Doctor Death

Harold Shipman was convicted of killing 15 patients – and suspected of killing more than 250. Now a documentary asks why no one stopped him

- Mick Brown

One Sunday in April 1984, Harold Shipman was returning home for lunch after a morning house call when he decided to kill one of his patients.

Joseph Bardsley was 83, “as fit as a butcher’s dog”, as his son-in-law John Hopwood would later describe him, with “absolutely nothing wrong with him”. But at some point in a house call, Shipman later made, he carefully and calculatedly injected Joseph with a fatal dose of diamorphine. The GP from Manchester, England, would write on the death certificate that Joseph had died of “old age”.

We’ll never know what explanation he gave to Joseph for administering the injection that would kill him. We can only guess that Joseph trusted Shipman as a GP to do his very best.

By many accounts, Harold Shipman was the perfect family doctor. In an age when most doctors were tied to their surgeries, he was always ready to visit patients at home, particularly elderly, vulnerable women. He was ready to listen to their complaints, no matter how minor, was caring and kind – “a patient’s dream”, as one would put it – right up to the moment that he murdered them.

By the time he murdered Joseph, he’d already killed 13 people – and he’d go on to kill many more. In January 2000 he was found guilty of the murder of 15 women, all of whom had been his trusting patients. But that number was merely the tip of a gruesome iceberg. Shipman is believed to have murdered more than 250 people and there are possibly more who’ll never be known.