Fascinating new details on UK serial killer Dr.Harold Shipman's WIFE,family life,prison demeanor,& attitude towards his patients
Joe1orbit
These LENGTHY and unique articles on the one and only Doctor Harold Shipman,
UK serial killer extraordinaire, are a few days old. But I believe they are
STILL worthy of our time and attention. They [rovide NEW and UNIQUE info, as
far as I'm concerned, on Doc Harold, his personality, his home life, and his
True Reality mindset. Especially the London Daily Telegraph articles. As far as
I know, the Daily Telegraph is NOT a "tabloid" newspaper. Even though the info
contained in the articles has some tabloidy aspects to it, I have to assume
that the facts given were at least MODERATELY checked out, for verification.
The picture that is painted, is most intriguing. Doc Harold comes across as a
DOMINEERING husband, and his wife, Primrose, GREAT name!, amazingly, comes out
as being even MORE of a LOYAL heroine, courageously sticking by hubby Harold,
even demonstrated herself to be tactically SMARTER that he, in REFUSING to
submit to police interrogation. She was ABUSED and clearly the "submissive"
fiogure in the marriage, but when push came to shove, she LOYALLY stood by and
backed up hubby Harold.
The articles serve to cut into the myth that Doc Harold was living an
"ordinary, middle-class lifestyle". While he DID have a family, I don't think
his family life can be classified as "normal". He was an enraged, dominant
figure in the household, and the "professional" mild-mannered physician
demeanor that he displayed at WORK, to his patients, did not carry over into
his familial, home life.
We also get very interesting ponderings on "what drove him to kill", although
the conclusions arrived at are not accurate. Why is it that you humans seem to
be obsessively compelled to COMPARE serial killers to each other, and to come
up with LINKING, common denominators, when the most SIMPLE of logic dictates
that NATURALLY, just like every plumber, cop, waitress, etc..., is a UNIQUE
person in his/her own right, carving out a unique life for themselves, based
upon their own UNIQUE life experiences and the UNIQUE mindset that those
experiences have had upon the person, the EXACT same rule applies, to serial
killers?! I mean, I know you creatures are TERRIFIED of the Truth, but still,
this piece of logic is so SIMPLE, I can't see how you can rationalize denying
it, as you try to invalidly create "links", between all serial killers.
Don't have time to offer up major commentary on the FASCINATING new facts
revealed below, but I do urge everyone to read the articles, in their entirety,
and of course if anyone wants me to comment on a SPECIFIC detail or paragraph,
I am of course, as always, happy to do so.
We do get some FASCINATING details on OTHER enraged serial killers,
throughout history, tidbits of info on their UNIQUE True Realities, revealed,
especially in the first, top article below.
Take care, JOE
The following four news articles all appear courtesy of the 2/6/00 online
edition of The London Daily Telegraph newspaper:
Sunday 6 February 2000
If not sex and money, what drove him to kill?
By Theodore Dalrymple
WHEN a man drinks a glass of water, we think we understand his motives. When a
doctor kills 150 of his patients, we require an explanation.
Why on earth did he do it? Why did Dr Shipman become by far the most prolific
murderer of his age, give or take a Ukrainian cannibal or two? What pleasure or
advantage did he gain from the deaths of so many of his patients?
There are two main motives for serial killing: money and sex. French serial
killers are usually motivated by the former, Anglo-Saxon by the latter. The
previous record-holding medical serial killer, the infamous Dr Petiot, lured
people to his house in the Sixteenth Arrondissement of Paris during the war
with promises of an escape route from occupied France, and there cut them up
and either buried or incinerated them, keeping the money and valuables they had
brought to fund their escape. After the war, in 1946, he was found guilty of 26
such murders, but was believed to have carried out many others.
The British medical serial killer with the most victims to his name until Dr
Shipman, and an exception to the British serial killer's general indifference
to money, was Dr Samuel Palmer of Rugeley, in Staffordshire. In the 1850s he
poisoned 15 people, mainly to pay his gambling debts. Among them were his own
illegitimate offspring: he killed them indirectly for money, in order to avoid
the expense of maintaining them.
Shipman's only attempt to benefit financially from his activities was so
clumsy, and so likely to end in detection, that it was more like a confession
of guilt and an announcement of a wish to retire from his murderous career than
a true effort at self-enrichment. Money does not seem to have been at the root
of his evil.
As for sex, tastes are so protean that it is difficult to rule it out entirely.
Sylvestre Matuschka, for example, was a Hungarian businessman who reached
orgasm whenever he saw a train crash, and 22 people were killed on the last
train he derailed by explosion (before he was hanged). Dennis Nilsen enjoyed
watching television with corpses at his home in north London, while Jeffrey
Dahmer, in America, seemed to derive sexual gratification from paddling in the
intestines of his victims.
What seems constant is that the appetite grows with feeding, and this would fit
with Shipman's accelerating rate of murder. In his last full year of activity,
he is thought to have killed 30: the year before, 19. But in fact there is no
evidence at all that Shipman derived sexual satisfaction from his murders,
other than the suggestive fact that all his victims were women.
The prosecution surmised - though, of course, it was not obliged to prove a
motive - that the doctor killed for the enjoyment of the sense of power that
murder gave him. His callous remarks to the bereaved hint in this direction,
for they were a raw expression of his power and importance. Indeed, the
greatest professional satisfaction for most doctors is in the exercise of the
power to bring about a sudden and complete cure of their patients' illnesses.
That is why most of us went into medicine in the first place. If it is a lust
for power, it is a benign one.
Unfortunately, the scope for such life-saving treatment in modern general
practice is distinctly limited. Could it be, then, that in the absence of an
opportunity to bring about cure, Shipman resolved to bring about death? That,
to adapt the words of Richard III slightly, since he could not prove a healer,
he was determined to prove a killer?
The problem with any such hypothesis must be that what applies to Shipman
applies with equal force to hundreds or thousands of other doctors, who have
not killed a single one of their patients, let alone 150. Perhaps Shipman's
patients exasperated him and drove him to distraction, and he therefore decided
to wreak his vengeance upon them. He did, after all, tell a policeman who came
to his surgery after the death of Ivy Lomas in the treatment room there, that
he considered her a nuisance, and that she was such a frequent attender that he
had thought about putting a plaque up on the wall and reserving a chair in the
waiting room for her.
But plenty of doctors grow exasperated with their patients without killing
them. Was Shipman sensitised, then, by the early death of his mother, when she
was in her forties and he was only 17? Did this sensitisation mean that he was
more likely to rage against his elderly female patients? Did he feel that if
his mother could not survive beyond her forties, no one else - in particular no
other woman - should do so?
It so happens that I discussed this hypothesis with a colleague whose mother
had also died when he was young; she, too, had received morphine injections
because of the pain caused by her cancer. But his career had been a blameless,
even a distinguished, one, without any suggestion of negligence, let alone
murder.
Mass killers of the elderly - such as two nurses in Austria who killed 40
patients in an old people's home in 1989 - have sometimes acted in the belief
that they were doing their victims a favour, since they believed that their
lives were no longer worth living. Not only does their "philanthropy" mask the
utmost sadism, but Shipman appears not even to have selected those among his
patients whose lives were in any way miserable. Misguided philanthropy hardly
covers the case.
The fact is that Shipman committed crimes that will forever defy our
comprehension. That eureka moment, when we feel that we have finally understood
something that was previously opaque to us, will never arrive. There will
always be an unbridgeable gulf between the explanation and the phenomenon to be
explained. Dennis Nilsen saw his grandfather's corpse when he was a small boy,
Shipman watched his mother die when he was an adolescent: but what does either
fact explain?
Nothing. We might just as well just say that Dr Shipman was evil and leave it
at that: for we are in the presence of Man's mystery to himself.
Theodore Dalrymple, a prison doctor, is the author of So Little Done: The
Testimony of a Serial Killer (Andre Deutsch).
---------------------
Sunday 6 February 2000
Shipman's wife refused to be questioned by police about murders
By Ian Cobain
PRIMROSE SHIPMAN, the wife of Britain's most prolific serial killer, was never
questioned about her husband's murders despite being a part-time receptionist
at his surgery and sharing the home where he kept a quantity of the drugs used
to kill patients.
Yesterday, relatives of Harold Shipman's victims reacted with shock and
disbelief to the disclosure that detectives had never interviewed Mrs Shipman,
50, who has been married to the mass murderer for 33 years. Police say they
were eager to interview her during their year-long investigation but she
refused to co-operate and her lawyer said she would submit to questioning only
if she were arrested.
Detective Superintendent Bernard Postles, the officer who headed the inquiry,
said: "Mrs Shipman refused to come to the police station and refused to admit
us into her home to be interviewed. We considered whether we had enough
evidence to arrest her and insist she be interviewed. But after discussion with
legal representatives we came to the conclusion that we did not."
At a case conference, police and Crown Prosecution Service lawyers agreed that
there was overwhelming evidence against Shipman, 54, but no evidence whatsoever
that his wife had done anything wrong. Mr and Mrs Shipman were both represented
by Hempsons, a Manchester firm of solicitors.
Legal experts say it would be standard practise for a solicitor to protect a
client by insisting on a arrest before being questioned. Police sources say it
is unlikely that Mrs Shipman will ever be questioned about the crimes of her
husband even though there are outstanding cases still being considered.
Kathleen Adamski, whose mother, Winifred Mellor, 73, was murdered after an
earlier police investigation failed to unearth any evidence against Shipman,
was astonished by the disclosure. Father Denis Maher, a priest in Hyde, Greater
Manchester, who believes that at least 200 of his congregation have been
murdered by Shipman or left bereaved, said: "People can't figure out why she
[Mrs Shipman] hasn't been questioned. If she is not interviewed there will be a
sense of wonderment in this area, rather than anger."
Receptionists at Shipman's surgery were questioned by police and some gave
evidence during his trial. The GP was convicted last week of murdering 15
elderly women patients but is suspected of killing up to 146.
Mrs Shipman has refused to make any comment since her husband's conviction six
days ago. The solicitors who represented her during the police investigation
also declined to comment.
-------------------------
Sunday 6 February 2000
The arrogant doctor: 'They will never find me guilty. I'll show them all'
By Olga Craig
SQUEEZED behind a makeshift desk alongside the mops and disinfectant buckets
that were stacked by the sluice room walls, Category AA Prisoner CJ 8198
Shipman H declared his Saturday morning surgery open.
"In an orderly line, like I say, please," he barked. There was no shortage of
patients: one inmate suffering a skin rash, several with flu, two prison
warders seeking advice about their bad backs. No matter that the doctor would,
within the week, be found guilty of 15 murders, making him - with the hundred
or more other murders he is believed to have committed - Britain's most
prolific serial killer.
In "the cage" - the Strangeways prison suite reserved for prisoners at suicide
risk - Harold Shipman, known as Fred, his second name, was clinging to the last
vestiges of his bombastic arrogance. He had once again set up shop. Even in
confinement and ignominy, he was Dr Shipman, GP par excellence. His diagnoses
were impeccable, he boasted; his methods above doubt; his word law. Along with
advice, he dispensed a testament to his medical skill.
"My work was faultless. I provided the ultimate care," he told prisoner Derrick
Ismiel. "I prided myself on my experience in caring for people who were
terminally ill. How dare they question my professionalism? People knew me by my
work. How can they accuse me of this?"
It was as if, Ismiel now recalls, Shipman felt he had no need for a defence,
that he was unquestionable and unassailable. Until the day of the verdict, it
was his arrogant belief that he was beyond reproach.
The compassionate, kindly veneer he perfected for his elderly patients had long
been discarded. In its place was the true Dr Fred Shipman: a callous,
calculating killer convinced of his own infallibility, determined to control
all around him and confident he possessed the intellect to fool all.
It was hardly surprising, then, that it was among the prisoners of Strangeways,
for whom he barely concealed his contempt, that he voiced the nearest words to
a confession anyone has heard him utter. In the chilling monotone he has now
perfected, he told Ismiel: "They are never going to find me guilty. I'll show
them all. This whole system is full of lies. They should have all died - and
died like flies."
To other prisoners he was even more graphic. While in Preston prison Shipman
shared a cell with Brian Ratford, then on remand for a drink-driving charge.
While Shipman did not directly discuss his case, he could not resist a desire
to boast. "He told me that if he had wanted to give people lethal injections,
there were ways of doing it without being detected," says Ratford. "He said you
could inject them in the nose, mouth, even the backside. It was easy to
convince old people there were new ways of taking drugs."
Shipman's callous candour and disregard for the sensitivities of others did not
surprise his cell mates, who never witnessed either of Shipman's two other
faces: the compassionate doctor, a face reserved for his elderly women
patients; and the autocratic, overbearing patriarch, the face seen by his wife
Primrose and their four children.
Those who worked with Shipman knew only too well how easily or swiftly he
shrugged off one persona and donned another. A pethidine addict who had escaped
censure by the General Medical Council, his last group surgery, which he left
in 1991 to set up in sole practice, was at Donnebrook House in Hyde.
There, Dr Ian Napier, now the senior partner, recalls Shipman's contrasting
behaviour. Dr Napier said: "On the one hand, he was charming, urbane and
pleasant with patients, but he had another side to him and, if crossed, he was
capable of making people's lives a misery."
Quick to anger if his methods were questioned, he took childlike delight in
ostracising and holding up to ridicule anyone who did not easily yield to his
superiority. It was a power play designed to undermine those he considered
unimportant or irrelevant. Dr Napier said: "Towards the end of his time here,
he refused to speak to the practice manager and if he needed to talk to her he
wrote her a letter. She was expected to do the same in response. Although he
walked past her desk every day, he completely ignored her."
Although an excellent clinician, he could be volatile and bombastic. Dr Napier
said: "He was well read and liked people to know it." Those he considered his
intellectual inferior, he scorned. "I recall on one occasion, he reduced a drug
company representative, who had been in the job only two weeks, to tears."
Among those who worked for him, rather than with him, he was at times feared.
One staff member said: "No one else was in his league, that is what he drummed
into us. You could not tell him anything and he was never wrong." Every few
months, he would show signs of violent and irrational mood swings, which he
inflicted on underlings.
Dr Napier said: "He wasn't violent in the physical sense, it was almost like a
childlike temper tantrum. He would go completely over the top, as though he had
no control over it. But he didn't do it with any of the partners, only with his
subordinates."
None of Shipman's patients was ever to witness his overbearing nature. Once he
had murdered them, however, he could not conceal it from their grieving
relatives. While there remain devoted former patients who still trust Shipman
as a caring professional, the families of those he killed witnessed his
bullying and dismissive arrogance - often within minutes of his murder of their
loved ones. As was revealed by the prosecution during his trial, Shipman
"bludgeoned and bamboozled" relatives into accepting that no post mortem was
ever necessary.
Jacqueline Gee, the daughter of murdered Pamela Hillier, saw Shipman at his
surgery shortly after her mother's death. He talked her out of a post mortem,
leaving her feeling distinctly ill at ease. She said: "His manner was very
abrupt. I ended up feeling guilty. He was trying to intimate that Mum was
poorly and we should have expected that she might die at any time. He just
said: 'Let's put it down to a stroke.' He was very uncaring."
Yet while Shipman displayed little or no compassion for the relatives of his
victims, he continued to convince others in the medical profession of both his
concern for his patients and his innocence. The loyalty of some, despite now
knowing his true nature, has not wavered.
Dr Wally Ashworth, Shipman's own GP, was so sure of that innocence that he
offered Ł20,000 towards Shipman's bail. "What can I say? That is how sure I was
of him," he now says. Shipman has written to Dr Ashworth from prison, still
protesting that he had nothing to do with the deaths.
Dr Ashworth said: "He never doubted that he would be acquitted. I do feel
rather guilty that I haven't visited him in prison and probably will. Despite
everything he was remarkably attentive to me when I was ill and I owe him a
debt for that."
Though Shipman remained outwardly calm on the day of his conviction, those
within prison have spoken of his utter shock at the verdict. One has said: "He
completely went to pieces - whimpering, bleating, pining for the world he has
forfeited. He sits and rocks saying: 'How can they do this to me of all people?
After all I have done. I am a great doctor, a caring man. This is an affront.'
There is certainly no remorse, no thought of those whose lives he took or the
families left behind. They are irrelevant to him now. Gone. Of no consequence."
Yet while Shipman may appear a broken man to his fellow inmates, it might not
be long before he begins to relish his new surroundings. Dr Richard Badcock,
the only psychiatrist to have examined him, believes that he will thrive within
the prison system. Dr Badcock said: "For him, it will be a world where the
rules are clear cut, where he will be cleverer than many around him, and the
sheer number of his victims may accord him a certain respect."
For the families of the victims, Shipman's life-long incarceration may provide
some small comfort. For some of them, true grieving can now begin: for others
it may never be fully over. One, at least, wants to meet again the doctor she
believes murdered her mother. Though Shipman was not charged with killing
68-year-old Bertha Moss, the pensioner's daughter, Brenda Hurst, is convinced
of his guilt.
At the time of her mother's death, Mrs Hurst thought Shipman to be a kind and
caring doctor who, she hoped, had eased her mother's pain. When she received a
condolence card from him, she thought it typical of his compassionate nature.
Now, unable to stomach the sickening hypocrisy of his act, she wants to return
the card. She said: "Police have told me that he won't get it if I send it to
him in prison. But one day he will get it. I swear he will."
--------------------------
Sunday 6 February 2000
The marriage: 'Nobody eats until I get home'
By Ian Cobain
MOTTRAM in Longdendale, a sedate village between the grey sprawl of Manchester
and the foothills of the Pennines, is the sort of place where people like to
observe that there's nowt so queer as folk.
All the village agreed, however, that few folk were stranger than Fred and
Primrose Shipman: you needed only to walk through their front door to see that.
On the rare occasions that neighbours were allowed across the threshold of 15
Roe Cross Green, the modest four-bedroom semi was always a tip, with clothes,
books and plates scattered across the floor, dirty dishes shoulder-high in the
sink, the carpets thick with grime.
Len Fallows, a retired police sergeant, who was one of the couple's few
friends, said: "I was completely taken aback the first time I went there. It
looked like a bomb had hit it. Your feet would stick to the carpet."
Detectives who searched the house after Shipman's arrest were even more
forthright. One said: "It was squalid, the sort of place where you would wipe
your feet on the way out." Another said: "I think the doctor was trying to grow
penicillin in his grill pan. It turned my stomach."
The bond between serial killers and their wives or lovers is an area of abiding
fascination for detectives, criminologists, and for the public at large: only
Dennis Nilsen in recent years was both mass murderer and loner. While other
people's marriages are always something of an enigma, however, the truth about
what went on in the Shipman household remains a total mystery.
The whispered asides of staff who worked at Dr Shipman's surgery in Market
Street in nearby Hyde offer one peep into their secret world, revealing a
domestic tyrant making impossible demands on his family. "Nobody eats until I
get home," he would bark down the telephone at his wife. There they would be,
Primrose and the four children, sitting stiffly at the dinner table staring at
their plates when finally the patriarch marched through the door, sometimes as
late as 10pm.
Letters that Mrs Shipman sent to her husband of 33 years, as he sat in
Strangeways Prison awaiting trial on 15 murder charges, provide another
tantalising glimpse. They reveal a stubbornly devoted woman living on an
entirely different intellectual plane to the man who bullied colleagues and
talked down to detectives.
In one letter she wrote: "I love you very much and I'm not thinking of leaving
you." In another, she wrote: "Dearest Fred, Love you - and the pain you feel is
just how I feel. I am coping but that is all. Do not get upset. We have an hour
a day."
A few days earlier, in her spidery hand and barely literate manner, she had
told him: "You hapen [sic] to be my husband and I love you very much and am not
thinking of leaving you: funny what setts [sic] me off I need all my friends
and suporter [sic]."
In another, after listening to a Radio 4 programme examining marriage, she
wrote: "Lust and passion, dull and boring, falling out of love, then falling in
love again, and then happiness, and then true love. I am not sure we have been
through all these."
Police might have had a chance to delve deeper into the dynamics of Mrs
Shipman's relationship with her husband had she agreed to be interviewed by
them. But she refused, with her lawyer insisting that she could be questioned
only after being arrested and cautioned - and police decided there was no
evidence to justify doing that.
During the 57 days that it took to try her husband at Preston Crown Court and
find him guilty of murder, Primrose Shipman was never more than a few feet away
from him. An ungainly, plump woman with lank grey hair and eyes that have long
lost their sparkle, she would be unremarkable were it not for her marriage.
She appeared not to care that every other woman at the court was sniggering at
her clothes, a Black Watch tartan two-piece suit that she wore every day. And
she appeared not to notice that reporters and court officials were staggered by
the way she blithely handed out sweets to her children while her husband's
murderous past was being laid bare. One observer said: "It was as if they were
enjoying an evening at the cinema."
Mrs Shipman allowed herself one public display of emotion when the first of the
15 guilty verdicts was returned by the jury foreman last Monday afternoon,
letting out a sigh that was audible several feet away and staring wide-eyed
into space. Then a mobile telephone went off in her handbag, playing the melody
of the hymn Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, and the spell was broken. Since that
moment she has steadfastly concealed her thoughts and emotions from the outside
world, and she has uttered only two words publicly: "No comment."
Fred Shipman was 20 and a year into his studies at Leeds Medical School when he
struck up a conversation with the girl sitting next to him on the top level of
the No 38 bus as he returned to his digs in Wetherby, North Yorkshire. Primrose
May Oxtoby was 17 and the youngest daughter of George Oxtoby, a gardener, and
his wife, Edna, devout Methodists who lived in an imposing Victorian stone
villa in the heart of the town. They had another daughter, Mary, 13 years older
than Primrose.
Shipman had never had a girlfriend before; whenever there was a dance at his
grammar school in Nottingham he would take his older sister, Pauline. Primrose
was not considered to be among the brightest pupils at her school and had even
less experience of the opposite sex than did her new boyfriend. Within weeks
she was pregnant, and a rift opened between Shipman and his in-laws that exists
to this day.
The couple were married in a register office ceremony near Wetherby on Bonfire
Night, 1966. There was no best man and no bridesmaid, with the two fathers
acting as witnesses, and the event went unrecorded in the local newspapers of
Nottingham and Wetherby . Four months later Primrose's daughter, Sarah, was
born in Harrogate. She was followed by Christopher, now 28; David, 20; and Sam,
17.
George Oxtoby died nine years ago. Edna and her oldest daughter are both now
disabled and have not spoken to either Primrose or Fred for many years. Mrs
Shipman moved with her husband first to Pontefract and then to Todmorden in
Lancashire, where he first went into general practice.
His partner at the time, Dr John Dacre, said: "Fred was an immaculate man, but
the same couldn't be said for his wife. She was obese, scruffy, and looked more
like a bag lady than a doctor's wife. She was rather on the uncouth side and we
didn't really have much to do with her. They ran their house down. It became
very untidy and they were only in it about 18 months."
It was here that Dr Shipman became addicted to the painkiller pethidine,
although he passed off the frequent blackouts caused by the drug as epilepsy,
and his wife would drive him to work. The senior partner, Dr Michael Grieve,
says that Mrs Shipman appeared to want to play a greater role at the surgery
than just chauffeuring her husband. He said: "She'd left school and got
pregnant, but she thought she knew enough to run the practice. She wasn't a
nice person. To my mind she was poison."
In October 1977 the family moved to Mottram in Longdendale, buying a house that
is, in one of those chilling coincidences, less than a mile from the council
house where Brady and Hindley murdered their last victim and were arrested a
few days after. While Fred Shipman threw himself into work, volunteering for
the St John Ambulance service, the school Parent-Teacher's Association and a
canal restoration society, Mrs Shipman appeared to have little life outside her
home, other than working as a receptionist at the surgery each Saturday
morning.
One of the few men who has come close to unlocking the secrets of the Shipman
marriage is Dr Richard Badcock, the only psychiatrist to have examined the
killer since his arrest. He believes that Dr Shipman is, quite simply, a
"control freak", a man who so fears being crippled by anxiety or self-doubt
that he attempts to exercise total control over his life.
Dr Badcock said: "His need for control is such that it extends to close family
life. He has to call the shots because he can't live with himself unless he
does so. It isn't about being cruel - it is about needs that he feels." It is
not unusual for such obsessive personalities to live in squalor, he says, and
Mrs Shipman would not have the will to oppose him.
Shipman is likely to find intimacy painful, Dr Badcock says, and the couple's
love life would be characterised more by a "lack of activity" than anything
else. He said: "He is capable of having relationships that look normal,
providing he can do it on his own terms."
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