Britain's 'Dr Death' may have killed 297

10:30 AM

LONDON - Britain's "Dr Death" Harold Shipman may have killed up to 297 patients over two decades, a government study revealed this morning (NZDT), a total which would rank him among the world's worst serial killers.

The former family doctor has already been convicted of murdering 15 elderly women with lethal heroin injections, but the report said scores more patients, many of them elderly women, may haven fallen victim to the man British media dubbed "Dr Death".

"Compared to similar practices, the excess of deaths certified by Shipman was 297," said the report's author, Professor Richard Baker of the University of Leicester.

He told a news conference that according to his analysis of death certificates and cremation forms, 236 was more likely to be the number of Shipman's patients who died in suspicious circumstances, including the 15 murders he was convicted of.

"It is horrific and inexplicable that this scale of activity was not detected earlier," the government's chief medical officer Liam Donaldson told the new conference.

The figures in the report place Shipman just behind recent history's most prolific serial killer, Colombian Pedro Armando Lopez. Dubbed the "Monster of the Andes," Lopez was suspected of killing 300 young girls in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador although he was only convicted of 57 murders in 1980.

The new figures emerged after a year-long review of Shipman's career conducted for the Health Department. It began immediately after his conviction in January last year.

Police have long suspected that Shipman had killed many more of his patients than the 15 he was convicted of murdering.

Prosecutors said at his trial that Shipman hid his killing spree behind the mask of a much-loved suburban doctor.

Jane Ashton-Hibbert, whose grandmother died in Shipman's care, told Reuters Shipman had seemed a caring family doctor.

"You knew him, and he would say `How are you? How's the family?'. It was like relying on an old friend."

Prosecutors at Shipman's trial said his drive to kill was fed by a desire for God-like power over life and death.

He would often caringly pat the hands of victims as he injected them with heroin while assuring them their illness would soon be over.

Detective Superintendent Bernard Postles, who headed the investigation into Shipman's crimes, said the government report figures were "broadly in keeping" with the number of deaths investigated by police.

Baker said he had examined Shipman's records - many of which were found during his trial to have been fabricated - and compared the death rates with those of fellow doctors working in the same northern English towns of Hyde in Greater Manchester and Todmorden in West Yorkshire.

What he found, he said, was a "quite dreadful story" of a doctor whose elderly patients were dying in excess numbers from the beginning to end of his 24-year medical career.

Baker said that in the later half of Shipman's career, more than half of his patients died in suspicious circumstances.

Baker said investigations into Shipman's practices drove him to "rage as a fellow professional that someone betrayed the trust of people who were really completely dependent upon him."

Britain's medical establishment came under heavy fire after Shipman's conviction for failing to protect patients after it was disclosed that the doctor had a serious drug addiction and was convicted in 1976 of forging prescriptions for his own use.

Despite the forgery conviction he was allowed to continue to practice medicine and run a one-man family clinic.

Donaldson said the report made "chilling reading", but was keen to stress that the Shipman case was unique.

"Everything points to the fact that a doctor with the sinister and macabre motivation of Harold Shipman is a once-in-a lifetime occurrence," he said.

Donaldson said this morning's report would be passed on to police and prosecutors, but Baker said he thought it was unlikely that any further prosecutions would emerge.

"The evidence I am presenting is essentially circumstantial," he said.

"It is not possible for me to say, from the evidence I've got, whether any individual was murdered or any group of people was murdered."

Shipman, who is serving 15 life sentences at Britain's top security prison in Durham, northern England, has refused to co-operate with police investigations.

British prosecutors said in May that they had enough evidence to charge Shipman with a further 23 murders, but decided not to proceed as they thought he would not receive a fair trial in the light of his previous conviction.

- REUTERS

Full text of DOH report