Serial Killer Doctors Read Free Page B

had died nine days earlier and another for a Mr Soden. When Adams’s records were examined, though, it transpired that Soden, who had died in September 1956, had never been prescribed morphine. Adams would later tell Hannam at the police station, ‘Easing the passing of a dying person isn’t all that wicked. She [Morrell] wanted to die. That can’t be murder. It is impossible to accuse a doctor’.
    Allegations of homosexuality – illegal at the time – emerged when police acquired some notes belonging to a Daily Mail journalist in which Adams, Sir Ronald Gwynne, Mayor of Eastbourne and Deputy Chief Constable of Eastbourne, Alexander Seekings were implicated. Gwynne was a patient of Adams and the two frequently holidayed together. Hannam did not pursue this line of enquiry, possibly as a result of the senior positions of those involved and pressure from above.
    On December 19, 1956, Dr John Bodkin Adams was arrested and charged with the murder of Edith Morrell.
    It was the longest trial in British criminal history, lasting seventeen days, but on April 9, 1957, the jury found Adams not guilty. On July 26, however, he was found guilty on 8 counts of forging prescriptions, four counts of making false statements on cremation forms, and three offences under the Dangerous Drugs Act. He was fined £2,400 plus costs of £457 and in November was struck off the Medical Register by the General Medical Council.
    In November 1961, after two failed applications, Adams was reinstated as a general practitioner of medicine. He died in 1983 having fallen while shooting in Battle, East Sussex. He developed a chest infection in hospital and died of ventricular failure on July 6.
    Right up to his death, he was still receiving legacies from grateful patients.
     

3
     
    Harold Shipman
     
     
    The list of the world’s most prolific serial killers makes dreadful reading. It contains names such as Luis Alfredo Garavito, a Colombian who killed 138 street children in the nineteen-nineties, and his countryman, Pedro Alonso Lopez, who killed 110 young girls between 1969 and 1980. At the top of the list, however, and earning the unenviable title of the world’s most prolific serial killer, is the quiet, bearded Yorkshireman, Harold Shipman, responsible for the deaths of at least 218 of his patients. In fact, the enquiry that followed his conviction examined the cases of 500 of his patients and concluded that the death toll might even have been greater and in its report it stated that there was genuine suspicion that he had killed another 45, although there was insufficient evidence to establish real certainty. Some sources place the number of people who were killed by him closer to 1,000.
    What drove a doctor to carry out such heinous acts over such a long period? There are many hypotheses. One is that he was, quite simply, a psychopath and his acts were no more than a manifestation of the classic tendency of the psychopath to control and manipulate. There is a view that it was a fascination with the power of drugs that led him to kill. He liked to experiment with them, this theory suggests, playing with the individual doses he gave his patients and seeing just how much they could take before the drugs proved fatal. Or perhaps it was a morbid fascination with death that caused him to bring it to so many people? Then again, Shipman had enjoyed a particularly complex relationship with his mother, Vera, watching her die from lung cancer while he was still a child. Perhaps the fact that he mainly targeted elderly ladies suggested that he was merely trying to recreate her death every time he killed a patient.
    Indeed, the young Harold Shipman – or ‘Freddy’ as his mother called him – was certainly the favourite of her three children. Born Harold Frederick Shipman in 1946 in Nottingham, he was the second of four children. His father was a lorry driver and Vera, his mother, was a very fussy woman, especially where her children were concerned. In