pretty quick.

And he had to put in a lot of work to be able just to keep up with normal grades. This is off topic, but is this one of those names that's really literal that comes from like, you know, blacksmith, Smith, things like that? Was his father just like a shipment? I could see that being where everything.

We come from a long line of shipments. Okay, well, you guys are the shipments then. Yep. That's what you were. We talked, I think it was during Franklin episode. We talked about, like, barrel makers. I think they're called Hoopers. Hoopers.

Yeah. Cooper. Cooper. That's right. all these fun names that came from all these old jobs. The place that Frederick really excelled at was on the football pitch, on the soccer pitch, and playing rugby. This is where you start to see kind of some emotion. This is where you get to see a little bit of a mean streak.

This is where you get to see him physically working hard as opposed to just being kind of a bland malaise kid that doesn't really stand out. One of the things that I'm sure stood out to everybody, and this feels like it falls firmly in line of the serial killer. He took his older sister to school dances. So his sister's seven years older than he is. Okay. We were talking about this before the episode started. You were trying to kind of get my head wrapped around it and everything.

So the thing that is fascinating with this guy, and we're going to come into it, is that usually you can track something back in life to where like some of the serial killers are most of the ones we've talked about. It's like, oh, like his parent watched his, what was the one the mom washed his junk too much? Gary Ridgeway.

Gary Ridgeway. Or you can go back about, you know, who, Ed Gein? Yep. Stuff like that. This one, you were hiding this sister dance thing from me. You did not disclose this part to me.

You said, oh, he grew up. He was, you know, kind of like working middle class, but wasn't down trodner or anything like that. The mom was fine, which I feel like Vera's not really fine. I think that there was probably some stuff going on behind closed doors. There has to be, like, the parent

that thinks that won't let her kids come out and play, that's how you get kids that end up going to the dances together. Yeah. And then you hit me with this. Okay, it's stuff like this. Yeah, psychopath. I apologize if anyone here listening took their

seven-year-old sister to several. Seven-year-old sister. Seven-year, yeah. So she wasn't even in the same school. And when it's your sister, it's not impressive. It's not like a middle schooler snagging a high schooler to come to the dance. Or the high school kids, it's like, hey, my college girlfriend's coming down. It's hey, my college sister's coming down.

Hey, my mom will only let me take my sister to this dance. Probably not making a lot of friends. It's probably not a... I wonder what the corsage situation was. I think I know what this guy's thing is now. At age 17, his life kind of gets flipped upside down. His mom, Vera, gets diagnosed with lung cancer.

And her struggles were really something that Fred carried on his shoulders. It was a situation where she was kind of his motivation, or he was kind of her motivation to continue on because she wanted to see what Fred could achieve.

You let me talk shit about this woman and then the next thing you hit me with is she gets lung cancer. Well, again, I feel like if she's giving her children the feeling that they're superior to all the other kids around him. That's not the best thing that a parent can teach her kids. Probably not.

It was said that every day she would be sitting at home in the chair facing out towards the window with a cup of tea waiting for Fred to get off the bus to come in and tell her about his day. In the process of this going on, Fred is also seeing doctor come do home visits with his mother because this is a time that they said was before radiation, before chemotherapy, to where there was nothing besides naturopathic remedies to try to fix this lung cancer. And when she's in pain,

Fred's sitting there watching the doctor administer these shots of morphine to his mom and watching how the morphine is kind of taking away the pain. And morphine being an opiate is something that works in your brain to kind of shut everything down, calm the systems in your body as far as your heart rate's going to slow, your breathing is going to shallow,

it's going to be a lot slower, it's going to shallow. Everything just kind of slows down. And so pain receptors, anything like that, you're just not feeling it. Some people, it leads to euphoria.

I mean, I'm not liopies aren't the worst thing in the world that I've tried. But he saw that it was kind of the one thing that took the pain away from his mother. I'm trying to harp on this because there's just so, The guy's maybe one of the most confounding serial killers that I've ever tried to study.

She ends up passing away June 21st, 1963, so she doesn't even make it a full year. Fred's still a 17-year-old kid in high school where his father, his sister, and his brother are all sitting at home in the house, kind of mourning veer his death. And Fred's out running on the soccer pitch. He's out training. He's trying to kind of run away from the pain that he felt. Being the closest one to his mom and the family, he's kind of the only one that's not outwardly grieving. His brother is younger, right?

Okay. So you have kind of a different way that he's handling the trauma of losing his mom who loved the shit out of him. One of the ways that he channels that is he decides at that point in time that he's going to become a doctor. and his hopes and ambitions are a little bit stronger than what he had going on between his ears because it took Fred two times to pass the test to get accepted into Leeds Medical School. And I'm not saying that that's not impressive because I think you could give me 100 times to try to get into medical school.

I'm not doing it. I'm not passing that test. Well, yeah, because you don't know. I mean, you'd have to, the fact that he had to study enough even to take it to pass. it is. Yeah, he's fresh out of high school. He didn't go to college. He didn't get a biology degree before he goes into being a doctor.

He just rolled straight into medical school. And granted, we are talking about, what, early 60s. So not exactly probably. Probably also kind of the stringent guidelines for doctors at that point. You just lost a lot of dudes in the war. I mean, it's, what, 20 years later, but still you're trying to get everything built back up. Yeah. Yeah.

You can get a little bit. parts of your city that aren't rebuilt. That's still pretty impressive that just self-taught enough to get into medical school. Absolutely. Leeds is one of the names I know. Yeah, it's a... That's just how, yeah. I think it's like the second biggest city by population in England, potentially. Oh, really? Bigger than I expected it to be. He was accepted on the second attempt, and he did qualify for financial assistance because his father didn't make enough as a lorry driver to where he was given some kind of financial aid to be able to live because this is at a time when they're not having to pay for college over in England.

So he just needs kind of a little bit of financial aid to be able to move into some dorms and spend that kind of time. All through high school, it's kind of a similar refrain to in college where as the kids are, he's standing in a locker room is kind of the primary example. And he's hearing all of these jokes and all this crude humor and everything where all the other guys are busting up. And he's just kind of sitting there with a smile on his face like, you children,

why don't you grow up and be adults? That's not that funny. But also still trying to be like, I need to put a smile on my face so I don't look like the only shithead in this locker room. But it's pretty easy to see that he's just generally unamused by kids being kids, by just kind of horsing around and having fun. There's not a whole lot of fun in Frederick Shipman's life. One thing that does happen at Leads that leads to some feelings,

I'm sure that he probably had never felt taking his sister to a dance, is he starts to become close with this girl that he met on the bus. Her name was Primrose. Primrose Oxtaby. He's like, you're nothing like my sister. It's the most British name that I've ever heard. And I'm having a little bit of trouble now that we're into this. I didn't really think about how I was going to talk about Primrose.

And in all honesty, I just want to tear. her ass apart because she had a husband that killed 250 people and she just didn't believe it. She just refused to believe it and she was closer to some of these murders than I think a wife would ever be. I'm going to hold reservation, hold my judgment and reservation for primrose until I get more information. It's probably a good call. She was awkward. She was a window dresser. She had started out going to school and somehow left school to become a window dresser for like department stores. She's pretty odd girl.

Had been raised in a similar kind of Methodist fashion, so they had that in common. And her and Frederick fell for each other quick. They met on the bus as he was leading into Leeds and she was going to work in the city. And as they fall hard and fast, she becomes

pregnant. Now, this is, we're talking to 60s at this point in time, so not necessarily a time when marriage out of wedlock is a series, or a child out of wedlock as serious as it was before. It was still pretty bad. Oh, yeah, you're trying to replay.

Listen, there was a certain period after the war when they were just like, everyone, just fuck. And then it caught back up finally. Like, okay, we've done this enough. Let's get back. We're good, we're good. This sexual revolution that happened, we can go ahead and tamp it down a little bit.

This is still in the midst of it, though. Yeah. Well, you have Frederick being kind of the bane of Primrose's parents' existence. He's this kid that doesn't come from a well-to-do family. He is going to school to be a doctor, which I feel like parents would probably be pretty pumped about. Like, that seems like something that you would want your child to try to marry as a doctor.

Yeah, but kids don't trust their parents' judgment, even if there's something off about it. Listen, there's some fucking weirdos that go to medical school, man. Yeah. So she's pregnant. They're not married. Her parents hate him. Shotgun wedding, baby.

Five months in. to her being pregnant, they end up getting married. Fred and Primer married November 5th, 1966. Sarah is born February 14th, 1967. This is going to be the one time that I mentioned a child's name. They have three other children. There's four children total. I can't bring them up in this episode because they just do not deserve this. There's no way that they deserve, and I'm pretty sure that Primrose and the four children all changed their names after this and moved pretty far away. just because you can't really shake this. This is a situation where this investigation was taken up all the way to the federal government.

The country handled the investigation in this. All these other investigations that they usually do are for like if a natural disaster happens, if there's something terrible that goes on where there's a mass killing event or a mass death event, he rose to the occasion to where parliament's like, we have to handle this now. This isn't like a local thing. We all have to look into this because if a doctor did this, there's doctors all over this country. If this was one, what else is out there? And so they end up getting married.

They have one child now. Fred graduates from Leeds in 1970 with two children. They had a son after that. He begins his residency a place called Pontefact General Infirmary in Yorkshire. Yorkshire, you say? I'm glad we get to do accents with this episode. Would you say a pontifact to general infirmary? Is like a primary health?

It's a hospital. Oh, okay. So instead of like a doctor's office or a private practice, this is a legitimate hospital. This is kind of the teaching hospital that comes after leaves. Gotcha. So this is like a fucked up version of like scrubs. He's going into like Sacred Heart as a medical, like a recently graduated medical student. To get his residency done.

Residency, okay. Yeah. I didn't even make that connection. This is a much darker story. I just see Zach Brath walking as this guy. Have you seen the new season yet? I refuse. Really?

I got... No janitor. Is that why? No. Because they tried to do that bullshit scrubs medical school season. And then that just kind of sours you on it. And then they try to then go back and capture. So there's like, there was a season that they just kind of shit on it.

And then they want you to just kind of forget that. and go back and remember. I don't know. Okay. I'll probably watch it. I've been curious, but I've been holding off myself because I just don't know

if it's going to feel the same. The soundtracks and everything else just crushed it. Here's the thing too. And I don't know if this is just me. When you go back and you watch one of those shows, because I like scrubs, that's like one of my comfort shows. I haven't watched it in probably like two years,

but with so many fucking things out, coming back around other stuff every two or three years is probably pretty normal. And it just emotionally, it'll get you. It will, but you see the character's young. So when you watch a show like that, you remember the times you watch that when you were younger, and you pick up on things that you might not have picked up on.

When you see them old, there's something about that that says, fuck, we all got old. I was young when they were young. Maybe I just don't want to accept that. I can see that. We got to keep breaking this up with a little bit of levity. Sorry to get off on the tangent, but it's rough. Fred, when he graduates, doesn't graduate with honors.

He graduates dead ass in the middle of his class. Maybe D's get degrees is now how it goes? He's not excelling, but at the same time, he's working hard enough to stay with the rest of the class. In Pontifract, he studies under the surgical fields, the pediatric fields, and I believe the word is obstetrician, but I think it's the same thing as an OBGYN. I believe so.

Okay. He's not too great at a lot of this stuff. He's just kind of sitting around. He doesn't plan on being a surgeon, so he's just kind of helping in that capacity. Pediatrics, we're going to talk about here in a second. As an obstetrician, he's just not really great at delivering babies. But he does find a passion in this field. And that passion is a little something called plethodin.

Or we'll just call it Demerol, because that's what we call it here in the United States. Demerall. Okay. Just so you know, when you're explaining that because you've studied this, it's very like informatory, like you know what you're saying. When you're the first person in hearing that,

you just told me that this guy, who you've given me a number of the people he killed, went into pediatrics and being an OBGYN. I'm just like, if there were medical fields that I would, choose this guy to not be in, it would have been those. Yeah. Yeah, pediatrics definitely not good for a guy that's got 250 under his belt.

OBGYN, he's leans pretty... Yeah, this guy should have nothing to do with the process of children. Well, and I didn't really put it together until you said this, but he leans about 77% female victims. So OBGYN, maybe he saw some shit that scared him. No, I don't think it was that. Okay. Think of it in this sense that women are always going to need communication with their obstetrician for their whole life. Yeah.

And if you're one of the doctors in a town or something like that, that doesn't mean that when it comes to like pediatrics, if you were just focusing in that, you wouldn't have contact with patients throughout their entire lifetime. time he's picking a field and i don't know if it's intentional because what he's planning to do or he just kind of falls into it but he's setting himself up where he's going to have access to older women if that ever is a thing where he's just like oh i'm just going to kill old people yeah i think it's a little bit harder to try to sell that your obi gyn killed you as opposed to a general practitioner there's going to have to be some evidence left behind if your obfeyn is Correct, but you would still have. Like imagine he's a general practitioner, but if he can also be that doctor too,

it's making him have an even bigger clientele to be able to pick from. And half the population is just women. Yes. It's, I don't quite know how to square this, but Demerol is usually, it was a kind of an opiate that they used to use a lot during childbirth. And they've kind of gone away with it. because they've realized that there's a little bit, I don't know if it's the placenta that would still absorb some of it

and it would be passed along to the child. But as an opiate, it's going to shallow your breathing out. It's going to lower your heart rate. Well, they can also just do a spinal block at this point. So the technology just required, doesn't require them to do that. Yeah, they had to have found something better to use. But regardless, Frederick loves Demerol. Frederick is starting to prescribe Demerol to other patients.

that he's seeing in the hospital that aren't pregnant as kind of like this catch-all drug that he's feeling like is a good opiate to be giving his patients. Good pain medication. For pain? Yeah. So...

How is he prescribing them to take it? I believe it's shots. Because there were... No, I guess there were pills at that point in time, but usually injections is how it happens. what he was doing would be to order like twice the amount of demoral that he's planning on giving a patient and then only administering half of it and pocketing the other half and just kind of starting this little collection to where he's going home and injecting himself

and I don't know if this comes into line again I'm not a professional in any of this this is just stuff that kind of hits me when I think about it but is that a feeling of like seeing the pain that his mom felt go away when she gets hit with morphine? I don't know. All I'm thinking of is, again, this is what the, he graduates in the 70s, late 60s? 1970. Okay.

So he's there from 71, 72, and 73. So morphine, and I know that people did come back as morphine addicts after the war and everything, not like a ton, but it did, it did occur. Was morphine just something where it was just very willing, nilly with morphine. And I know that, of course, the answer to that is yes, because this is happening. But to think of a time where it was just like, oh, man, Doc, you know, it's kind of burning when I pee. And instead of being like, well, we need penicillin, he's just like morphine. He's like, I get headaches sometime. Morphine. But with morphine, too, with like injections, which is going to make

it even kind of crazier how he gets away with this in my head, is that he's coming in either doing house calls where he's giving these people just like injections to where it's going to be just over a shorter period of time basically they're just getting high is what it is or he is coming over to or he's prescribing him in pills but that way when he gives them an overdose on it it's making it look like they're just taking all their pills or some shit like is he setting this stuff up it's not a not the cleanest way if you're going to inject something to kill somebody it's just not the cleanest way because morphine's going to show up on a toxicology report as this lady had a bunyan and you prescribed her morphine and she overdosed on it.

Like it's, it becomes this weird pattern of like, well, that's an odd call for a general practitioner to make. That's what should be the connection of being like, okay, she was killed by morphine overdose. First thing,

even if we don't suspect, you know, it's the doctor, first thing we're going to do is what was she on morphine for? And then asking him and be like, what was she on the, oh, she had a bunion and been like, you gave her morphine?

He's like, yeah, I mean, it's not illegal to prescribe. It just looks like she took them all. It's such an odd choice, and we'll get into that more, but we're in the middle of kind of a demoral spiral for Frederick during his residency. He ends up signing on, he goes from a junior doctor there to signing on as a GP in 1974. He moves along to this place called Abraham Omerod Medical Center. I couldn't do an accent with that one.

And his opportunity for getting his hands on this demoral has increased tenfold because as he shows up to Amarad, he tries to ingratiate himself immediately by going and cleaning up and tightening up the records room and then taking care of the prescription drug rotations in the pharmacy within the hospital. So now you have a guy who has a demoral addiction at this. point in time, being the guy that's supposed to cycle out and be like, okay, well, this Demerol has gone past

his expiration date, I'm just going to throw this in the trash. Kind of a bad idea, because he starts siphoning it off into his own pockets. That doesn't, like, raise a flag with everyone. Hey, I know I'm new here, but let me handle all the expired drugs. Well, and I'm sure if you ask a doctor, the one

thing that they don't want to do is try to organize notes or records. Oh, fuck, yeah. It's the shit work and everything. But it should kind of worry you a little bit when someone coming in, offering to do that work. It's just the stuff that nobody wants to do. You don't want to have to be the one that's in charge of the... No one wants to question it is, I get it.

Yeah, and nobody's going to go through the trash and say, well, okay, this isn't expired, this is expired. It says that you had X amount you were supposed to destroy. Correct. But what I'm saying is for someone just to come in and be like, hey, I'll take over this. That's got to, like, kind of put the hairs up and be like, why does this new guy want access to... Or is that just something they did? That would immediately ring an alarm in your head and being like, oh, really, you don't just want to kind of do a normal job at the hospital for a little bit?

Well, and he had figured out a little bit of a personality to where his equals or his superiors liked him because he never questioned him. He was always pretty cordial with him. He showed them a lot of respect. Whereas anybody that worked underneath him, he just talked down to. He called them stupid. He always questioned their judgment. he always had a better solution than they did.

So he knew kind of how to get into the, it's not tough to figure out that you want to be nice to your boss. Yeah. It's not tough to figure out, but at the same time, is he doing this as more of a way to be like, well, I'll be beyond question if anything happens.

So the guy's addicted to the nurses. Uh-huh. Yeah. He's going through the records room, and he's seeing how all of these records of all these patients are being written in what things people are paying attention to as far as like what they're writing down. And again, I don't know where he is along this line of killing.

And we'll talk about kind of some things here in a second that I think are pretty pertinent to kind of when we can start counting killings. But regardless, he's kind of starting to put together a plan as to how this is going. And then it all comes crashing down because there is some questions as far as what's going on with the ordering of Demerol and how it's coming in from this one place where you get the drugs in the store. Pharmacy. This one pharmacy is showing all of these massive records of Demerol being sent to the hospital.

And as they get the board involved to come check on why the Demerol is being dosed out to, as many patients as possible. He is saying, well, you can come in to look at everything. Everything's an order. You're not going to find an expired date. We had a lot that went out of rotation. They go, okay, well, it seems like you're prescribing a lot. He goes, yeah, I am writing a whole lot. I'm seeing a lot of people in pain. I've seen that this has been an effective medicine to kind of help a lot of these things. They go, okay, well, how many doses have you administered? And he goes, oh, that's the thing. I didn't really keep up on those records.

I kept up on what I prescribed, but I wasn't writing like how many shots I had administered, how many milligrams when they came back to see me, if I got them a second time or anything like that. So there's not a whole lot in the records I can tell you about usage. That's all that the records are supposed to have, right? Like, that's insanely important stuff, is how often they're getting stuff and how much it is.

But he wasn't the only doctor that was dealing. doing it. He looked through all those records reports and saw. So he's like, oh, I thought this was just standard procedure here because I had seen how all these other doctors had written this stuff. Check Dr. Barnaby's records. Do you see his, his dosages that he was giving out? Like, it's a way to where it feels like he's trying to cover it up and this is maybe something new. But I think a lot of it is just the fact that he was able to see that this is kind of how things are done and if he's going to be questioned for something, he can also turn around and say, well, did you question everybody else in this scenario? Who else is not doing this like I am? So it's

almost like he gives himself a little cover. And they end up pulling away from this. He starts to develop some pretty addict-like tendencies. He ends up getting diagnosed with, oh, idiopathic epilepsy. So he starts having these epileptic fits. He's passing out. He's, why can I not think of the word?

Seizures? Yeah, he's having seizures. Can you be a, like, that's a legitimate question, because what if you're working and you're trying to do something and you have seizures? You can't drive to work, that's one. So your wife, Primrose, has to be the one,

that drives you to and from work, and in doing so is also the one that is driving you to and from home visits. Now, this is insane. Like, this is already crazy. Yeah. Like, she's his driver to the murders.

To some of them, yeah. Sometimes the kids are there. Sometimes the kids are in tow. Sometimes they all come in when they realize that there's a commotion going on. There is a lot of, a lot of very close calls that Frederick has with his family coming into some of these situations. Any empathic epilepsy is just basically the term for you have epilepsy, but we don't know

what's causing it. There's not like something pressing on your brain. They don't know he's an addict yet. That's what I'm saying. That's, oh, okay, it's causing him. Yeah. So he's gone so far down the demoral hole that now he's starting to have seizures if he's having withdrawals or if he's overdosing himself.

Is it, okay, so he gets diagnosed with that, but is it just the withdrawals or is it actual epilepsy? Is that can be, can that be caused by that? Yeah, any sort of abuse of opiates will give you seizures if you do it enough and if your body's either. But what I'm saying is, I don't know, is the term epilepsy in regards to the condition of having that and seizures is a effect of it? I believe epilepsy is just consistent seizures. Correct, but what I'm saying is, is he just, is, is his use of this giving him these, the seizures. So it's tech, so doctors are thinking it's epilepsy.

Yep. It's really him just doing drugs. Well, he's, it's just drug-induced epilepsy instead of we don't know what's causing that. Okay. There's a point in time where he's even like getting out of the shower and goes into a seizure and falls and hits his head on the sink and damn near kills himself to where he's. Oh, so many people would still be alive. Mm-hmm. He's still showing up to work and he's still doing his job while passing out in front of patients while having seizures at work.

What if he's doing like a cathode? No, that's, well, he's a doctor, so he's not doing catheters. Thank God. Yeah. Yeah, that'd be a pretty tough time for that guy to seize up. I'm sorry, you got to make, you got to try to add in some jokes every now and then. He finally gets confronted just because he's, the discrepancies are too much. The amount of Demerol that he's handing out is just, it's far too much to be able to try to pass off as this is just a normal procedure.

It's a legit prescription of quantity of prescriptions. Well, and there's also a situation where they just kind of look at this and they're like, okay. Are they consistently investigating him for this for like a long period of time? And they, the police are in on this, this place called the home office inspectors are the ones that are going in and looking at these Demerol things. They start to investigate some of these prescriptions that he's writing and they find that there's a lot of fraudulent prescriptions for this drug. And basically going through and interviewing his patients and saying, did he prescribe you Demerol? And they're like, Demeroy, what? He didn't tell us anything about this.

So it's a situation where he's writing prescriptions. for people and then going and getting the drugs himself, but then just never even giving it to the patients. Okay, we're not fast forwarding ahead of them like catching him, right? Like this is very early on in his career. Yes. Very, very early on. This is before we're even getting into an official kill, that's how, how far this, how close this could have been to being stopped. So after he's confronted and they kind of call him out on it, he denies it the first couple times, they finally bring him in, they're like, what's going on? And to his credit, I don't know if this is just a little bit of a smart play on his point. He starts telling them, yes, I got hooked on this drug just a year ago.

The stresses of being a new doctor and having a family at home and trying to balance my life was weighing on me. I found my way into this drug. He ends up seeing a doctor about this, and the doctor can see the track marks up his arms, and the doctor can also see the collapsed veins in his arms, which is pretty indicative of somebody that's been shooting up drugs for much longer than just a year.

They end up firing him. They send him to rehab in York. He ends up spending three months in rehab. he sees two therapists and he to his credit he goes for the rehab he gets clean

he these two therapists have glowing reviews about just how he wants to change his life he wants to be better at what he's doing the whole time he's basically just requesting don't take away my medical license I have a mother that died and this is why

I'm here is because I want to help people like that doctor help my mother how fucking desperate are you for doctors in this country if you're just like, all right, you scamp, get out of here. I love you. This is fantastic. Do you know why?

Because they had just introduced socialized medicine in Great Britain. Free health care. And if you're going to provide... God damn it, no, because now this is going to be the argument against free health care. No, just in this one case, you need extra doctors. So you can't just be dismissing. No, I get it. Yeah, but that's...

What I'm saying is that... That sucks because, like, I think free health care should be a thing. Yeah. And this is the argument. I guess I'm like, well, fuck. There's a lot of doctors that slip through the cracks here. I'm sure that he wasn't the only one that was a bad doctor that slips through the crack. But, uh...

Like you said, he hadn't killed anyone yet. He was just doing it to himself, right? Yeah, there weren't really any questions about this. So as he goes in front of the board, he's brought up on like 88 charges. He ends up pleading guilty to, I believe it was five. And of the five, it was things like drug forgery and then deception. They tell him he's not allowed to practice for two years as a GP, meaning that he can't be a general practitioner because he can't prescribe any medicine,

because the last time he had a prescription pad, he ended up taking his way to Candyland. Several trips, many trips. So the general medical counsel says you can do that. We are going to find you 600 pounds, which is right around five grand. in today in today's money. Not a small sum of money to be fined, especially having a family at home and also being told that you pretty much can't do your job for two years. Not to mention the three months that he spent away in rehab, he has a family who just lost their house because he didn't have any money being the sole breadwinner. And interestingly enough, they said that when they moved

out of the house, the people that were either moving in or had purchased it said that the house was like disgusting. It was very dirty inside. It wasn't well kept. There were bugs and rats and all sorts of stuff in this house, which if you think about a doctor, a guy that has to be, you know, scrubbed pretty clean most of the time. Buddy, this is not a doc. Come on.

This is not a guy with the sterling. This guy's obviously not concerned about the cleanliness of stuff. No, but if you were to go into a doctor's house, what would your expectation be? That would be, yes, that would be your expectation. So he's definitely against what you would expect from a normal doctor. Yes. He ends up finally getting put into practice, where is it, 1977, I believe, at this place called Donnybrook Medical Center.

This is two years after the first counted death that they can attribute to him that happened in 1975 before he was rung up on the Demerol charges. It was a woman named Eva Lyons. Wait, before he was... Okay, so when were the charges for the demoral stuff, when they catch him doing that? Late 75. So this happened in the same year that he got brought up on those charges. But the...

Okay, so he... But this is one that they had... Someone who had died, that they then tied back to him. Yes. Okay. She was 71 years old. She died of a diamorphine injection. So not a morphine injection, but diamorphine is basically like medical heroin.

Okay. So what you're telling me is that they had a case where someone had died with that. They then had just brought in a guy who had been writing out way too many prescriptions, but he had said, I was using it. I wasn't prescribing it to the patients. There wasn't any type of like, hey, we should investigate this guy for that thing. So he was using Demerol. She dies of diomorphine.

Oh, okay. And at the same time on her, certificate, it's written out that she died of natural causes, which basically is him saying that there's nothing that I can really pin this on. It's like the most blanket statement, natural causes in old age are kind of two things that you can just throw out there. And it's just basically a myriad of things, but it's also not you being specific to what it is. He also recommends cremation for the body. So he doesn't recommend a medical examination, and then he recommends cremating the body.

So not only are you not checking into why she died. Don't look at it and destroy the evidence. Yeah. Is what he's saying. And then get rid of the evidence, exactly. Kind of going back a little bit further to something that I want to point out just because I kind of tease it earlier. Possibly previously in 1972 at Prontafract when he was working in his residency, when he was working in pediatrics, he met a four-year-old patient named Susie Graf.

And Susie had cerebral palsy. She was deaf. She was in pretty bad shape as a four-year-old. Didn't have control of any of her limbs. And basically, Frederick says, tells the mother she might not have long to live. She's not long for this world. And her mother basically says, just tried to make her comfortable while I'm away. He says, okay, she ends up leaving, goes and gets herself some.

comes back about 20 minutes later and as she's walking back into the room, Harold, or Frederick stops her and says she's passed away. So. It's happening within the like, you, 20 minutes later. He did just say she doesn't have long to live. Yeah, come on. That is he. But that's the thing is I'm trying to point out why this sounds weird without being like,

obviously this is nuts. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. I'm trying to put myself in that perspective. I don't know the exact circumstances of this. I don't know if that, you know, like, what her condition was before she had left the room, if she was just, you know, there for routine stuff or anything like that. Yeah. And also at the same time, you have to look at it as he's, they try to kind of pass it off as you're learning,

as some people are talking about this was this like a mercy killing was this something that he saw a child that was never going to get any better so he put her out of her misery or did he see it as an opportunity that would be easily explained away by something? Yeah, it's one or the other

it's very black or white really there's no in between as to why you could have done this and the reason that I bring this up is not because this is a death that they've actually attributed to him but this is a verifiable story that happened that is on record of this is how this interaction went and a death that happened under his watch. But again, we're talking 1972. So he's not a full general practitioner yet. He's just in his residency working at this hospital. And the hospital becomes a pretty tricky thing to

try to gauge just because there are so many patients that are there. But also, there's so many eyes that are in a hospital to be able to be watching at all times if you are trying to kill patients. This isn't like a home visit. These are just people laying in hospital beds with a million nurses running around. I know, but is it? That's what's so crazy about this. We don't know the circumstances like of, God damn it,

I want to know about the hospital industry in 1975. Because you're thinking, what's the oversight like on these? How are they recording? Is there enough oversight? Like, does it have to get to a certain percentage of deaths of patients before they're just like, oh, hey, your files are coming across my desk a lot? Like, how long does it take for?

that to happen. What's the number? There's a threshold of mortality rates in hospitals to where they'll finally take a look at it. Did those get moved after this? I believe they were just looked at a lot tighter,

but there's like an allowable range and it could be something as simple as their allowable range might have been 14%. And when Frederick showed up, it was like 9%. And it only rose to 13%. But it still was the 14% that you have to look at and be like, whoa, what's going on?

Yeah. There was another story from this time right around then, in 1972. This doesn't end up coming out until after Shipman is caught and arrested that this woman named Sandra Whitehead comes forward. In 1972, she worked in Pontefract as a training nurse, and she remembers specifically one night that they had three women's deaths in this women's ward of the hospital. and like three consecutive deaths like one death, two hours, two deaths, two hours, three deaths. And she said that she had never seen them happen in succession that quickly in her entire career as a nurse. She also said that she found a whole lot of empty injection packets sitting in these rooms where these deaths were occurring when they would happen there. So, I mean, it's nothing that they can definitively tie to him.

But that's what's fuck. Like, it's so hard to look at this without knowing the end result. Yeah. Because to everybody, how they're looking at this is they're going through the process of, like, the patient death. It's not just like, hey, who killed the patient? They're looking and they're trying to revive the patient, finding out what's going on, and then having to notify the family, then having to go back and look at the history. So the investigation is pretty far removed when they go back and they do like a review of that patient's death.

Well, and all under the guys. But you still think that there's going to be a name that keeps popping up. It's like, oh, hey, I got these three case files for these patients that died 20 minutes, two hours apart, whatever it was. And you're looking and it's like, Harold. Harold. Harold. I got three in a row to review. And I'm not saying it would have worked like that.

but still, when you see somebody within a short period of time, how is that not like, hey, let's have a talk about Harold? There is. You also have to kind of remember, though, it's under the guise of, it's in a hospital. Like, healthy young people don't just frequent hospitals. You usually have an ailment, and you're usually a little bit older. So. How much of this are they just, because there's also when these, he's not the coroner.

Isn't there corners that are, like, reviewing these bodies there? If they don't suggest it, if he doesn't. doesn't suggest an autopsy or anything like that, they're less likely to do them. So like, there's different levels that this could be identified at. Several people that could just raise questions. But like, it's just kind of like, well, if it's getting signed off, then it's getting signed off. But maybe they don't see as many, I don't know. If you see an 86 year old that died of old age or natural causes, usually they're probably not going to do an autopsy to figure out the cause of death. So it's kind of a matter of convenience. He has found a way to just kind of like

slip through the system of this, like slip through the screen of this. Yeah. I mean, if you're, if we're saying potentially a handful, I would say is a light estimate as to what he did in the hospitals. When he gets to this place called Donnybrook in this little town called Hyde, he goes buck wild. So Donnybrook was a private practice. It was a co-op. Basically, a bunch of general practitioners all looked at the system and said, we don't want to work in the hospital, so we on our own private practice. And then they realized that if they got eight doctors together and they all pitched in a bunch of money that they were just going to put towards their practice, they're able to

buy better imaging machines. They're able to run basically like a small hospital private practice like you would see now, like a family medicine clinic. But now you get to start making house calls because people from hospitals don't make house calls. That was one of the things that his patients loved about him was he wasn't going on house calls had kind of gone out of style. but he was very, very committed to his patients to where they said they actually loved

that he would come do house calls because it was usually hard to get a hold of a doctor. So as he goes to this co-op, you have to buy into this co-op. You're basically buying a share. And the share that you're buying is going to include a patient list from the previous doctor that it just left.

So he ends up buying into this practice, but he buys into a patient list of about 3,000 patients, which seems like an insane number of patients. It does. But depending on the age group and everything like that, I could be on the patient list and I see my doctor once or twice here if I need to go in and do something. Exactly. But at the same time, like, they're going to have someone they see a lot more consistently or someone like me that they see one time met of 365 days.

So I don't know. It still sounds like a lot. I'm trying to rationalize it in my head. But yes, well, all I'm thinking is now he has a catalog of 3,000 people to kill. pretty much. Even beyond the house calls, they said that his appointments would usually run long because he would just let people talk about their lives and everything.

He would get to know these people to a pretty intimate level, I would say, for a practitioner. And he follows much of the same pattern that he does in the hospitals where these other doctors that he's bought into this practice treats him with respect, is very nice to them. He becomes cordial with them. Meanwhile, the next.

while the nurses hate him, there's an office manager that every time they have like a doctor's meeting, an ownership meeting, talk about things. First thing that Shipman does is he recommends firing

the office manager because he just does not like her. It could be something as simple as her questioning something that he said to where he just gets it in his head where he's like, fuck this lady, I'm not going to listen to her. I'm a doctor. She's an office manager.

He's basically trying, like, the people that are going to be looking over things, he's trying to kind of discredit their, discredit them before he even has a chance. Like, if they're going to question him and be like, she's horrible a drop. Don't listen to anything she's going to say. He's running people down left and right just to try to, I don't know if it's to buy himself credit or to make them doubt them. But they just hate him. He's not great. This old school approach is respected by these other doctors.

He's working holidays. He's working Saturdays and Sundays. He's basically 24-7. He's going and making just follow-up visits at people or with people at their houses that aren't even scheduled. He's just knocking on doors saying, hey, I saw you the other day. I was thinking about you on the way home or I was thinking about you today. She wanted to come by and see how you're doing. You might not know this.

Did he have any, were any of his victims and not his patients, but patients of other doctors within his practice? It didn't say. I think he was pretty tuned in to everybody. Because again, if you're doing that, then the doctor that's their doctor is going to have to look over all of the notes. Yes. Okay, that makes sense. If he's working holidays, he's having to refrain because he's covering other doctors patients and everything. So he's just like, okay, is this one of mine?

Can I kill it? No, it's fucking Jenkins. I can't kill one of Jenkins patients. That's what's so confusing about it, though, is he's not, like, he has a modus operandi. He has his patented way to kill down. but I don't understand the choosing of the patients because it's not to say that all these patients were super duper healthy and it was a shock that it happened

there were cancer patients there were people that were in renal phaid there were every abnormality or male malady that these people had were I mean it was something that they needed constant checkups for they were in their 70s their 80s but also there's times when there's a random 47 year old there's just something that's thrown in where somebody's completely healthy that he's killing and then saying well she had a bad reaction to this or she

came in complaining of heart or heart pains chest pains i went to visit her all the sudden she's found three hours later in a position we'll talk about positioning because that's it feels like that's pretty dumb that they've missed that but it's he provides enough cover that he's able to get away there's not enough cover that can get like that's the that's the torture part of this is that knowing what we know and how this ends, you're just like, how? That's all I'm sitting here thinking is like, it's so obvious. Well, it's keeping up on stuff.

But no one's really looking for it, I guess. There's deaths that happen in the hospital where he will have patients come into the hospital. And again, not all these are attributed to him, where they'll be there for 12 hours and they'll end up passing away. And when he's writing his notes down, he'll say patient has been under my care for the last 24 hours, spent the last two hours alive in a coma and they're not going through and checking and be like, well, he says he's been under his care for 24 hours but he was admitted to the hospital 12 hours ago

so how does that lineup or make sense? So there's no guess and check on this. There's no going to families of victims and saying, hey, when did you guys show up to the hospital? When, had you ever met Shipman before? Because those people don't know each other. Nobody, this is at a time when there's not something to be like alert everybody.

Not to mention there's not a reason to alert everybody. Yeah. And can you imagine if like there was a neighborhood or a street and he didn't, that's the other thing too. Imagine if like several of these patients are on the same street and all of a sudden they're talking and they're like, yeah, my grandma died too. You're just shipment. And you just start making the connection. Was that something he was looking at as well? Because this guy seems like, I hate to fucking say it, but this guy seems like very smart about this, knowing how to like slip through the system.

Is he looking at addresses? He's like, I can't kill these people. to close together because they might get to talk in. There was one street where he ends up killing three different people on the exact same street. Seriously? Yeah. Uh-huh. And we'll talk about one of them because it's

pretty scary what happens to them. Do we want to take a bathroom break before we go a little further? Sure. Okay. Well, hello. Listen, while we head to the restroom and get ourselves something to drink, why don't you do something nice for yourselves? Head on over to patreon.com

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gmail.com. All right, and with that said, let's get back to the good stuff. We're kind of to the... Are we back? We're back, yeah. We're kind of to the... where the numbers start coming in, and the numbers start getting a little bit nasty. 1978, he kills at least four patients.

they believe it could be as high as nine in 1978. So this is kind of his first full year at Donnybrook. All four of the deaths that they can attribute to them included, or we're all home visits. We have August 7th, and the numbers are kind of crazy here. August 7th, Sarah Marsland, August 30th, Mary Jordan. Sarah Marsland was 86. Mary Jordan was 73. You have Harold Bramwell, who was 73 on December 7th.

And then December 20th, you have Annie Campbell who's 88. I'm raising my hand. Yes. I do work on the non-interrupting thing as much as I can. We're good, but it's just so you all know. This is how conversations happen. Okay. So you're going to start listing off these instances for me.

The reason we're able to go back is because after he was prosecuted and arrested, this was all investigated, this is the timeline that has been constructed, right? Yeah. And this, again, this came from a four-year-long thing called, the shipment investigation. Okay. These things, because I don't want to like every section of time being like,

God damn it, is he being investigated at this point? How are they not catching him? This is all the stuff that leads up to it. And then is there anybody going to catch him for a while or try to catch on to stuff? 1998. And we're in 75? Yeah,

78. 78. So we got 20 years of kind of, but there's no point is he approached or like, anything happened to like put a scent on to him that he's like too many people are dying and that he in his area or like nothing really official like nothing there's eventually there are rumors in hide that something seems to be going wrong he got the nickname doctor death before he got caught basically okay there were people in the community that kind of started to put together like

maybe it's just bad luck but at the same time it wasn't enough to stop people from going to him And there wasn't a reporter, like a news article where the reporter was just like, hey, my entire job is connecting the clues. I'm going to go talk to this family and this family. Who was his doctor? Who was her doctor? Who was their doctor? And they're like, oh, this shipment name keeps popping up a lot. If there's only 10 doctors in the area.

Proceed with the mortar. So you have two deaths that occurred for sure. in August, you have two deaths that occurred for sure in December. Sarah Marsland is a pretty interesting case because, again, August 7th, 86, she ends up dying via morphine injection. Not known at the time, she ends up having a daughter whose name is Irene Chapman. Now, Irene Chapman had questions about her mother's death because she had just been with her the day before and everything seemed fine. It wasn't enough to where she stopped going to Shipman, and Chapman ends up continuing being a patient of Shipman.

Irene Chapman. The daughter continues to be a patient of the guy that just killed. That she doesn't know. She had questions about it. She thought that it was weird because her mother was in great health, and all of a sudden, Shipman, or she comes up dead after an appointment that Shipman had had with her. But she trusts him enough that, okay, yeah. This is why this is so, like, madding about this.

In 1998, Harold Shipman kills Irene Chapman. So he killed a mother. The daughter continued to go to him as her doctor. And eventually in 1998, he kills the daughter that had suspicions about the doctor. Fuck. Pretty insane that he was able to kill generations of people. There was at least two in 1979. August 10th, Alice Gorman.

She was 76. Jack Sheldman Dean was 77 in November on the 28th. So August, November, there's a little bit of a gap. Both were in home, both the diet of diomorphine, and this is just going back, and if they were able to exhume the bodies to be able to see this, because, again, this is 20 years before, but they're still able to pull tissue samples and find the opiates inside the bodies. to what amounts they don't know

but once they finally put the pieces together the diomorphine's killing method that's immediately what they're looking for. I wonder how far back because again that you said they don't do the investigation until like 98 or whatever how far back they're able to go.

They run into a lot of problems with the hospitals because there just aren't records around because this is a pre-computer era where everything's just handwritten. And stuff can go missing. A typewriter, yeah. 1980. No deaths on the ledger.

Pretty weird that he was able to shut it down from this point in time as far as being able to walk away from murder. Still, still married. Still married. Still has the kids. Yeah. And his wife is driving him to housecoles. Well, now that he's kicked the demoral, all of a sudden, all of his seizures went away. You don't say.

So, yeah, now magically after he quits the demoral, and one of the things that I think really ingrained. appreciated him to the other doctors at Donnybrook is when he showed up, he just laid his soul bear. He's like, I did all this, I was an addict, I've done all of this work to try to get back here. I want to be here. I want to help people. Talk to my therapist. They'll tell you the exact same story. So this wasn't like he was trying to hide that he had gotten pinched for the stemmer all use.

He came out to these doctors as an addict, which again, if you're a serial killer and you have something that people could look at as far as look down on, you're usually not mentioning it. But just to get into this whole serial killer talk, because I find it interesting that he was able just to shut it off for an entire year, or at least that we know of. If you look at what we've talked about with serial killers, usually it's like power that they're looking for, control, sexual fantasies. As far as we know, there was no sexual improprieties with any of these patients. Thrill seeking. I don't really know if you could kind of put him in there, because I'm sure it could. could have been a thrill if he was wired that way. But also.

I don't know, man. This guy seems like a fucking robot. Yeah. There's no anger. There's no rage. And there's no financial gain for a while. And as far as like a delusion or if he's in psychosis when he's committing these murders, I mean, he's a doctor. So you can't, there's just no real way to pass a lot of this stuff off.

But he is able to. And again, to be a serial. killer you need, I think it's at least three deaths and there has to be a cooling off period. Has there been kind of a, I mean, I'm sure there's been a shit ton of studies of this guy. Has there been some type of consensus with what the fuck was wrong with him?

He never admits to anything. He never gives a reason or anything like that. They just, everybody has a pretty strong belief that he gets off on killing people because when you inject somebody with that much of an opiate, they go within a minute

or two usually. And so he is present a lot of these deaths to see happen and they think that that might have been the satisfaction that he was getting. But I just don't know if that's the urge and the satisfaction that you need to just be able to shut

it off for a year. I mean, that seems pretty controlled, right? I don't know. If you're addicted to something, if you're addicted and you're just like, okay, I can't do this for a year. No, like I get it. I'm trying to like apply some type of rationale to this and it's it's hard.

It's just nothing there, man. 1981, we get two deaths. April 18th, Mary Slater, aged 84 and August 26th, Elizabeth Ashworth, 81. Not a whole big pattern there, but a lot of these home visits that are ending up in death are all kind of following a pattern where there's afternoon dosages that are happening when he's going to meet these people at their home. and they would then be found later on by a family member or by even sometimes shipment himself saying, I saw her earlier, I gave her a prescription, I was just coming back around to check and see. I'm trying to go through my head and try to kind of think of the common situation where someone would be having their doctor come over to prescribe them or to give them morphine.

So part of that has to be family member. that are needing like an injection, which is kind of like, it's not a controlled drip, like where you can have it over a long period of time. This is them getting a shot of morphine to be like instantly like yacked. What's their condition or what do they have that the family knows?

Does the family know that they're getting morphine during some of these just regular visits? Because like you said, they're seeing, he's seeing some of these people for long periods of time and then just one time their card gets drawn. He does a lot of his killings under the guise of doing blood draws for testing.

So it's a way for the patient to basically be at ease and to stick their arm out for the vein. And instead of pulling the blood out, he's just injecting them. Okay. But at what point, this is, I know that you're going to get to this. This is what's, I can't wrap my head around. At no point are any of the family members going like, okay, when it comes, they just are buying that it was, what are they buying is the excuse?

someone was healthy? What's he providing the explanation of? And then if someone's not able to provide an explanation, be like, yeah, I want an autopsy. Okay, it was an overdose. What was she overdosed on? Why did you, why did you prescribe that to her and try to like get to the bottom of that? Some excuses were heart attacks. Some of them were embolisms. Just he's throwing out. But he's doing it, but there's no community. That's the biggest thing is there's no communication between any of these things happening. Fuck, I, something like this happened, and it would be three connections,

and it would be all over, like, social media about people trying to figure this thing out. Well, this is the thing that really hits weird about this, is a lot of these patients, as they're being found, there was, I'm just pulling this out of something that I heard off of a documentary. The average amount of patient deaths, that occur with the doctor present

was something like 1.4% at the time. Shipman's number was about 33%. Yeah, he's at the crime scene a third of the time. And it's just it goes kind of under the radar. When they're finding these bodies,

they're not in a typical fashion that you would find a body that they had had a heart attack. They're not like in their pajamas. They're not found sleeping in bed to happen overnight. they're usually found fully dressed, kind of like this happened in the middle of the day.

And as gruesome as this sounds, if you have, normally people dying is never in a pleasant fashion. Usually there's, there's anguish on their face, there's, bald up hands. Well, that just depends on what it is.

Like you're, I don't think everything requires like a struggle or anything like that. Like, You can die peacefully in your sleep, like they say. You can, but if you're not found in your bed and your pajamas... I don't know. Yeah. No, I mean, I guess.

If you have a heart attack, you're probably going to be found clutching your chest, right? Or reaching for any sort of medication, anything like that. Yeah. But if you're getting diagnosed... You're trying to do the logic thing now. It's just... Well, it's one of those things that all of those signs are there. But when these people are finding their dead relatives and they have a peaceful look on their face, they weren't going for medicine, they weren't trying to get to the door.

They had their shoes on, but they were just laying asleep on their couch. Yeah. It becomes this thing where nobody's really understanding that death isn't a peaceful look, but all of these victims that they're finding are very peaceful. Well, one of the ways that you can get a peaceful death is if you're injected with morphine before you die. Yeah. A lot of end of life. Or injecting with morphine to kill you. Yeah.

A lot of end of life practices now kind of are you use morphine to try to ease somebody off into the afterlife. Yeah. And nobody's putting these pieces together, just finding these people in all of these different situations. It's so frustrating that nobody could do it. But then you have to remember. It's like we've talked about. This wasn't something that it's like you got to watch out for a killer doctor. No.

And you're also not at a hospital now. You're at a private practice, and as long as you're taking care of your patients and paying your dues or paying into the practice, not a lot of people are going to question. And nobody's, not a lot of people are going to question an 84-year-old dying in her home. Yeah. Like, that's a, she had a good run. That's why I'm having to give her a home visit is because she's, you know, that ill. Yeah, she's not able to leave the house. As these home visits are following these patterns of deaths in the afternoons and then being found at night, his patterns in the hospital were similar as far as,

what they're trying to attribute or saying that there's a good possible attribution. When you say like the hospital, do you mean like when he was at the hospital or in like the clinic, the private practice clinic? No, when he was at the hospital hospital. Not the clinic. To where these deaths were being found in the evenings after visitors hours were done for the day. So a situation where there's less people and less rooms to where you can't inject somebody and then leave and have a nurse walking. Less witnesses is basically what it's saying. Yeah, two, three hours later. It's, It gives him more of a chance to get away.

Donnybrook patients were mostly women, as we talked about. He's falsifying these death certificates pointing to old age, natural causes, these causes of death. Pretty much every one of the victims, the recommendations in his reports are for cremation. So trying to get rid of the remains for this to happen. Now, that's just a recommendation. There are still families that are burying their relatives. potentially leaving a trail of evidence, but at the same time,

you're not going to go exhum a body just to check if 89-year-old pop pop didn't die of a stroke. So there's also a lot of confusion as far as what he tells the victim's families and then what the cause of death is. But usually when you look at a death certificate, the first thing you don't go to is the cause of death.

Like it's a I don't know if it's a mental thing to not have to kind of relive what happens, but you see the cause of death and you just almost don't want to look at it. I guess I'm also thinking about the fact that these people probably know who their family or who their mothers or father's doctor was. They probably had a head and picking those. So when that comes back, even the people that are like, well, we'd like to know what the cause of death was. He's like, I'll call you as soon as I have the medical report. And he calls those people up and is like, this was the cause of death.

death. If it's not, if they're not requesting a death certificate or I don't know if there's a questionable thing on it and he's explaining him being like, well, actually the reason that they put that on death certificates is because right at the moment you die, it releases a bunch of chemicals into your body and so the natural levels are going to be higher. Like trying to explain away bullshit ways, but then families not knowing any better or trusting that doctor because that's who was treating their mother keeping her alive and be like, oh, well, he explained it. So I guess we don't any more questions on it. Does that make sense? And the patients did nothing but praise the doctor to their families. Yeah, because it's not like this. I would wonder what the, um, obviously when it's

earlier, like in the 70s, it's going to be closer to when he first starts. Some of these patients, he could technically have patients like that daughter. Yeah. And have her for the entire time and never do anything. He could have a 10 year patient, a 15 year patient, a fuck. Yeah. Some of them are long games. Some of them are short games. It's just he has no real discretion as to how he does any of this stuff. He becomes pretty emboldened later in the 80s and begins murdering in the office at Donnybrook. He's actually taking it a step further when on November 6, and we'll kind of get through the 80s here.

November 6, 1989, this guy named Joseph Wilcoxon, sweet last name, was killed in the exam room and his death inside of the exam room was so close around these nurses that a nurse was actually someone who found him and he was still warm at the time. He hadn't even had enough time to cool off as far as dying that he was found minutes after he had just passed away and it was a situation where he had come in to have something checked out. Shipman says, okay, let's do a blood draw he hits him with it he ends up dying on the table shipment comes in he goes well obviously he was here for a heart problem he said that he'd been feeling chest pains i took some blood so i could go run the sample and those chest pains must have manifested themselves into a heart attack while he was sitting in

this room not a whole lot of like damn we just missed him or let's try to revise that's what i was going to say been like oh if only we'd got him here a few minutes sooner yeah it all just kind of becomes these very close calls. And after this time, he does cool down. He has these cooling off periods to where when something gets too close or he just skirts getting caught, he'll shut it down for three, four months at a time. He'll go a little bit longer in between these things. Still treating patients and everything like that. Yeah. And that's just it. During, what I say he's cooling off, you always think of like a guy that just goes back to his nine to five and punches the clock and goes and pounds iron for eight hours and goes home. He's seeing patience that he could

potentially be killing, but he's just not doing it. He's just not. I turned up the kill tap. Yeah. He ends up, it was 10 months that he goes on a dry spell after Wilcoxon dies inside the office. These close calls are just not enough to stop him from doing it. And there's a, when I was kind of confounded earlier by him being able to have these dry spells and being able to keep it under control for a full year before he goes back to it, he always goes back to it. There's no just stopping and trying to live a normal life. Had he stopped at this point in time with this many kills under his belt or as many deaths under his belt, he's fine. Nobody's any wiser.

It's just one of those things where he just always is on the hunt, but he's only pulling the trigger when he feels like he can. When you said the body, the nurse came in and the body was still warm. So basically, he was doing the exam. He was in there by himself at a certain point. Yeah. Did his thing. And then was still, was he still in there when she, he would have had to still been in there, right? He was attending to another patient.

He let go for a little bit to run the blood to the lab and to go see somebody else. And the nurse ends up coming in to check on him. It's, I mean, there's so many. I just saw him, he was just fine. Oh, I bet it was this. Yeah. And it's, that's what really. kind of shocked me was there's so many times when he's explaining what happened to these patients

as far as like a heart attack or a collapse or something where it's these all it all happens they all happen at random times in life you never know when you're going to have a heart attack but you're telling me that it's not weird that this doctor is seeing heart attacks happening in like this 20 minute halo around when he's seeing these patients if only you got them here quicker yeah and that happens 50 times and you're just like I'm just so lucky You guys are like, oh, I always miss them. Yeah, it's not, he's sending them bad vibes. It's not bad vibes that he's giving them that's killing them.

It's the morphine. From 1977 to 1992 when he's at Donnybrook, he ends up believing, or they believe that he killed 71 patients. 71 patients at one practice. And again, I dropped that 250 number earlier. We're only talking about 71 patients at Donnybrook. So we're going to see the numbers ramp up in a way that I just, it's very, very hard to comprehend. In the 1990s, the practice begins implementing the use of computers for record keeping,

and then they end up switching over to this thing called the General Practitioners Fund Holding Program. And it basically allows practices to manage some of the money that they're granted from the government as far as how they're able to spend it. Now there's more oversight. there's more oversight, but also if you're in a practice with seven other doctors and you all have the exact same stake in it, when it comes down to spending that money under your own discretion, if you don't agree with the other six doctors in the way that they're spending it, you're not going to be happy with the fact that this is happening. And he actually goes to a lawyer, he brings the contract to a lawyer that he signed signing into this co-op and finds enough language to be able to split away from the doctor's office. and go into his own private practice. And when he does, he blows the doors off of Donnybrook.

So as he leaves, the remaining doctors were forced to buy out shipment share in the building, which was about $23,000 that they had to come up with to buy him out of his share in the practice. So he gets $23,000 that way. All the remaining doctors are then forced to pay off all of his tax debt, which was about $30,000 in tax debt because since they were a corporation, since they were run as a company, instead of each one of those doctors being taxed on their income that they're bringing in, all of it is being assumed by the practice. And when he leaves, the whole previous year's tax bill comes due and they say,

hey, you worked here for the entire year, we're going to need you to pay up on that $30,000. He just says, no. so they're fitted with 23,000 pounds, I guess he would say over there, that they have to pay him just to get him out of the building. Then 30,000 pounds that they have to cough up without him coughing it up for taxes, for work that he had done. Final fuck you was since he was able to get out of that contract, it was usually common practice for a doctor leaving to like go to a different city,

to go to another practice or go work in a hospital or anything. thing like that. He just left his patient list there. The whole reason that Shipman was able to buy into Donnybrook was because this doctor named John Bennett, he didn't have a teddy bear named Teddy Ruxpin, but he ended up leaving

and going to Yorkshire or Yorkshire to work. So Shipman just assumed his patient list. Yeah. Shipman leaves and takes his entire patient list with him. So they can't advertise to bring on another doctor

because they don't have a patient list to be able to hand that doctor to start making money. They are stuck fitting the bill or footing the bill without that seventh doctor in the practice paying in. With no way to recoup that. Yeah. So just an absolute. He's a fucking psycho in every sense of the word. Just some of the shrewdest worst business moves. And on the way out, he also took two staff members, which I have a hard time believing because it sounded like most of the staff members hated him.

I don't know why they would follow him. you not want to use computers? Do you not want to use computers? Fantastic. No, he wants people that have been using it and he was able to then have probably owe him a little bit for his new practice that he could just say, hey, you know, boss them around, tell them to get rid of records or anything like that or kind of just tell them to mind their own fuckholes. Yeah, I'm sure part of it probably comes with like a nurse that was not happy with her job. And he says, well, you can come run my practice. You can come work and something else that you want to do. And also, I mean, a lower overhead cost of going into his own private practice, but also bring

approximately like 3,300 patients along with him. Yeah. You already just have a built-in money-making system and there's going to be no changeover besides you have a new building. Yeah. It's just... And no oversight. Yeah.

In no oversight. That's the thing is he wanted no oversight. Funny thing that you bring up to computers is because one of the first things that he installs at his new practice on 21 Market Street that was also in Hyde, it was, like 10 or 20 kilometers away from Donnybrook. It was known as the surgery. First thing that he puts in is computers. Oh, really?

He got good enough on computers to where he was like kind of a local help desk kind of person for other doctors that are trying to get the computer system set up. It's going to come back to bite him in the ass pretty fucking hard. Is this kind of the new age equivalent of what he did previously at that first hospital where he went through and sorted all the records and got information? So he could try to see loopholes. I think he would like to see it that way, but it'll come into play. That's how he sees what he's doing. Yeah, a little bit. Okay.

So as he moves into the practice known as the surgery, because that's apparently going to the doctor, they just call it the surgery in England. It sounds pretty bleak that we call surgery something pretty important. It seems excessive. We're going to the surgery. God, how do you sell that to a kid? I don't know. We're going to the surgery today.

Yeah. His first year in practice, 1993, kills 16 people. 16 people right at the gate. Shaking off the rest. Comes out hot. 1994. He kills 11 people. 28 in 1995.

Busy year. Including seven in March alone. So March is. a very, very busy, busy time for him. 71-year-old Neva Ashcroft, an 88-year-old Lily Bardsley, were on the same day on March 7th. So not only is he keeping it in the month, he is throwing it all in there.

I think her name is Renata. Renata Overton dies April 1995 after being in a vegetative state because in 1994 he had shown up for a house call, a visit, because Overton had asthma. And he brings a nebulizer over to try to help her work through her asthma. Then injects her with morphine. She ends up pretty close to death.

Her daughter ends up showing up as she's fading away and going out. He says, there's nothing that I can do for. She's dead. And then a couple minutes later, they hear a groan come from the bedroom and she's not dead. So he goes in again, they check on her. He says call the ambulance. They end up calling the ambulance. They believe that he gave her a second shot of morphine at this point in time.

When the paramedics show up, her heart is stopped and she's completely dead. They throw her in the back of the ambulance. They hit her with the EpiPen. they hit her with the adrenaline, they end up starting her heart again. Start her heart again, but she's stuck in a coma. Yeah.

So potentially another woman that could tell the story of what happened to her, as the paramedics show up to like, okay, we'll have you treat her. And he goes, I gave her the nebulizer. She went into an asthmatic fit. I gave her morphine to try to calm her down.

Paramedics like, really? That seems kind of silly because you'd want to open the airways and if you're giving her morphine that's going to slow down. Really? Just straight straight to the morphine, huh? And this is another situation where the paramedics could have gone back to the hospital and be like, we've got to check up on this guy because he just gave an asthmatic morphine to try to fix her asthma attack. But they don't do it. It's just, it's so sad how many times that somebody had a chance to do it. I mean, at this point, he's in triple digits. Or they're just so busy too.

Again, they go in a report and they're like, we'll try to get to it. Could have been their fourth call that day that they were on. They had another one potentially right after that. You never know the circumstances. 1996, we have 30 deaths, including six of them in July. The youngest victim in 1996 was a 54-year-old named Valerie Cuthbert. her only reported ailment at the time of death was an inflamed bunyan. Those are deadly, man.

Yeah. A bunyan is what does it. It's, and again, this is a situation where you can't really, I mean, what are you looking for in a bunyan case? Like, how do you end up dying from a bunion? Like, how do you, but how do you justify that when someone asks you? It's, I truly don't understand how it all happens. And that's as we're talking about kind of young patients, his youngest patient that he had ever kind of run afoul of

actually did end up surviving. If you take away the four-year-old, youngest patient was a 25-year-old that he had seen all the way back in 1974. I believe her name was Mary Oswald. She came into the surgery or into his practice. It was the hospital at this point. Okay. comes in with a stomach

egg and he ended up giving her these pills or he injected her with something called dachanol, which is a synthetic opiate and then he gave her pills to take when she gets home because he thinks that she has appendicitis and he's

trying to instead of taking it out I don't know why it was. He decides, okay, let's do this. It might be gallstones. So he says, I'm going to come check on you later. ends up She goes home She stops on the store

On the way home Not thinking that this is really Anything beyond Just I got to take these pills eventually Goes home Freshens up the house Because she knows that the doctor's coming later Ends up taking the dicanol then

Shipman shows up And she is a little loopy On these diaconols So there's not really a whole lot of pushing back On anything that he's doing He ends up injecting her She loses consciousness. And Shipman is kind of like, ooh, this is a bad deal.

She's dying. She just said her husband is coming home. I don't know if she's going to be dead quick enough. Husband ends up coming home, finding that he's standing over the top of her, like still working on her, trying to revive her because he killed her. And this is kind of the one where it's like he put in enough effort. try to revive her, that it's questionable as to was this like a, he tried to drug her and sexually assault her or something along those lines? Because apparently she had bruising in and around.

A doctor had never done this before. Why are you, no one would question somebody that was able to go into the noble medical field. I guess. I mean, it's, it ends up not coming out and tell the inquiry kind of what she feels, but he is able to revive her. They get her to the hospital. They take care of her and she asked what he thinks happened and he says well you're allergic to opiates so you can't take any opiates because you'll pass out from those dykenol pills that i had given you earlier and she just believes that she just for the rest of her life surgeries or anything like that she says no opiates because i'm allergic to them because dr shipman told me that i was allergic to these and i ended up passing out and almost dying just it's one of those things where he runs into these

situations where he doesn't kill all of his victims that he intends to, but was this a point in time back in the 70s when he was starting to experiment with what he could give her a patient as far as an injection to kill them? And this was something to where it didn't kill her the first time. And he got a little gun shy and maybe didn't have his speech down for if somebody walks in on this happening. And it's like, shit, I'm not prepared to try to explain this death away. I have to try to save her. But you fast forward all the way up to 1996, and he's killing 30 people in 6 in July, and then he's running into this Bunyan situation. He's already had 20-ish years of trying to figure out the stories that he can tell.

And a pattern that comes up while he's working in the surgery is they see when they go through and investigate that he has a habit of going and visiting a patient, and then hours after going and visiting that patient, going back into their records into the computer and changing their forms, changing their notes, and saying something like she had complained of heart pain on this day. She complained of kidney pain.

He's building a backstory to justify why he was there and why he was able to prescribe that. And then the family could be like, what do you mean she was, well, she might not tell you guys every time that she contacts me. How are you guys? Like she's talked to family members and be like,

she was in that day. I didn't know she didn't tell you that. He's laying it on victims' families saying, well, maybe you didn't know your mother as well as you thought you did. Did she tell you that she had heart pains? Did she tell you she had palpitations? Like, well, no. They didn't tell their family

because they didn't have those at the time. And he's saying, well, on this date, when she came in, look at these records here. It's saying that she has heart palpitations. So as he's doing this, the reason that they can figure out the pattern is because he figured out how to do hand charting. He didn't know that computers,

when you go back in and try to edit files, it leaves whatever metadata was back then that these records were changed on this date. So as the inquiry... Some type of like edit code or something like that. So as the inquiries going back and looking at all these deaths and trying to put two and two together,

they're going through his medical records, and they're seeing that he's making changes to medical reports six months ago. The day that he killed these, women hours after their bodies are found or before their bodies are found. But until you investigate that, you don't know. You're just, you're not looking into any of this. So he shows that this is kind of a pattern of going back and changing all of these records

and all of this data, but he doesn't know. Some of these home deaths were muddled by shipment turning up the heat in the house. because if you turn up the heat in the house or you start a fire in the hearth in the temperature of the room raises faster decomposition happens faster rigor mortis sets in because the body has stopped working

and it's starting to basically eat itself in a terrible way to say as far as break down and decompose so does that change how it processes the you decompose faster in heat no you do but what I'm is that to go ahead and throw off just how time of death.

Okay. To say, I showed up for this doctor's appointment and she was already dead, not admitting that he had showed up a couple hours early, dosed them, and then left, and then came back like, oh, I was just showing up for my appointment. I showed up and she was already dead. Let's not look at the thermostat and see that it was set to 84 degrees in this house, so there was a roaring fire going on.

He could have turned it down. Yeah. He absolutely could have, but he's just doing these very, little things to try to throw off if there is a coroner's report on any of this kind of stuff and almost further himself distance himself from a time of death but that's not happening all the time it's just wild how there's these few little things that he'll try to control while using a very obvious mode of killing people by giving them morphine uh 1997 he ends up killing 37 including five in january and five in December.

1997, the youngest patient, he has, David Allen Harrison is 47 years old in that same year. It's, the numbers, I mean, 37 in a year, it's damn near like one a week. But you're also running into multiple deaths happening during a week. There's just so many different little, this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. And all these people died. And nobody questions it. Nobody goes into any sort of details into this kind of stuff. Up to this point in 1997,

there has to be rumblings in the town of being like, well, he's a great doctor, but he seems to be killing a lot of people. You would think so, right? Like, there's church services and stuff. Also, how big is this place that he's in? It's not huge. I want to say that they said the general area was somewhere,

around like 40,000 people. This should have been sussed out much earlier. Like, that's to where this, like, same people that are going to church and everything together and having funerals planned and all

of that should have been talking about this. But again, why would you question someone that it had was in the, where no one had ever done this before? Yeah. Where there was never a reason to suspect a doctor. They did everything they could. And if it's a town with an aging population, it's to be expected.

What's the opposite of a blue zone? Shipman zone? Yeah, shipment zone. The shipment field. So we get to 1998. 1998, I'm going to say you would think that it's a cooling down period, but it's actually his last active year. 18 people end up being killed in 1998. The last death that occurs is June 24th.

1998, 81-year-old Kathleen Grundy. 18 sounds like we've stepped down a year. And then you realize that the last death that occurs is June 24th. So within the first six months of 1998, he kills 18 people. We're headed for a record year at that point in time. March 1998 is kind of the first little sniff that there might be something weird going on. There's a general practitioner from this place

called Brooke surgery that's literally right across the street from the surgery. It's just another doctor's office. Her name was Linda Reynolds. And she brought up these concerns about these high death rates of shipment's patients. The reason that she knows that is because in order for cremation to happen,

there's these things called type C forms. And it's basically a second sign-off from a doctor saying that everything looks right here, go ahead and prepare this body for cremation. and they knew as they introduced these forms that people that had single doctor private practices were going to need second signoffs from other doctors. So they found that these other doctor's offices were charging money for these signatures on these forms. And then being right across the street, they were very convenient for shipment just to walk over and be like, hey, got another one here. If you guys could go ahead and look over my notes, look over the cause of death and everything.

see all of the different things that I checked as far as how they had died, how I found them, all this kind of stuff. You just want to sign off on it. That's okay. And they were doing a lot of this, but she ends up doing the math. Shipman's patient list at this point was around 3,000 people. They had signed 16 cremation forms over the previous three months. Now, Brooke's surgery had...

16 over the last three months? Brooke surgery had 9,000 plus patients on their list. They only had 14 patient deaths in that period. So he had 16 cremations, not all total deaths, just 16 cremations that are going to happen in three months with 3,000 people. They had more than 9,000. They had 14 patients, just total deaths. Do you think he was doing that at other practices too?

Mm-hmm. To not all do them. Okay. So just that one alone had 16. Yes. She ends up looking at this number. Like, that's not good. I got to go to that.

She ends up going to the coroner, tells the coroner what's going on, who the coroner is probably like, well, I'm not seeing a lot of these bodies. It's because you're not doing autopsies on these bodies. They're just going straight to cremation because they're dying of natural causes or old age, and nobody's investigating this. The coroner ends up hooking up with the greater Manchester police force to investigate this stuff. Apparently, the lead investigator. that was in the office wasn't there.

I don't know if he was on vacation. He was tied up with something else. But it ends up being passed out to these other inexperienced officers to investigate the situation. They investigate 15 kind of semi-recent cases. It was something within like the last six months or so. As they're looking through these cases, they are seeing some kind of questionable things. So they go talk to Shipman.

He's explaining all of them off. He's going through these lists and he's saying, well, obviously, you guys are, you don't know my field, you deal with murders. I'm a doctor. I deal with deaths. Yeah, inexperienced investigators and everything that are, you know, haven't learned lessons yet about how to spot some bullshit or haven't dealt with certain circumstances. Again, why would a doctor be doing this, right?

Yeah, well, they don't know how to investigate these kinds of murders or these deaths because they're taking shipment on his word and they're not going and speaking to any of these families. Mm-hmm. Because no matter how convinced you are that something was above board, if a police officer shows up to your house and starts asking questions about this death, you might reframe some things in your mind a little bit more as far as, okay, well, if they're coming to ask me about this death is suspicious, did I really notice anything suspicious?

Was there anything that I kind of felt that was off, that I was just in such an emotional state that I just went ahead and took it as fact from shipment? So they didn't go do any of these investigations with the family members. This was just solely on Shipman's word, basically. And April 17th, they find no sufficient evidence to continue to pursue charges. And because they found no sufficient evidence, there would be three more victims that would be killed after that. They had the numbers in front of them. Just based on statistics alone from the fact that he had more cremations in three months with that

few of patients than... They would have had to just dig a little bit more. Yeah. Just based on that number, you have to ask way more questions than that. There would be a time afterwards. It was August in 1998, so we'll jump ahead of Kathleen, because Kathleen's, she's a rock star, and it's just, when you find out how he falls,

it's the most insane shit ever. So as they're going through, this is after shipment's been caught. There's a taxi driver named John Shaw that is realizing that he's losing a pretty fair amount of the taxi fares that he was having because he was driving elderly patients to their appointments at the surgery. I want to say that he said he had like 27 regulars and 16 of them had died at that point in time. So would he drive them to their appointments, hey, wait outside for me and then shipment's having to come out or he's having to go in and say, hey, is my fare here? I'm sorry they passed away. If they died in the surgery,

But then there's the home visits to where he says, okay, well, I know she has appointments on Tuesdays. Let me go pick her up. He shows up at the house. The family's there and they're like, yeah, she died last week. So he's seeing the connection between dead patients and shipment. And he can't put it all together to come in and talk to the police until he finds out that shipment is under investigation to go in and give him that information. So there's people around that are putting together that there's something very, very, very, very seriously wrong, but a doctor is kind of supposed to be above reproach in a neighborhood like

that. You have women who are suspicious of this, but they're concerned that if they go and tell the police and there's an investigation and anybody in the community finds out that somebody's bad-mouting shipment's name and they love him as a doctor, they're potentially going to be a pariah in a community that's already not that big. So there's a lot of people that are being quiet. Back to Kathleen. June 24th, Shipman goes and sees,

or goes to Kathleen Grundy's house, and it's under the guise of taking blood for an aging study. Hours go by, he goes and sees him in the morning, hours go by, she doesn't show up to,

she volunteers five days a week. She makes sandwiches for the less fortunate people in town. Oh, God, she was the wife of the mayor of Hyde. She's very well known. She's a fixture in the community.

She's just a bad ass lady. So this is like his big kill. And this is the one that gets the attention, right? Had it gone differently, this would have just been another patient. But this is where he takes a turn that's just very, very confusing. So she ends up not showing up for making these sandwiches.

The friends go to the house. They find the door unlocked. They walk in. they find Kathleen laying out with her shoes on a cup of tea on the coffee table laying on this couch very peacefully passed away. Immediately they try to get in contact with her daughter. Her name's Angela Woodruff. No answer there. They end up calling Shipman because they know she's his or he's her GP. He returns to call the death. He cites old age on the death certificate. when Angela ends up finally getting in contact with somebody who informs her, who is Shipman,

Shipman tells her that she died of a heart attack. So he writes old age on the certificate of death, but he tells her she dies of a heart attack. Didn't put a heart attack on the cause of death, so he got his wires crossed somewhere along there and ended up not being able to cover up. It was a heart attacked caused by old. Yeah, caused by old age, I guess. That same day that she dies,

June 24th, there's a will that shows up at the office of a solicitor, a solicitor's a lawyer, called solicitors over there, of a man named Hamilton Ward. In this will that's typed out on a typewriter, it states that her entirety

of 386,000 pounds and a house is to be left to Harold Shipman for the superior care that he gave her and that he gave to the entire community and that her family isn't entitled to anything because they are already doing well enough themselves. Guy got greedy. It has Kathleen's signature on the bottom of it

and it has two other witnesses signatures, a man named Paul Webster and somebody else who I spent 20 minutes looking for his name and could not find him. turns out that Paul Webster and this other guy were both patients of shipment and when Paul Webster gets interviewed about this as they're in the process of investigation Webster says that he was just sitting in the waiting room and one of or and shipment comes out and asks him to sign these forms as he asked him what these forms

are he says that they're new medical forms that he has to have his signature on to be able to form these procedures. Webster says that the only thing that he could see was there was one signature and then it was folded over so he couldn't see what he was signing. He just assumed that it was some sort of a medical form that he had to sign. Yeah, some standardized form. You wouldn't think anything other than that as far as coming from a doctor's office, right? You wouldn't think that you were forging your name on a will that's fake, right? Nope. It's just, it's so confounding that he does this. Along in this letter, just poor typing, there's misspellings.

The signature is like twice the size of what Kathleen's signature usually is. And it shows up the day of her murder or the day of her quote unquote death at this point in time. Now there's a letter that comes in four days after this from a Jay Smith that states he was a friend of Kathleen's and he is just writing to the solicitor's office to inform them of her death. So now it's time to execute the will. In this whole time this is going on, Angela Woodruff, who's Kathleen's daughter, is a solicitor

herself. And she was the one that worked in concert with her mother to create a will. So she knew the last will and testament of her mother. And when she is informed that there is now a new will in play. She sees the new will and she goes, my mother was a secretary for 25 years. She would never misspell a word. Do you see how these don't line up? It's just not right.

Something doesn't smell right here, Gavna. Not to mention. Oh my God, she's, oh no, she's the mayor's. I was the mayor's wife. Not to mention in this will, it states 386,000 pounds and a house. Kathleen owned two houses.

So, she hadn't known that. Kathleen in this writing her new will just happened to forget a whole separate ass house. Like it's it's just such a big miss that she immediately jumps into investigating this whole entire thing. She's actually the one that goes and speaks to Paul Webster after she sees this new new will that's completely wrong. Woodruff goes to the police. Who's Paul Webster again? Huh?

Who's Paul Webster was one of the signatures, one of the witnesses. Gotcha. on the new will. Woodruff goes to the police to begin this investigation. And in the process, they have to figure out what's going on. In this new will, it said that she asked to be cremated. She knew, or Angela knew from doing the other will that her mother wanted a specific funeral where she was buried, not cremated.

And they basically planned all this out, and now she wanted to be cremated. So she got to them fast enough to raise this questioning, that they just buried her. And one of the reasons that she realized that these witnesses had to be fake was at her funeral. She got everybody's name that came to the funeral.

There was no Jay Smith that had written this other letter to begin the execution of the will. There was no Paul Webster that would have been a witness to this will signing and this other man. Nobody showed up. So this is when she goes out

and starts finding them. They come to find out that Jay Smith is just John Smith, which in England, I'm assuming, is probably a very... It's like John Smith here. Yeah. Yeah. It's the most common name in the world.

It's the easiest name to use. So zero creativity points for even the name for that for shipment. They have to exhume the body. They have to test this body to figure out what's going on. They said that they had like the hardest time finding any law enforcement officers that had ever been a part of an exhumation because it was so rare for. for it to happen that they just didn't have anybody to be able to do it. So once they finally get people to dig a hole.

Well, to show up and kind of coordinate the security and the movement of the body and all that kind of stuff so nothing gets found with or tampered with, they throw up tents around her graveside to try to protect from the prying eyes because there's literally, there's an old folks home that is right across the street. That's just poor placement that it's down on grave, it's looking over a graveyard anyway. So there's just old folks staring out the window I mean like, why are they digging it? It's something different than just looking at death all day.

Yeah, but maybe they got it wrong and she one of us made it back. They must have thought she was still alive. They had taken enough care to where they took soil samples from both sides, the top and bottom underneath and over the top of the casket to make sure that there weren't any sort of elements that had leached into the casket and maybe gotten into the body to corrupt the body. as they go through and they're doing the post-mortem the autopsy on the body, they end up finding large amounts of morphine in the samples that they're taking.

So the reason why I've been harping on the morphine is because it's a substance that's going to stay in your bodies. Had he done something like used insulin, used something that's more naturally occurring or would have found into a body. to overdose them, it would have been way harder to find out all of these victims. But maybe it's not as effective. You can overdose somebody on insulin pretty quickly. Like there's, if somebody's not diabetic and you hit them with insulin, your body naturally

produces insulin, you can overdose on insulin. I'm sure you could, but at least he can't prescribe and cover up why he's prescribing people insulin for stuff if they don't need it. Well, the same way that he's getting the morphine is he's over prescribing it, and then he's funneling some of it away for himself to use for these murders later on. And they think that that's potentially why after he gets caught at the hospital, that it takes him a little bit of time to get back into murdering, is because he got rid of his stash of drugs that he was using to kill.

So there was a little cooling off period. There's also different times where they said that there's a chance that he was spooked into not killing for a while. And it took him a while to get all of the ingredients that he needed to start back on his binge again. As they do the exhumation, they find the cause of death is not old age. It's not a heart attack. It was an overdose. There's a search warrant for the surgery and for Shipman's residents that are completed at the same time, obviously,

so he can't see that there's a search warrant going on in the surgery and run home and flush a bunch of evidence. At the surgery. As they walk into the surgery to execute this search warrant, they go ahead and tell them that it's a search warrant. One of the first things that Harold Shipman says is he points to the typewriter. He said, Kathleen Grundy has borrowed that typewriter on more than one occasion. I don't know what she did with it. I just know that hers broke and she came in and borrowed this typewriter.

They take the typewriter. They go through. They seize a bunch of records. That's what they end up taking from the surgery. It was her typewriter from her house that he had taken. It was his typewriter that he said was a spare that he had had in hers broke. So he had lended that typewriter to her. Correct.

But why? So that would have obviously had to come from her house. No, no, no, it was his. Why would they say, why would he say that that's her typewriter? Because as they went through and did the analysis on the typewriter, they found, I believe it was the E key, the thing that goes up and strikes it. it leaves a very faint E instead of a solid pressing on the E. Yeah. And they go back and they check the will in the letter from J. Smith.

And every single one of those E's is very faint. So they immediately know that that typewriter was what produced that will in that number or that letter from Jay Smith. Gotcha. And he's saying that she borrowed it from him and she wrote her will with that one. Yeah, pretty convenient that the only two documents that they have link to. I thought you were going to say something about like D.N. but this is also not a time frame for DNA on that. They checked it for fingerprints. The only fingerprints that they found on that typewriter were Harold Shipman's.

The only fingerprints that they found on both of the letters matched Harold Shipman. Kathleen's fingerprints weren't on the typewriter. They weren't on the will at all. It all just becomes very suspicious. And he had to... It's beyond suspicious. Come on. Yeah.

He tips his hand immediately when he's like, before you guys start, Kathleen borrowed that typewriter a number of times. You're just, you realize how badly you're You're already trying to give them to a question That they aren't going to reach for another three or four days And they're gonna be like, how did you know to, yeah, yeah, I got you. 45 minutes of questioning, you might get to the typewriter. Off the jump, he's like, that's a random thing to say.

So they also pull a bunch of records from the surgery at the house. They end up finding this box of trinkets. They find all of these items stashed away in this box in the garage. And as they're going through it, they know that Primrose is a fairly portly woman. And they're finding all of these rings that are just, it would be a physical impossibility for these rings

to be fitting on Primrose's fingers. They're also finding all of these old, like, figurines and these different things that Primrose has no idea about. Old people trinkets. Yes. So it's one of those things. situations where serial killers do take trophies. But at the same time, some of these trophies were worth nothing.

There were also diamond rings in these trophies. So, but he wasn't paunting them. He wasn't selling them. So he had to have been keeping them for some reason. And they end up seizing that. Shipman is questioned about the death now that they know that was caused by an overdose. Shipman says, well, it was kind of a secret that Kathleen wanted me to keep, and she didn't even really know that I fully suspected this, but I believe that she was an addict.

I believe that she had a morphine addiction. As you can see in these notes that I had taken from years back pointing to the fact that I believe that she was taking some sort of opiate just based upon the the searching that I was doing of her body for any sort of needle holes or anything like that. So where was the stuff that she had taken? Well, and before they can even get to that,

they go, you know that when you go back and you retroactively edit one of your reports or your notes, it leaves an imprint of data is to when that was put in, correct? And Shipman goes, I wasn't aware of that. I was not aware of that. And he says, but that's, I mean, you have.

Just for the computer to try to smash it. Yeah, which as I sees the computer, I'm sure he's like, that's fine. That's not going to hurt me in anyway. I have plenty of records on there that back this up. I doctored a lot of records on it. But it ends up biting him in the ass. When they ask him about her showing signs of addiction, he talks about how he saw needle marks.

He saw a lot of lethargy from her. They speak to her daughter, Angela. Her daughter Angela says that she's never seen her mother not in great health in her old age. They interview some of the friends that had come and found her body. They said that just weeks before that they had seen her throw a little skip on the last step of the bus and jump off the bus. She was just fine. She had never been lethargic. She had never missed anything.

She was always on time for everything. So the addiction thing, not only is it blown out of the water by her actions and by her lack of having any other morphine in the house, it's also blown away by the fact that the records just don't match. Everything is just falling into place to start pointing the fingers at Shipman. And on September 7th, Fred is arrested. Again, we talked about John Shaw, the taxi driver, comes forward in August. You have that information that's being pushed into their ears about all of these other patients. He ends up getting arrested on 15 counts of murder and one count of four. forgery. They had gone back through these records, I believe it was like the previous six months

maybe to where they found these records. They exhumed bodies. They brought ashes in for testing as far as any of these deaths that looked suspicious. So they had Kathleen Grundy's death and the forgery count. They had all of these other bodies that they had exhumed and studied and found that there were abnormalities in the reporting. And then they had had other deaths that, that they just attributed to this had to have been something fishy, and that's why they were cremated. When the trial starts, the defense throws up this whole plan. It starts October 9, 1999, so you have about a year for everything to come into play for this trial.

The defense immediately tries to split trials. They say, we need to have one trial for Kathleen's murder, because that's the one that you've directly tied to him along with this will. We want to fight that separately. We also have all of these exhumed bodies that you're going to try to tack on that we would need extra time to look into those for the defense. To prepare for each. And then, yeah. And then we have all of the cremation murders that you're tying to him through just evidence that's not physical in any nature.

And the judge says, no, because if we do that, the other two trials are going to be tainted by the outcome of this trial. because this guy is suspected of killing this many people as a doctor. If this makes nationwide news, we're never going to be able to get another jury pool in here to try to convict him of anything else that doesn't know anything about this. They also jump into the will

whole hog, this fake will, and try to use it to bring Angel up on the stand and say, is it true that you and your mother had a falling out? She says, no. Why would she leave you out of the will? She doesn't. She didn't.

It's a fake will. And they keep pounding the will drum saying, well, it's true that it's written in the will that you guys didn't need the funds. And your husband actually had inherited a million pounds from the death of one of his parents earlier on in the year, correct? She says, yeah, we both have good jobs. But that doesn't mean that my mom wouldn't have wanted us to have any of her things. And just basically, they try to use this evidence that can't really be looked at as evidence. because it was faked and forged the whole entire time to try to defend shipment. And this whole entire time is they're going through.

So by bringing the will into question, that is what gives him motive to commit the murder. It was financial gain. And this is like the first time he had ever tried to pull any financial gain from a victim. So it's like the first time that he tried to do this, he ends up just falling flat on his face and being the most obvious con job ever. had he not forged the will and sent it in and just tried to ride this whole thing out, all of a sudden he's still killing. He's still murdering. There's no questions as to what happens.

You would like to say no, they would have got him on, but technology would have eventually caught up. I have to believe that, right? But they just investigated him about this odd number of deaths and the police cleared him. This was months before he murders Kathleen Grundy. So he's already scurred. that kind of questioning. And before the trial, when they have him, it's crazy to watch them interrogate him

because he's just saying, no, I didn't do this, no, I didn't know about this over and over and over. And it finally gets to a point to where they're bringing him into the questioning room to ask him about these different cases. He grabs his chair and he turns at the opposite direction from the investigators. His lawyer is in the room present, still sitting facing the investigators and Shipman's just staring at the wall

and they have to get up and walk around the table and try to show him evidence and you hear them on the investigation tape saying, let this be noted for the record Frederick Shipman had his eyes closed for the entirety of the time that I showed him Exhibit A. He's so far into denying everything

that he stopped talking. He's not even facing the right direction when they're questioning him. he's giving them nothing there's no sort of evidence that they can even glean from these uh interviews besides just he's not saying anything yeah he's not denying anything at this point so it doesn't take them very long um they ended up coming back with a verdict january 31st in 2000 so i mean it's it's a fairly long trial between the beginning of october to january 31st it only takes him six days of deliberations to find him guilty on all 16 counts he gets life

for each plus four years for forgery. You've got to make sure you tack on that. Got to get it there. They pretty much immediately announced after this that there's going to be no trials going forward no matter what they find because it's just, it's going to be impossible to try to give this guy a fair trial. He's already going to be in jail for the rest of his life. We will do an inquiry to try to bring any sort of peace to the families and try to figure out

just how bad this was. So basically they're just adding to the tile or adding to the tally as they go through do these investigations, but it's never going to, nothing ever is going to come of it. They're just going to simply say, well, then he was guilty on 16 counts. It's not going to be like that. They're just going to say, he's already in there for life. We can't tack on anything else except Pallymarks to his number. We're not going to find him guilty of anything else, but we will attribute deaths to him.

And that begins happening. The shipment inquiry runs from 2001 to 2005. This woman named Dame Janet Smith. I like dame. Is dame the equivalent of a sir? It is. Okay. So that's what it is. Dame's way cooler than sir.

I don't know why. Dame Janet Smith is the one that runs the shipment inquiry. And it ends up concluding that shipment killed approximately 250 patients between 1971 and 1998. They originally thought it was 215 until they dove back into those earlier years when he was working at the hospital after he got out of medical school. And they basically said more likely than not, these were the contributors for. them. So 215 unlawful killings. And like I say, they said about 45 were reason for concern,

but they were confident in the 250 number. The 45 were just concerned about the cause of death because it just didn't match any of the other records that it was like immediate death. They go on for so long just trying to look into this and trying to figure out what else they can pin on him, what else they can look forward to. part of the big issue is there were 459 people that had died under shipment's care between 71 and 98. So if we want to get weird with the numbers. Yeah, I mean, he would have people that would naturally die under his care. And that could be somebody that he got called and then made a house call and pronounced them dead.

Or do you think he ever went up to one of those and was just like, fuck? Didn't get him. I planned on this one. This was the person I was planning on next month or something. Yeah. Or they were under his care when he was working at the hospital during a shift, and that was just when they died. Yeah, he, yeah.

And the uncertainty in this 459 numbers were, there were so many of them that he was often the only doctor that certified the deaths. So he was the only one that made the call, didn't have any sort of second opinion or second look at any of this stuff. So if you want to say 250 patients, there's 459 that died under the case. under shipment's care, that's more than half that they're attributing to them of that 459.

I feel like if you're going to attribute half to him, that number has to be bigger, right? Because half's a lot, but 459 deaths, and he has this many that they can attribute to him, and then there's that many that are sitting in limbo, there had to have been more. At some point, when you're looking over things, at what point are you just, like, bury it? Like, you've got to, like, imagine that because the high, that number gets, and if you consistently keep reporting on that and having to put that in the news, it just hurts everything associated with that system of, first of all, the pleas for not having stopped it, erodes trust in any, you know, medical professionals and everything. It's, yeah,

it's just a, it's a constant, like, running tally of failure. After that inquiry, they end up charging six doctors with misconduct. All six doctors who would sign the cremation forms for shipment, or just six doctors. Not all the doctors that did it, but these six doctors, they were all found not guilty, but the reason that they were found to have done this, potentially, was because they were in the process of making money,

and they had all kind of said, well, he was paying us to do this, and we couldn't go see the bodies, so we just assumed that since he was a doctor, he was going to have the, he took the Hippocratic oath, so why wouldn't we trust him? The statement, well, he was a doctor is kind of like the just following orders type excuse.

You also have two after that that do end up getting convicted. And they were convicted because they were giving misleading statements during the inquiry. So basically trying to minimize the fact that they were just signing these cremation forms willy-nilly. It brings a ton of just, we have to reform this. We have to try to button this up to make sure that it doesn't happen again. And like I said in the beginning, This wasn't just like a regional inquiry. This wasn't just a medical board inquiry.

This went all the way up to parliament where there was a national inquiry to try to figure out exactly what happened. Because they had never dealt with a killer that had come anywhere close to this number. He's by far and away England's most prolific serial killer. And I would say, I know that we had done that pot quiz where you were talking about the guy in South America. I think that was a rankings one. I think I gave you the listing, yeah. Where his number was higher than that. And he absolutely, I haven't looked into him.

He was the dude that would dress up like the priest and stuff, right? And it was mostly like younger boys, yeah. I haven't looked into him to see just how legitimate that is. But the fact that there's this error of potentially 459 people that died under his watch, that feels more prolific than just a 250. The craziest part is how he was doing it to where there was a system set up for oversight of this. not only the medical system but also law enforcement

that should have caught this as well with this many people dying and investigating it was a lapse on two fronts whereas someone that is just doing this stuff like a fucking psychopath against the law it's just the law trying to catch them and he's able to find that meaty middle ground to be able to do it

so they assessed that box that they'd found of trinkets at about 10,000 pounds worth of jewelry in different things and primrose request that they return that box of jewelry. They go through

the box of jewelry and they end up finding that there were 66 pieces that Primrose had said yes, these are mine. They had taken another 33 of them and just auctioned them off and then gave the money to the surviving family members.

But 66 pieces of jewelry feels like a whole lot for Primrose to just have sitting in a box out in the garage that she didn't know about. Why would ship and be throwing her shit in there with all of his little prizes. Oh, yeah. Like, yeah, I get what you're saying.

There was also, like, the most expensive one was a platinum ring that there was a family that stepped up and had a picture of their mother wearing the ring. Like, that's 100% hers. So you can say, with complete certainty that a lot of those were trophies. Either she is, you know, she knows what's going on, or she's just the dumbest fucking thing there is. And it's just like, these old ladies are just giving you rings and everything like that, because you're such a good doctor.

That's what I'm saying. I want a hammer her so bad because she's totally a victim in this, but I feel like she's a victim that should have had a little better of an eye out for what's going on. She's just fucking dumb. Well, at the same time, is it a situation where he's able to separate his work and home life enough to where she's like, how was your day, honey? He's like, that six more died. Six more died under my watch today.

I didn't know what happened. They just, they all died. Off day? Yeah. And you can have a bad day as a doctor. Honey, you look sad. Another day, another bad day. Six of them died on me.

I don't know what's happening. Where did it happen? Oh, it happened at her house on Shire Street. Didn't you have two other deaths that happened on Shire Street? The math is just insane. Finally, we get to January 13th, 2004. Harold Frederick Shipman, I believe it was two days before his birthday, ends up being found hanging in a cell.

He killed himself finally. Age 57. Now, there's a belief that the reason why he took his own life was because his pension fund would have not contributed anything to Primrose and the family had he died after the age of 60. So he had to end his life to make sure that they were going to be taken care of.

There were also rumors that days before his death, he had received a letter from Primrose where she basically asked him to come clean with everything to her before it was too late. So this might have been something that she had even known about. The report from the inquiry doesn't end up coming out until after he's already dead.

So there is a thought that maybe once the inquiry came out, he was going to be so embarrassed. There was going to be no doubt whatsoever once it became public. So there's a lot of reasons to do it. But again, his death just, it makes the most sense out of anything that he does. He killed himself to make sure that his pension ended up staying with his family, which it did. I believe they got something like there was a lump sum one-time pay out of 100,000 pounds. And then every year following that was another 10,000 pounds.

So I don't know how that would have gone over in 1998. It doesn't feel like a large sum of money. money, but at least he's still providing for his family. This dude's a fucking psycho. He is, but, I mean... No, don't do the whole redeeming... No, no, there's no redeeming qualities, but I can't quite pinpoint on why he was such a psycho. That's what I'm trying to... No, no, I can pinpoint on why I think he's such a psycho

to just like, I don't know. Maybe it's the fucking audacity of this guy to not explain himself to provide us some type of, like, clarity or closure on this. makes me not fucking like him. So much outside of just like being an evil person. And to go off the list, I mean, to say, well, he was killing people because he saw that they were in rough shape and he saw his mother in rough shape when she died. But not all these people were rough shape. No, no.

No. Not all these people were older. Not all these people were on death store that these were mercy killings. You can say that he was addicted to murder. usually people that are addicted to things can't just shut it off for an entire year. I feel like maybe we're into God, why can't I think of his name?

The serial killer we did last. Ridway. Ridgeway. Ridgeway was the mother. This could have been a Ridgeway type situation because the mother dies at 17. They're not able to interview her for anything. She's sending him to prom with his older sister and everything.

There's probably some fucked up shit going on inside the house. potentially but you would think that i'm not trying to blame the parents like that like this guy's a fucking psycho but i'm just trying to kind of connect dots here you'd think that his brother and sister would have come out and said shipment was molested something like that at some point in time trying to cover it but they they just don't did the siblings do any i mean assumed they not that i really saw i think everybody kind of went underground with the family because again you're dealing with a guy who's serial killer numbers are unmatched by pretty much anybody on planet yeah um the closest

this thing that I can come up with, and this is just kind of what I'll finish on, is the way that I can really make sense of this was the same way as I was talking about, like, when he would show up to a practice, he would be respectful to all of his superiors and everybody else, but he kind of looked down on everybody else, and there was kind of a feeling of superiority for anybody that was below him. Yeah. I think that that could have attributed in a way to where he felt like he was the deathbringer for really he knew better he was who was in control of every situation at all times

i that's it's the closest thing that i can come up with is that it had to have been a control thing for him the randomness of the killings i feel like kind of points to it but it also kind of points away from it yeah because he it could have just been a feeling that he had that day that's what i'm saying crazy like again this is something we can't understand because we could never step in the shoes of why someone would do this. He might have gotten cut off in traffic on his way over to see somebody for a home visit. It was like, I've got to kill somebody, pretty angry. I can't go beat that guy up because he'll probably kick the shit out of me.

But I can go kill this lady. Mrs. Wilson. Yeah. I'm back in controlling you. It's the closest thing that I can come up with as deeply as I've... As you want to go. Yeah. Pretty much.

Deep as I can understand. It's so different because all the other serial killers that we've talked about, there's blood, there's gore, there's just horrific scenes. These are just people that have passed away. Yeah. That's why, yeah. All right. Good times. To Head Scratcher for sure.

Yeah, I can't believe I hadn't heard of this guy before. No, he's had quite a few different things out on him. But there's also, once they realize the popularity of the Harold Shipman story, they really dove into a lot of other doctors. And as far as the mercy killing things go, I wouldn't put him anywhere near. for as little as I know about Jack Kvorkian, I don't have enough information on him to say that this is anywhere in the same ballpark. I do believe just on the little bit that I know about him

that he was somebody who was more of an ally than a murderer. I know that he got painted that way. An accomplice. Yeah, I think that... We'll find out eventually. Eventually, we definitely will. But this was... He was just nothing but a serial killer. And it's the easiest way to describe

without getting any deeper. Because once you get deeper, It's impossible to describe it. All right. You got anything else? No, I'm all that's all about that on this guy. All right. Well, we hope you guys enjoyed the episode too, and we'll catch you on the next one.

Peace.