Book Review: Evil Beyond Belief - Wensley Clarkson (Blake, 2005)

This is an incredible and well-written account of the sick career of Dr Harold Shipman and how and why he killed anything up to 400 people in Todmorden and Hyde over a period of about 25 years.

Shipman was a failure at school despite the apparant success - he did badly in his O Levels and then failed his A Levels, needing an extra year to get any at all. Then he got into medical school in Leeds and, as they say, the rest is history.

According to Clarkson, the evil doctor did it all because of his complex relationship with his mother, who died when he was just 17. However, I can't see anything unusual about Shipman's background - he came from a small council estate in Nottingham, in an apparantly normal family, his dad being a council driver for many years.

Shipman met his first ever bird, Primrose, while in his first year at medical school in Leeds, got her pregnant, and then promptly married her. She supposedly never had a clue about what he was doing, however.

Strangely, Shipman was born in almost the same month as that other monster, the Yorkshire Ripper (Peter Sutcliffe), first practised in the same area (near Bradford), used prostitutes, and was operating at the same time. Both were extraordinary cowards as they never openly confronted their victims: only the modus operandum was different.

Sutcliffe used to sneak up on women at night-time and then, before they knew anything at all, he had already half killed them with a blow from a hammer to the back of the head. Shipman, as a respected local GP, had the fullest trust of his patients, manifested in his fake, easy manner. But, claiming he was offering proper medical treatment, he would inject them with massive doses of morphine, killing them within a few seconds. Again, they never knew what was happening.

In his surgery in Hyde, Greater Manchester, Shipman eventually had his own, one-man practise. He was now beyond any restriction at all. No other GPs to work with.

In the end, he was caught mainly due to the idiotically fake/forged will he produced for probably his last victim, Kathleen Grundy, the former mayoress. And his computer records. He killed HUNDREDS of people, almost entirely vulnerable old women.

I can't understand how the General Medical Council were so inept. Shipman was a lifelong injecting drug addict - mainly pethidone and morphine - and totally unsuited to being a GP where calm, assured judgement is the order of the day. He was convicted for drug offences in 1976 yet carried on regardless. There were no later checks. Why didn't someone speak up?

It's all thanks to the undertaker in Hyde, and about 2 other GPs (Dr Lyndsey, I think), that he was ever caught. They are very brave people.

They should have made him share a cell with the Yorkshire Ripper. One final question - why has Shipman not got a nickname? They Hyde Horror? Dr Horror of Hyde? There must be something.