"Harold Fredrick Shipman (14 January 1946 – 13 January 2004) was a British doctor and one of the most prolific serial killers in recorded history by proven murders with up to 250 murders being ascribed to him.
On 31 January 2000, a jury found Shipman guilty of 15 murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and the judge recommended that he never be released.
Harold Frederick Shipman was born in Bestwood council estate in Nottingham, England...His working class parents were devout Methodists.Shipman was particularly close to his mother, who died of lung cancer when he was 17....
Shipman studied medicine at Leeds School of Medicine and graduated in 1970. He started work at Pontefract General Infirmary in Pontefract, West Riding of Yorkshire, and in 1974 took his first position as a general practitioner (GP) at the Abraham Ormerod Medical Centre in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. In 1975 he was caught forging prescriptions of pethidine for his own use. He was fined £600, and briefly attended a drug rehabilitation clinic in York. He became a GP at the Donneybrook Medical Centre in Hyde, Greater Manchester, in 1977.
Shipman continued working as a GP in Hyde throughout the 1980s and founded his own surgery at 21 Market Street in 1993, becoming a respected member of the community. In 1983, he was interviewed on the Granada television documentary World in Action on how the mentally ill should be treated in the community.
...The Shipman Inquiry into Shipman's activities submitted in July 2002 concluded that he had killed at least 215 of his patients between 1975 and 1998, during which time he practised in Todmorden, West Yorkshire (1974–1975), and Hyde, Greater Manchester (1977–1998)... Most of his victims were elderly women in good health.
...The General Medical Council charged six doctors who signed cremation forms for Shipman's victims with misconduct, claiming they should have noticed the pattern between Shipman's home visits and his patients' deaths. All these doctors were found not guilty....
...In October 2005, a similar hearing was held against two doctors who worked at Tameside General Hospital in 1994, who failed to detect that Shipman had deliberately administered a "grossly excessive" dose of morphine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman
"The official report speculated that the doctor was "addicted to killing" much like he was addicted to painkillers around the time the murders started...Shipman "simply enjoyed viewing the process of dying and enjoyed feeling the control over life and death."
... Even more incredible was that his murders of so many people did not arouse suspicion for decades...
...the system failed tragically when Shipman, after being convicted of drug abuse in 1975, was allowed to obtain enormous quantities of painkilling drugs. For example, in the name of a dying patient, Dr. Shipman obtained enough of the painkiller diamorphine to kill 360 people..."
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/notorious/shipman/killing_27.html
