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On the trail of a monster called Fred
Prescription for Murder – The True Story of Doctor Harold Frederick Shipman, by Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie, has entered the Sunday Times Top Ten Best-sellers list.

Brian, who began his career on the Harrogate Advertiser, now runs the Manchester-based Cavendish Press agency. Jean started on the Stockport Express and became a feature writer. Here, Brian outlines their investigation and stands up for the long-suffering people of Hyde.


It’s been hell for the people of Hyde.

Just over a month ago the murderous activities of Doctor Fred Shipman in their full horror were revealed to a disbelieving world for the first time.

One in ten residents in a town with a population of 25,000 was a patient; everyone knew him, or knew of him.

At least 150 families had received a visit from the police during the investigation that led to him being convicted for the murder of 15 of his patients.

Hundreds more sat at home worrying and wondering if their mother, grandmother or aunt could have been a victim.

As the verdicts were delivered and revelations about the extent of the killings emerged the town was numbed with shock. There has not been such a collective sense of grief anywhere since the death of Princess Diana.

As the awfulness and extent of his crimes slowly sank in two questions were on everyone’s lips: “How could he do it?” And “How could he get away with it for so long?”

Our book does not have the full answer, no one ever will, but it does go some way to revealing what shaped the character of the man, what mistakes were made when earlier crimes were discovered, and what steps should be taken to ensure a monster like this isnever allowed to operate as a doctor.

Over a year ago I already knew Shipman had killed close on 100 patients; that he had been a drug addict; that he had, forgive the pun, been effectively given a clean bill of health by the General Medical Council. That “Doctor Death”, like the Yorkshire Ripper, had slipped through the detection net many times.

But where did he come from? What had shaped his character and that of his loyal wife, Primrose? How come the death rate among his patients had never been questioned? How had he become an almost mythical figure of kindness and consideration in the local community?

These were the questions that myself and co-author Jean Ritchie – who wrote the best-selling Myra Hindley: Inside The Mind of a Moors Murderess – have attempted to answer in a book carefully researched over the last 18 months.

In Nottingham, at the time the much-loved GP had been arrested, there were blank faces when we started asking questions about Harold Shipman. Pictures flashed across TV screens and newspapers of a bearded, bespectacled middle-aged man bore no resemblance to anyone they knew, nor to the good-looking 19-year-old with a shock of black wavy hair who’d left the town thirty-odd years previously to study medicine at Leeds University.

It slowly dawned that Harold was really Fred – the name he’d always been known by, and still is. Putting his first name on a charge sheet had unwittingly changed his identity.

And so began a trail of investigation that took us to Yorkshire and the little market town where Primrose Oxtoby, later to become Primrose Shipman, lived; to Leeds where he studied medicine; to Pontefract where he completed his housemanship as a doctor and to Todmorden where he entered practice for the first time – and became hooked on the pain-killing drug, pethidine.

We discovered he had been a psychiatric patient at The Retreat, a famous mental hospital in York, and later worked as a clinical medical officer in County Durham before joining the Donneybrook practice in Hyde, to leave his partners in the lurch financially.

There had been an inspiration and a pattern to his drug-taking, a bombastic side to his character developing, and a single-mindedness. He sulked or shouted if he did not get his own way. He felt superior to all around him. He was a control freak.

There can be no excuse or redemption for what Doctor Shipman did, but for the good people of Hyde we can possibly offer some kind of explanation, and at the same time expose the appalling lack of control over GPs, their working patterns, filing systems, and most importantly, their dispensing of drugs.

One of the national newspapers last week described Hyde as “an S-bend with chip shops” – the sort of cheap, ill-informed jibe, that demonstrates a lack of feeling for its inhabitants, and a lack of knowledge of its geography.

Ten years ago, I spearheaded the national publicity for brave Mandy Turner, the dying cancer victim who raised one million pounds to buy a scanner for Tameside Hospital, and got to know some marvellous folk.

In the last year and a half, I’ve been privileged to renew links with people in Hyde. Some of them may not have two ha’pennies to rub together, but if they had they’d give you one of them. The term “salt of the earth” should be their copyright.

Many others kept their fears behind closed doors, finally venturing out with them as they realised their misgivings about the most popular doctor in the town, were perhaps founded in fact.

Prescription for Murder contains some sobering statistics when it comes to serial killing. Fred Shipman killed five women, in his surgery, six in one road (Joel Lane) and eight in a month.

But the most damning statistics – the ones that would have stopped the killing years ago – are the ones that aren’t kept. The West Pennine Health Authority did not know about the soaring death rate among Shipman patients because there is no provision for analysing and comparing those figures. Just as there is no provision for checking that unused prescribed drugs are properly disposed of.

The General Medical Council took months to even suspend Dr Shipman AFTER he had been arrested and charged. Imagine the outcry if that was the case with a police officer under investigation for a serious crime.

Did he get wind of the initial police enquiry that failed to nail him? Was it then that he targetted Kathleen Grundy, once the First Lady of Hyde, as a well-heeled victim whose bequests he could steal, providing him with an early retirement?

Sadly, the answers to those questions will never be known in a town whose image has for years been unfairly tarnished by association with Moors Murderers Brady and Hindley.

It did not need, or deserve, “Doctor Death”.

Prescription for Murder, The True Story of Mass Murderer Doctor Harold Frederick Shipman, by Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie is published by Little, Brown at £5.99

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