On July 31, 1998, a lawyer named Angela Woodf came from the Manchester Police Department in the United Kingdom, who reported to the police that she suspected that her mother, who had recently died, had been murdered, and hoped that the police would thoroughly investigate the case.
Angela suspected that her mother had been murdered because not long after her mother's burial, she received a strange will that alerted her.
When it was learned that Angela's mother was the widow of the former mayor of Hyde, the police attached great importance to the case and quickly arranged for a crack general to investigate.
At 3 a.m. on August 1, braving the drizzle overhead, officers surrounded Manchester Cemetery and tried to open the coffin of Catherine Glendy buried here.
After forensic examination, it was found that Catherine Glendy's various organs were healthy and did not have fatal lesions, and the only suspicious thing was that a large number of residual morphine components had been detected in her body, and the content was high enough to kill two adult men.
Who would use this method to prey on an old man who is too old to do anything wrong? How did Angela discover her mother's mysterious death? What did the police find out in the follow-up investigation?
Hello everyone, I am a student of history, today we will take a look at the serial murder case that once occurred in The United Kingdom------ the devil in the guise of an angel.
It also started with the former mayor's wife, Catherine Grundy, who lived alone after the death of her husband at the age of 81, and because of her good health, Angela, as a daughter, only returned home from time to time to visit her old mother.
Everything was normal, but on June 24, Angela suddenly received a call from harold Shipman, her mother's personal doctor, who sadly told Angela, "Your mother Catherine has passed away." ”
Angela was very sad to receive this news, and rushed to the house to see her mother lying on the sofa, her expression very peaceful, and the death certificate issued by Dr. Harold wrote that the cause of death was "death at an advanced age."
Since Harold and his mother had been friends for many years, and they were highly respected on weekdays, and thinking that his mother was 81 years old, there was a possibility of sudden death, Angela did not have any doubts at first, and prepared to bury her mother.
Harold, a personal doctor before the burial, suddenly suggests cremation, which Angela rejects because her mother is Catholic and cremation is a great disrespect to the deceased, and it is Angela's seemingly inadvertent decision that exposes a white-clad demon who has been hidden in the world for 23 years.
Not long after her mother left, Angela, a lawyer, received a call from another lawyer who claimed to have a will in her hand about her mother's death.
This made Angela very confused, as a lawyer who has been practicing for many years, all the legal affairs of her mother Catherine are handled by her, and the lawyer who called Angela has never heard her mother mention it, why is her mother's will in his hands?
After agreeing on a location, Angela met with her fellow lawyer, and when she saw the contents of her mother's will, Angela vaguely sensed that something was wrong.
Because according to the arrangement of this will, all of her mother's inheritance has nothing to do with her, and all of her life's inheritance of about 386,000 pounds was donated to Harold, a family doctor who is not related by blood.
Her mother, Catherine, had already made a will more than a decade ago, so why did a new will suddenly appear now?
After a closer look, Angela, who has many years of experience in writing wills, found many doubts.
First of all, Angela's mother was a secretary before she died, and her years of professional habits have given her good writing and typesetting habits, and the will is not only logically chaotic, but also very rough in typography.
Secondly, the mother has always been accustomed to writing documents by hand, never using a printer, the whole will is printed with a typewriter, only the place where the signature is written is handwritten, and this signature is larger and vague than the previous mother's signature.
Finally, the will only said that he would leave his house to Dr. Harold, but the old lady had two properties, and the house in the will was written in the singular form, if it was really the suicide note signed by the mother herself, it should also be in plural form, even if only one set was left for the doctor, it would at least clarify which property it was, but there was no explanation and explanation in the will.
It is said that the daughter's mother's little cotton jacket, Angela has always been very close to her mother on weekdays, and her mother has never mentioned leaving the property to the family doctor Harold, so Angela strongly suspects that this will was forged by Dr. Harold.
In order to be able to find out the origin of the matter, Angela found the two witnesses who signed the will, and after chatting, learned that the two witnesses not only did not know each other, but also did not know their mother.
However, the two have one thing in common, that is, they have signed a document with Dr. Harold, but this document is definitely not Catherine's will.
Thinking that the last person he came into contact with before his mother's death was Harold, Angela thought that his mother's death was absolutely inextricably linked, so Angela went to the police station with the evidence she had gathered.
When police conducted a detailed autopsy confirming that Catherine had consumed morphine in excess of three hours before her death, coinciding with the time when family doctor Harold left Catherine's home, police immediately locked him as a key suspect and searched his clinic.
During the clinic search, the police found a large amount of morphine injection and some jewelry, and found an old-fashioned typewriter, could it be that Harold used this typewriter to forge the will?
In this direction, the police took the typewriter back to the police station and handed it over to a technical expert for identification, who found that the typewriter had a button spring that was somewhat aging, resulting in a color difference in the typed words, which coincided with the forged will.
So the police came to the conclusion that the will was forged by Harold with a printer in the clinic, and when asked Harold about the origin of the large amount of jewelry, he could not give a reasonable explanation, and as for the reason why Catherine left the inheritance to him, Harold simply said that it was her will, how could I know.
In view of the many doubts mentioned above, on September 7, 1998, the police formally arrested Harold Shipman.
News of Dr. Harold's arrest quickly caused a stir in local media coverage, and at first the police thought the case would soon settle, but didn't expect the appalling story to begin over time.
Hyde is a small town with a population of less than 40,000 people, and everyone who has a headache and brain fever on weekdays goes to Dr. Harold's clinic to treat it, and dr. Harold himself does it.
Because of his high medical skills, more than 3,000 patients have been treated in the clinic, which has made Harold have a high reputation in the local area, many residents are very trusting of him, and many families have hired him as a personal doctor for the elderly.
Over the years, Dr. Harold has served not only many families, but even generations of a family, and the townspeople regard him as a respected elder and a close friend.
Many old people have become emotionally dependent on Harrow's doctor, but what the old people do not expect is that this person does not care about them, but wants to send them back to the West.
After Dr. Harold's affairs were exposed, a man named Peter reported to the police that his mother had been a patient of Dr. Harold, who had notified him when her mother died, told him on the phone that her condition was very dangerous, and called an ambulance for her mother.
But when Peter arrived home, his mother had run out of breath, and the ambulance she had been waiting for for a long time had not come.
According to Dr. Harold, it was because his mother had died that he later called to cancel the ambulance. However, after Peter consulted the local ambulance center with doubts, the feedback was that no one called an ambulance that day, and the local telecommunications bureau did not find that his phone had a record of calling out.
The main point was that after the death of his mother, Dr. Harold also offered him the advice to be cremated, and Peter listened to the doctor's advice at the time, and although he now suspected that his mother had been murdered by Dr. Harold, there was no way to provide any evidence.
This situation attracted the attention of the police, and began to focus on the investigation of patients who had been related to Harold, and as the investigation was carried out, many elderly people in the town died after Harold informed their families, and many of them had been cremated.
Fortunately, some people have followed the wishes of the elderly and chosen to be buried, in order to obtain more evidence to uncover the true face of this human demon, the police decided to open a coffin for all the deceased who were buried in the earth after obtaining the consent of their relatives.
In the winter of October 1998, the police dug up the elderly who had been resting for a long time, and 14 of them were older women, and through testing, they found a lethal dose of morphine in their bodies.
Not only that, but in the follow-up investigation, the police also found an important evidence, finding a list of 30 patients in his clinic, and since these patients all had different degrees of pain symptoms, he prescribed a large dose of morphine preparations in his prescription.
But when the police found these patients to verify the situation, they found that almost all of them had not received the drug, which explained why so many illegal drugs were found in his clinic, and he obtained these drugs through false openings that could affect life and death.
Why is Dr. Harold so hostile to these old people? Murder them even at the cost of crime?
This may be inextricably linked to his childhood experiences.
Harold was born in Nottingham, England in 1946, the father of a truck driver, the mother is a very strong woman, although the family has 4 children, but she has a special preference for the second little Harold.
It is precisely because of his mother's doting that he developed a sense of superiority at an inopportune age at a very young age, and this arrogance in his bones accompanied him for the rest of his life.
However, the good times did not last long, when Harold was 15 years old, his mother suffered from lung cancer, and he took the initiative to take care of his mother's daily life, and it was during that time that he saw his mother tormented by illness.
In order to alleviate the pain caused by cancer, he injected his mother with morphine prescribed by doctors, until finally her mother left, when Harold was only 17 years old.
The death of his mother dealt him a blow and he aspired to become a doctor in the future, and two years later Harold became a doctor and met the other half of his life, Primrose Shipman.
Not long after Harold began practicing law, one of his colleagues discovered that he had secretly hoarded a large number of prohibited drugs, and in order to be able to legally possess them, he also forged false cases and prescriptions for many patients, and then secretly put them into his own pocket.
The incident was soon discovered by the hospital, and the decision was made to fine him 600 pounds and expel him, but surprisingly did not revoke his medical license, which facilitated his future murder.
In 1977 Harold's family moved to Hyde, where he opened a private clinic with a medical license, because no one here knew about his past, and he quickly gained the trust of the townspeople under the deliberate creation of an amiable society, and because of this, after the Catherine incident was exposed, many people still chose to support Dr. Harold.
When the prosecution indicted Harold, he began to perform like a movie emperor, first singing and dancing in court, then pretending to be crazy and stupid, and finally even lying on the ground and foaming and twitching.
In desperation, the judge had to find a doctor to diagnose and treat him, and it turned out that he was completely normal mentally and physically, and everything was just his upper body.
The trial began, and this time Harold changed his ways, remaining silent throughout the prosecution's questioning, not even looking at all the evidence and pictures presented in court.
As the evidence continued to be presented, the crowd in the audience became angry, and they did not expect that a professional doctor who saved his life and helped the injured could do such a unconscionable thing.
But one audience member was the exception, harold's wife, Rose, who listened captivated and calmly, as if she had expected it all.
On January 25, 2000, harold received the final verdict after a jury decision.
Dr. Harold convicted him of all 15 counts of murder and forged probates, and he was sentenced to 15 life sentences without parole.
Although Harold received the punishment he deserved, the number of victims was far greater than 15, and in his 23 years of practicing medicine, he handled countless patients.
Among the more than 500 deceased people who re-examined him to sign the death certificate, at least 218 people died related to him, and there are more than 200 cases with great doubts, many relatives of the deceased have reacted that when the old man left, he was neatly dressed, his face was serene, and he could not see any pain, but unfortunately, due to the long time, a lot of evidence was no longer available, and the police could only give up.
Harold has become the most murderous serial killer in British history, and he will spend the rest of his life in prison.
According to people who later co-served his sentence with Harold, when there were reports of him on television, Harold always sat down and watched with a smile on his face, as if he had enjoyed the time when he had committed a crime.
As time passed, just as the world was about to forget about this white-clad demon, Harold once again made an incredible move.
At 6 a.m. on January 13, 2004, Harold was found hanging in his cell by prison guards, just one day before his 60th birthday, and the people of the town did not feel happy when they learned of the demon's death, but felt that the demon had exploited the loopholes in the law.
Why?
It turned out that if Harold had died before the age of 60, his wife would have been entitled to a one-off after-tax pay-off of £100,000 plus a pension of £10,000 per year, under the insurance system at the time. If he ends his life a day later, his wife Rose will not receive the £100,000 and his annual pension will be reduced to £5,000.
This incident also caused strong resentment and suspicion in British society for the national health insurance system, and after Dr. Harold, the British medical and insurance circles also made adjustments, hoping to reduce this man-made scourge through institutional changes.
Although Harold has been dead for 17 years, there is one question that has never been solved, and that is why Harold killed so many people.
Many experts believe that this is inextricably linked to his experience in his youth, he witnessed his mother constantly injecting morphine because of the torment of illness, so in the depths of his heart he felt that morphine was not a flood beast, but a medicine that could alleviate pain.
But on the other hand, because of his almost paranoid love for his mother and the fact that he does not allow other elderly people of similar age to live a healthy and happy life, the dual personality makes him think that ending an old man's life is not murder, but to help them get out of pain, so he chooses an extreme way to vent his inner dissatisfaction and use contraband to harm people.
It is also difficult to understand why such a clumsy method of forging wills appears in Harold, and the only explanation is that he wants people to discover that he wants to end this kind of life of his own, otherwise it is really impossible to explain this stupid behavior.
No one has really known Harold's motives for committing the crime, whether he was for money or chose to help the sick in his own way, or whether he was a severe mentally ill person himself.
Maybe the devil is really around us, please be kind to the old people around you, and do it and cherish it!
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