Harold Shipman

Harold Shipman was born on January 14, 1946 in Nottingham, England. As a child and caring for his mother while she was going through terminal lung cancer, he wanted to become a doctor. Shipman attended Leeds School of Medicine in England and began working as a physician in 1970 (Biography, 2017). After graduating from Leeds School of Medicine, Shipman who had started a family began his career as a physician in Todmorden, Yorkshire. By 1975 he was forging prescriptions to himself for pain medicine in order to feed his addiction and was ultimately caught by his partners. Shipman agreed to enter rehab and paid a fine for forgery upon his conviction (Biography, 2017). A few years later, Shipman began practicing again at Donneybrook Medical Centre
Shipman was also caught forging the will of one of his victims, Kathleen Grundy. He changed the will to leave everything to him and also changed that she wanted to be cremated instead of being buried. Grundy’s daughter, Angela Woodruff was notified of the will and she immediately notified the police because she knew that the will was not changed and signed by her mother (Batty, 2005). Kathleen Grundy’s body was exhumed and was determined that she was giving a lethal dose of morphine. Subsequently, nearly a dozen of his deceased patient’s bodies were exhumed and all of them had lethal doses of morphine in their body tissue (Batty, 2005). It was also determined that Shipman was putting wrong information as the manner of death on his patient’s death certificates. There is not an exact number of how many patients that Shipman actually murdered, but he was only convicted of fifteen murders in January, 2000 in which he was given fifteen life sentences. It is estimated that he killed at least 250 of his patients over 23 years of practice, all in the same manner (Batty, 2005). Harold Shipman dubbed Dr. Death hanged himself in his prison cell on January 13, 2004 at the age of