U.K. Doctor May Have Killed Hundreds
L O N D O N, Jan. 5 -- Britain’s “Dr Death,” serial killer Harold Shipman, who may have killed nearly 300 of his patients, hid his murder spree behind the mask of a much-loved suburban doctor.
The number of Shipman’s possible victims announced in aBritish government Health Department report today, wouldplace him just behind recent history’s most prolific serial killer, Colombian Pedro Armando Lopez.
Dubbed the “Monster of the Andes,” Lopez allegedly killed300 young girls in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador although he was only convicted of 57 murders in 1980.
A review of the records from Dr. Harold Shipman’s practice, carried out by a University of Leicester professor, found that Shipman, who was convicted in February of killing 15elderly women with injections of heroin, had 297 more deaths over a 24-year period than similar practices in the area. Of those, 236 happened at the patient’s home — causing the greatest suspicion, said Professor Richard Baker.
“The analysis makes chilling read,” said chief medical officer Liam Donaldson today.
The report found that Shipman’s 24-year-long trail of corpses were elderly, female and clothed. Most of the deaths tended to be women over the age of 75 who died in the afternoon and when Shipman was alone with them.He hoarded lethal drugs like candy and often tenderly patted his victims’ hands as he injected them with heroin along with an assurance that it would cure their illness.
“He was hardly Jack the Ripper, bursting through the frontdoor. Everybody has a doctor — it could have been your own,” said one onlooker at the packed northern English courtroom in Manchester last year when Shipman was sentenced to life in jail for murdering 15 patients.
Until his arrest in 1998, Shipman ran a busy practice in Hyde, a small town near Manchester, northwest England.
A Perfect Cover
Shipman went about his business — murder — in a quiet andprofessional way, just as his apparent utter devotion to the job of medicine made him the most popular doctor in the Manchester suburb where he practiced for two decades.
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