January 2, 1996, was a day that Jane Ashton Hibbert would never forget, when she lost her beloved grandmother, Hilda Hibbert, forever. Although life, old age, illness and death are a process that everyone has to go through, and my grandmother is 81 years old, because everything came too suddenly, Jane could not accept this fact for a long time.
I remember that Jane went to visit her grandmother as usual that day, just when she wanted to buy something, so after the two of them talked, Jane went out to help her grandmother run errands, but when she came home again after buying things, the grandmother who had been talking and laughing with herself had collapsed in the chair and lost consciousness, Jane hurriedly called the emergency call, and the ambulance personnel arrived at the scene after a while.
After an initial examination, the doctor told Jane that the cause of her grandmother's death was a stroke because her blood pressure had been high recently, and When the accompanying ambulance crew asked if she needed to transport her grandmother back to the hospital to test the exact cause of her death, Jane shook her head.
However, Jane did not expect that this decision would cause more deaths in the future, because her grandmother, who was not a stroke at all, was involved in the largest serial murder case in British history.
Fast forward two years, late one night in August 1998, heavy rain, most of the residents of the small town of Hyde in Greater Manchester, England, have fallen asleep, but at this time in Hyde's cemetery, there is a group of people with flashlights and shovels in their hands, they are all local police officers in Hyde, and they are planning to plan out an old man named Catherine Grundy, who died not long ago.
So the question is, what is the identity of the deceased old man, and why did the police bother him to sleep? This has to start from more than a month ago.
Catherine's daughter Angela Woodruff and son-in-law are both lawyers and are very busy at work. On the afternoon of June 24, 1998, the couple was working at the firm when the phone on their desk suddenly rang urgently.
Angela picked up the earpiece, and the deep voice of harold Sipman, the mother's health doctor, came over the end: I'm very sorry Angela, your mother, Catherine, has just passed away.
Like Jane more than two years ago, the sudden bad news made Angela unbelievable, her mother Catherine was not an ordinary old lady, she not only served as mayor of Hyde, but also as the chairman of the Tamside and Grassep Community Health Committee, or CHC for short, an organization that specializes in providing medical and health services to the people of the community.
The mother's body has always been very healthy, in fact, I think about it, otherwise how could this health service organization let her become the chairman?
In fact, catherine, who is already 81 years old, is an extremely energetic and eternally energetic old lady in the eyes of all acquaintances, and now she actually walks away, how can people accept it? But the truth is so cruel that Angela has no other way but to try to accept reality.
On July 1, 1998, a week after Catherine's death, Angela held a grand funeral for her mother. Originally, she wanted to wait for the funeral to be calm, and she could slowly soothe the pain in her heart through the passage of time, but the truth did not make her wish.
Shortly after the funeral, Angela suddenly received a call from a strange man who identified himself as Brian Burgess, a lawyer. When he explained the reason for the call, Andyra was stunned because Brian was going to read Catherine's will to him.
This thing is very strange, we just introduced above, Angela and her husband are lawyers, if Catherine makes a will, how can she find someone else?
Some people may say, what if it is an old lady, some ideas that do not want their daughters to know in advance? But it's unlikely, Catherine made a will 12 years ago, in 1986, and it still lies in the safe of her daughter's law firm.
However, Angela did not hang up the phone, because she was very curious about what the guy named Brian was planning to do, so she made a plan and agreed on a meeting place with him.
When the two meet, Angela feels that it may be much more complicated than she expected, Brian is a serious lawyer and comes from a well-known firm.
Soon, Lawyer Brian was routinely reading out the contents of the will. Angela's first reaction after hearing this was two words: fake. According to the will, Catherine had a $380,000 estate in her name, and the Angela and their two children did not receive a penny.
But the problem is that the relationship between the old lady and the daughter and son-in-law is very good, there is no contradiction, and her grandson is even more pampered, and it is impossible not to give the inheritance.
So who did this old lady leave the money to? This is also the most incomprehensible part of the will, Catherine actually left all her inheritance to Harold Sipman.
Do you have friends who this person is? It was the first health doctor to call Angela to report the funeral. Catherine was a man with a head and a face, and his healthcare doctor could not have been sought out.
Angela is a lawyer and is very cautious, although she is not familiar with Harold, but her mother Catherine was familiar with Harold more than a decade ago because of the original sin of work when she was the president of CHC, and after Harold's clinic opened in 1993, Catherine became his patient, which shows that her mother trusted him, Angela decided to investigate first and then make plans, but this investigation was terrifying.
For a will, it is not just a matter of signing it in person, but also two witnesses. But when Angela found the witnesses of her mother's will, they all said that they had never done it, so the authenticity of the will is now very obvious. At first, Angela was only Harold's robbery after his mother's death, but the more she thought about it, the more she felt that something was wrong.
At noon on June 24, 1998, Catherine asked two friends to have lunch together, but by 11 a.m., Catherine did not show up. Keep in mind that celebrities like Catherine are generally very punctual, plus they are already 81 years old, so friends go to the old lady's house under concern.
When the two friends arrived at Catherine's house, they were shocked to see her sitting neatly on the couch, but her face was lifeless, and the friends immediately contacted Dr. Harold. When Dr. Harold arrived at the scene, he simply did some tests and confirmed Catherine's death, and the reason was that he was dying.
Supposedly, this is normal, so why did Angela become suspicious? Because in fact, around 8:30 a.m. that morning, Harold visited Cather and helped him draw blood.
At that time, the purpose of Kay Forest's blood test was not because of health problems, but to participate in Harold's elderly health survey program in the community. In this way, Harold was the last person Catherine had ever seen. Combined with the fake doctor's advice, Angela had to have some connection with Harold about the death of her mother.
On July 24, 1998, a week after Catherine's death, Angela went to the local police station to report the police. After the investigators learned the whole story, they felt that Catherine's death was strange, and the only way to verify it at the moment was to let the forensic doctor reconfirm the cause of the death, so there was a scene of a group of police digging graves in the cemetery.
Then the forensic doctor tested and actually detected the residue of morphine on the old lady's body, and the forensic doctor speculated that Catherine died within 3 hours after the injection. Catherine was discovered by her friends at 11:30, 3 hours ahead, and it was Harold's visit to Catherine at 8:30.
So investigators think it's probably the doctor who took advantage of the blood test to inject Catherine with an overdose of the banned drugs, which led to her death.
However, this conjecture seems to be a bit unreasonable, after all, this drug is easy to remain in the body, as a senior doctor Harold can not be unaware, if he really wants to harm people, he can completely use other drugs that are difficult to detect.
Out of caution, the police planned to investigate Harold first, but before they could begin to investigate, they discovered a strange thing, which had been investigated by harold by colleagues just a few months earlier.
Hyde is a small place, with only 34,000 households here, according to the 2011 census, and relatively few people die every day. And it is precisely for this reason that the staff of the local funeral home notice a very unusual thing, that is, among the people who were sent to the funeral home, the proportion of patients who were Dr. Harold was very high, and the characteristics of these people at the time of death were extremely similar, most of them were older elderly people living alone, and when they died, they were dressed neatly, either sitting on chairs or lying on the sofa, in short, they died very suddenly.
In March 1998, three months before Catherine's death, the staff told a doctor named Linda Reynolds about the incident. Linda was shocked when she heard this, why? Because Linda was specifically responsible for signing the cremation permit, in case Harold did something unseemly to the patient, he would have to undergo a forensic examination in the future. When the time came, good guys, all burned to ashes, and it was still her signature, this matter is not clear, since this is better to tell the police about this matter first, so she did so.
So why didn't the police take action against Harold 3 months ago? It turned out that the investigators did feel a little strange at first, but after inquiring about the case information of the deceased, they reassured themselves, because these people were indeed terminally ill for a long time, and the death was normal.
In this way, the investigation was declared over after more than a month, and Harold was confirmed to be innocent.
Catherine's incident made the police hesitate again, but Harold had his own account of the drug residue in Catherine's body, and he told investigators that Catherine was actually a bad addict, but this matter was little known. But angela, as a daughter, would never believe this claim.
Just when the police didn't know who to believe, things took a turn for the better.
Catherine, who had previously been mayor of Hyde, was a well-known person, so the news that her death may have been caused by a murder attracted the attention of the local people. In early August 1998, a taxi driver contacted police, who said he had been pulling workers near the Harold Clinic, so he often pulled patients to the clinic.
In his opinion, most of them were in good health, even energetic, but strangely enough, he often heard sudden news of the death of some people, and it was shortly after Dr. Harold's visit.
The tip led the police to Angela's side, and they immediately screened the other deceased family members, and while most of them did not suspect the death of their loved ones, they all mentioned the same detail, which was that Harold always tried to persuade them to cremate the deceased.
This is very intriguing, fortunately, some family members did not listen to Harold, which gave the police a chance to let the deceased speak. When the forensic doctors again detected drug residues on their bodies, investigators finally arrested Harold on September 7, 1998.
But although people have arrested the doubts, but there are still doubts, the police have studied the cases of Harold's patients before, to confirm that they really have little hope of survival, so if this is the case, what is the need for Harold to murder them?
To find out, the police investigated the computer where the clinic kept the case. When professionals analyzed the computer's hard disk data, they found that the medical records of many patients had been extensively tampered with after their deaths.
Harold was formally taken to court a year after his arrest on October 5, 1999.
Prosecutors charged him with 15 counts of murder, but Harold did not admit it.
His defense lawyers wanted to portray him in court as a good doctor who was professional and well respected by his patients. In addition, harold's happy family is used to say things, which proves from the side that he is definitely not a cold-blooded killer.
As for the issue of drug residues, the defense's point is also clear, some of these patients are inherently bad addicts, and the other part is terminally ill, and injecting drugs for analgesia is a reasonable therapeutic behavior.
Do you feel that the defense's point of view is somewhat far-fetched, but in fact, this trick is very powerful, as long as the defense says that the situation is possible, it does not matter how low the probability is, after all, there is no suspicion. In the end, the defense lawyers are on this point, and the prosecution has no way to prove whether the drug residue was caused by a long-term injection or a one-time injection simply for the sake of harming people.
But coincidentally, if this trial was held a year ago, the prosecution really had no way, but in the year after Harold's arrest, there was a new breakthrough in detection technology, and now it can be determined whether to take banned drugs for a long time through hair testing. In fact, no residue was detected in the hair of Catherine and the other deceased, so 100% of these were injected at one time before death.
On 31 January 2000, Harold Sipman was convicted of 15 counts of murder and sentenced to 15 life sentences without parole.
Then with Harold's arrest, catherine's case is over, but there is actually a follow-up, because of the time relationship, we will talk about it in the next issue.
Well, this issue of the content is here, if you have any insights, write it down in the comment area and discuss it together, we will see you in the next issue!