Dr Harold Shipman's surgery at Hyde, Greater Manchester. Dr Shipman was found guilty of killing 15 patients but his total number of victims is thought to be as high as 250. Photo / Getty Images
Dr Harold Shipman's surgery at Hyde, Greater Manchester. Dr Shipman was found guilty of killing 15 patients but his total number of victims is thought to be as high as 250. Photo / Getty Images
One detective wanted Shipman struck off as far back as 1976. Instead the doctor went on to become Britain's most prolific killer.
On September 7, 1998, George McKeating switched on the TV and a newsflash stopped him in his tracks. A GP in the nearby town of Hyde had beenarrested on suspicion of murder. The man was called Harold Shipman. The true horror of Shipman's crimes — he is believed to be Britain's most prolific serial killer — had not yet been revealed, but the death of Kathleen Grundy, and a dubious will that left everything to her doctor, had alerted the police that something suspicious was going on. Her body was exhumed and traces of diamorphine (heroin) found.
McKeating was shocked, he says, but not surprised. The detective, who was now retired, had led an investigation into Shipman many years before and the outcome had troubled him ever since. "I had probably dealt with 50-odd murders and many more suspicious deaths by then," he says, "but that is the case that comes back to haunt me."
Born in Scotland, McKeating had joined the West Yorkshire police force in the 1960s. He was one of the young constables combing the moors for the young victims of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady — the only one of the search party still alive today, he believes. He rose steadily through the ranks of the criminal investigations department, and over the course of his career dealt with more than 100 murders, suicides and suspicious deaths, including five double murders. His wife loathed the smell of the mortuary disinfectant that lingered on his clothes. When he came home from work she'd say, "You've been for post mortem. I can smell it," McKeating chuckles. It was worth it, he says. "I was a dedicated policeman." Which is why the Shipman case has hung over him for so long. He came across the doctor in November 1975. His brief back then was to investigate medical professionals who abused controlled drugs. One day he got a call from a local pharmacist. "He said, 'You want to look at some of the pharmacies in Todmorden and Hebdon Bridge because there is a guy, a doctor, who is picking up pethidine by the bucket-load'."
Dr Harold Shipman wasn't struck off after being investigated for drug abuse in 1975. Photo / Getty Images
The doctor in question was Shipman, who had qualified as a GP the year before and was working at a medical centre nearby. He was indeed collecting large quantities of the pain-relieving opiate.
McKeating began contacting the patients named on the prescriptions. As he spoke to more and more of Shipman's patients, he noticed they had a peculiar relationship with their young doctor. Shipman lavished them with attention. "He would drop in at nine or ten at night and say, 'Pop the kettle on,' " McKeating says. "Now that's strange, isn't it, I don't know any doctor then or now who would do that."
McKeating gathered testimonies from 70 people who had all had prescriptions for pethidine written in their name and never been given the drug. By the time he was ready to make an arrest, Shipman had got wind of it and checked himself into a rehabilitation facility in York. McKeating followed and brought him into the station for questioning. The impression Shipman gave was one of extreme arrogance, he recalls. "He had this attitude of 'I'm better than you, I can outsmart you', " McKeating says. But once he started talking, "you couldn't shut him up".
A Manchester Evening News board stands near the former surgery of Dr Harold Shipman on the day he was found dead in his prison cell. Photo / Getty Images
There was no doubt in McKeating's mind that Shipman was an addict. There were track marks all the way up his arms. The veins had been so badly scarred that he had resorted to trying to inject the drug into his penis, McKeating says.
Shipman was charged with eight offences of illegally obtaining controlled drugs and forging NHS prescriptions, with 74 further offences taken into consideration. He was found guilty on all counts, fined £600 ($1,160) and fired from his job. The crucial decision, whether he could keep practising, lay with the General Medical Council. McKeating believed Shipman should be struck off. "Would you trust a doctor who was jacking up hundreds of milligrams of pethidine in his body to treat you?" His fear was that Shipman would kill a patient by accident.
By the time his case came before the Penal Cases Committee, in April 1976, Shipman had already secured another job as a clinical medical officer for the Durham Area Health Authority. The meeting was supposed to decide whether Shipman's case should go on to be heard by the disciplinary panel of the General Medical Council, which has the power to strike doctors off.
Three phials of Diamorphine hydrochloride which is the medical name for heroin. Photo / Getty Images
McKeating arrived in the morning, expecting to be called to make a statement. Eventually someone came out. "He said, 'You're not needed George.'" McKeating assumed the decision had been made and Shipman would be referred to the next stage of the process. But the official told him: "The chairman says he is no longer a threat to the public."
McKeating couldn't believe what he was hearing. "I was absolutely livid," he says. Every doctor he had convicted for drug offences had been struck off. With hindsight, he thinks that Shipman was able to con the committee. The doctor had given a written statement saying, "I have no future intention to return to general practice or work in a situation where I could obtain supplies of pethidine." They believed him.
Hauntingly, there is evidence to suggest that Shipman had killed for the first time by then. He is suspected of giving Eva Lyons, a 70-year-old with terminal cancer, a lethal injection at her home in March 1975. For Shipman it was the beginning of an addiction of a different sort. By 1977 he was practising as a GP in Hyde, near Manchester. He had a reputation for being a conscientious family doctor, often visiting his elderly patients at their homes.
Relatives of the victims of Shipman arriving at the Manchester Town Hall for the start of the Shipman Inquiry. Photo / Getty Images
He established his own surgery in 1993 and was a respected member of the local community. In reality he was killing people with lethal injections. It would take years for the true horrors of his crimes to come to light. On January 31, 2000, he was convicted of 15 counts of murder and imprisoned for life. Four years later, the day before his 58th birthday, he took his own life in his cell at Wakefield prison.
The Shipman Inquiry identified 215 victims, but estimated that the total number could be 250. The vast majority were women and the average age was 76.
McKeating is now 80. It has been 45 years since he met the doctor, but Shipman is still often on his mind. He believes we have a duty to continue to re-examine cases such as Shipman's where a litany of errors were made.
Whatever the doctor thought of his own intellect, Shipman was not too clever to catch. In 1998 Linda Reynolds, another doctor in Hyde, alerted the police to the high volume of cremation forms for elderly women that Shipman needed to be co-signed. But the investigation closed in April — and Shipman went on to kill three more people.
Dame Janet Smith, who chaired the Shipman Inquiry. Photo / Getty Images
For McKeating there was one more warning shot. A couple of years after the 1970s drug conviction, a friend called out of the blue. "Do you know a man called Shipman?" he said. The doctor had applied for a job with the National Coal Board, which would require him to go down into collieries and inspect their medical supplies — supplies that included pethidine. "It would have been like a kid in a sweet shop," McKeating says. The NCB never returned his call. Reports suggest he did work there briefly before moving to Hyde.
Ever since McKeating saw the news that day, there has been a question in the back of his mind: "Could I have done more? It's the question I ask myself all the time.".
