# Serial Killer Doctors... Who Hunted At The Hospital | 253

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 12 Jun 2026, 1 h 02 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO5915807422.mp3

Join me for some of the most twisted serial killer cases possible: doctors who decided to do as much harm as possible. Episode 253 of the true crime podcast btw. Also don't forget to follow, rate and share if you enjoy my content. 👇 Support My Work: 🛍️ Merch: https://lazy-chill-zone-shop.fourthwall.com ❤️ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lazychillzone 👇Social Media Links: https://www.instagram.com/lazychillzone/ 👇 Podcast links: ⚡History Video Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/7km5pLWpYWEj1mrPpEfRUr?si=0FHYnZf-Qs2FY1GyLevfig ⚡True Crime Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/0klIz08pAr7wR4we0Ia4sk?si=68qZxCeAQkysXzMZrHE0Iw serial killer doctors, killer doctors, doctor true crime, medical true crime, Dr Death, Christopher Duntsch, Michael Swango, Harold Shipman, Dr Death surgeon, Texas surgeon killer, hospital murders, medical murders, killer surgeon, poison doctor, doctor poisoner, Harold Shipman victims, Michael Swango victims, Christopher Duntsch victims, medical malpractice crime, true crime documentary, true crime stories, disturbing true crime, doctors who kill, murder in hospitals, healthcare horror stories, medical system failure, dangerous doctors, licensed to kill, real life Dr Death, spine surgeon scandal, serial killer documentary, true crime cases, infamous doctors, healthcare crime, hospital negligence, medical horror, true crime mystery, doctor crimes, deadly doctors, patients betrayed, serial killer, true crime stories

## Transcript

[0:00] In the summer of 2012, one of the most experienced spine
[0:04] surgeons in Dallas stood in an operating room, looking at the
[0:08] inside of a woman who'd been operated on days earlier.
[0:12] What he found made so little sense that only one explanation
[0:15] seemed to fit. The man who'd done this couldn't
[0:19] actually be a surgeon. Somewhere out there, he figured,
[0:23] was a real Doctor Christopher Dunsch, and somebody had stolen
[0:27] his name, his diplomas and his license.
[0:31] So he tracked down a photograph of the man and sent it to the
[0:35] training program in Memphis that had supposedly produced him,
[0:40] along with a simple question asking if it was him.
[0:45] The surgeon thought he had discovered a serious criminal
[0:47] act committed by a phony surgeon.
[0:51] When the answer from Memphis came back that yes, that was
[0:55] Doctor Dunch, that sent a shock through the surgeon, Since the
[1:00] answer was far more frightening than an imposter could have
[1:03] been, it suggested immediately that this wasn't simply a case
[1:08] of someone who didn't know what he was doing, it was someone who
[1:11] had weaponized his medical knowledge.
[1:15] Christopher Duntsch grew up in Memphis, TN, the eldest of four
[1:19] children of a physical therapist and a school teacher in a family
[1:23] that prized achievement. The defining story people tell
[1:26] about his youth involves football and his dreams of
[1:29] hitting it big in the NFL. He played linebacker in high
[1:33] school and decided he was going to play at the next level
[1:37] despite the inconvenient fact that he wasn't very good.
[1:41] He started at tiny Millsaps College in Mississippi, then
[1:44] left to chase something bigger and clawed his way onto the
[1:48] roster at Colorado State as a Division One walk on.
[1:53] Team mates remembered a guy who'd outwork anyone in the
[1:56] weight room and beg coaches to rerun drills.
[1:59] He kept botching without ever getting much better.
[2:03] He eventually transferred home to Memphis, where the moves had
[2:06] wrecked his eligibility and the dream of going any further came
[2:10] to an end. In retrospect, the dream wasn't
[2:14] realistic for him, given his abilities and build, but the
[2:17] determination was admirable. The young Duntsch decided to
[2:22] pour that same blunt force ambition into something new.
[2:26] He decided that he was going to be a doctor, And not just any
[2:30] doctor. He wanted to be a neurosurgeon
[2:34] on paper. He pulled it off spectacularly,
[2:37] and he spent roughly 15 years at the University of Tennessee
[2:40] Health Science Center in Memphis.
[2:43] He stacked up an MD and APHD and won grant money for stem cell
[2:47] research on spinal discs, he ran a lab and he Co founded a
[2:52] biotech company called Discgenics that drew in millions
[2:56] of dollars from venture capitalists as well as his own
[2:59] mentors. The company is quite successful
[3:02] until this day and even maintains A disclaimer and an
[3:06] acknowledgement of Doctor Dunch. Honestly, I find it quite
[3:10] admirable that they didn't just simply write him out of the
[3:12] entire picture given the evil acts he would commit.
[3:17] Personally, I think this is one of the things that makes the
[3:20] story of Doctor Duntsch deeply tragic, since this was a person
[3:24] who had the skill and ability to improve the lives of millions
[3:28] worldwide. Instead, he chose to focus on
[3:32] the worst kinds of evil imaginable, which in a certain
[3:35] light, perhaps makes him one of the worst people to ever live,
[3:39] but I digress. Anyone reading Doctor Dunce's
[3:43] resume saw a rising star, the rare surgeon scientist who could
[3:47] really do it all and actually had done it all already.
[3:51] But unfortunately for Dunce, the operating room told a different
[3:54] story, and this part makes me question how he was able to
[3:58] qualify as a fully licensed neurosurgeon.
[4:02] During a neurosurgery residency, a trainee typically takes part
[4:06] in something like 1000 procedures, according to records
[4:10] that surfaced years later. Dunch, for reasons that aren't
[4:13] quite clear, performed fewer than 100.
[4:18] There were also darker problems to suggest that his life was
[4:21] already spiraling out of control at this point.
[4:25] Part way through his training, he was reportedly sent to a
[4:28] program for physicians suffering from addiction after allegations
[4:32] that he'd been huffing Colombian confetti the night before
[4:35] surgery. He completed the program, and
[4:39] despite all his shortcomings, he finished his residency.
[4:43] He topped it off with a minimally invasive spine
[4:45] fellowship at a respected Memphis practice.
[4:49] In 2011, Duntsch moved to Texas, and he started working at Baylor
[4:54] Regional Medical Center at Plano, an upscale hospital north
[4:58] of Dallas. They brought him in to anchor
[5:01] its minimally invasive spine program, reportedly guaranteeing
[5:05] him about $600,000 a year, plus a cut of the revenue he
[5:10] generated. Elective spine surgery is one of
[5:14] the most profitable product lines in American medicine, and
[5:17] Duntsch looked like a machine built to generate it.
[5:21] His credentials checked out, and his references were stellar, but
[5:24] Despite that, the trouble started almost immediately.
[5:29] In late 2011, he operated on a man named Lee Passmore, who
[5:33] worked, in a grim bit of irony, for the County Medical
[5:37] examiner's office. A veteran vascular surgeon was
[5:41] assisting that day, and what he watched unfold alarmed him so
[5:45] much that he reportedly swore he'd never share an operating
[5:49] room with Duntsch again. Hardware ended up in the wrong
[5:53] place, and while Passmore survived, he left that table
[5:57] with chronic pain that never went away.
[6:00] That veteran surgeon, Doctor Randall Kirby, would start
[6:04] making his moves to bring down Doctor Dutch, but for the time
[6:08] being, there simply wasn't enough evidence to do much.
[6:13] A few weeks later, in January 2012, Duntsch fused the spine of
[6:19] a man named Barry Morgoloff. The operation left bone
[6:23] fragments near his spinal canal, and Morgolov walked out worse
[6:27] than he went in, eventually losing much of the function in
[6:31] one leg. Spinal surgery is inherently
[6:34] extremely risky, even in the hands of the most experienced
[6:38] and conscientious surgeons, so no additional red flags went up.
[6:43] Not yet, at least. What happened next is the part
[6:47] of the narrative nobody can quite explain, even today.
[6:50] In February 2012, Duntsch performed an elective neck
[6:54] surgery on Jerry Summers, his closest friend since their
[6:58] school days in Memphis. Summers had followed him to
[7:02] Dallas and worked for him, and he trusted Duntsch enough to let
[7:05] him operate on his neck to fix lingering pain from an old
[7:09] injury. The procedure went
[7:12] catastrophically wrong, and Duntsch damaged the area so
[7:15] badly with so much blood loss that Summers woke up unable to
[7:20] move his arms or legs. He never walked again and spent
[7:24] the rest of his life in a wheelchair before passing away
[7:27] in 2021. A few days later, lying in
[7:31] intensive care, Summers began shouting at the nursing staff
[7:35] that he and Duntsch had been doing coke together the night
[7:39] before the operation. He later took it back, but a
[7:43] statement like that can't be unsaid, and Duntsch was
[7:46] reported. The hospital ordered a drug
[7:49] test, which Duntsch managed to delay for days before passing,
[7:53] then cleared him to return restricted to minor procedures.
[7:58] Then in March 2012, he got a routine lumbar case, the kind of
[8:04] operation experience spine surgeons consider about as low
[8:07] risk as the specialty gets. The patient was Kelly Martin, a
[8:13] 55 year old school teacher and mother who'd hurt her back in a
[8:16] fall. During the procedure, Duntsch
[8:19] cut through a major blood vessel and she bled internally while
[8:24] the rest of the team scrambled. Sadly, she passed away that same
[8:29] day, and an autopsy classified her death as a quote UN quote,
[8:33] therapeutic misadventure, which sounds about as euphemistic as
[8:37] possible. Baylor, Plano and Duntsch parted
[8:40] ways in April 2012, and this perhaps should have been the end
[8:44] of the line for this disturbed surgeon.
[8:47] But here's the thing. He wasn't fired since after some
[8:51] legal wrangling, he was allowed to resign.
[8:54] He walked out with a lawyer negotiated letter stating that
[8:57] all areas of concern about him had been closed.
[9:01] The national practitioner databank.
[9:03] The federal clearing house that exists to warn hospitals about
[9:07] dangerous doctors received nothing that would have stopped
[9:10] him. In July 2012, Dallas Medical
[9:15] Center granted Duntsch temporary privileges while his application
[9:18] was still being processed. He lasted about a week, long
[9:22] enough for three operations, and at this point, the pattern
[9:26] started to get even darker. Among his first patients there
[9:30] was Floella Brown, a woman in her early 60s who'd come in for
[9:34] a neck fusion. During the operation, he pierced
[9:38] her vertebral artery, one of the main vessels feeding the brain.
[9:42] By the next morning, she'd suffered a massive stroke.
[9:46] And while Brown lay dying in the ICU, Duntsch went ahead with his
[9:50] next scheduled case. This one was on a 74 year old
[9:54] woman named Mary Efford. Efford woke up in agony, unable
[9:59] to stand. The hospital called in Doctor
[10:02] Robert Henderson, the veteran spine surgeon I mentioned in the
[10:06] beginning, to figure out what had happened.
[10:09] Doctor Henderson was, in essence, everything Duntsch
[10:14] should have been on paper, except, you know, actually a
[10:17] highly competent surgeon who cared about his patients.
[10:22] Doctor Henderson is in essence the hero of the story, the man
[10:28] who staked his entire reputation and livelihood on getting
[10:31] justice for these patients. But more on that shortly.
[10:36] When Henderson reopened her back, he found a spinal fusion
[10:40] attempted in the wrong place, screws drilled into muscle
[10:44] instead of bone, and a nerve root severed outright.
[10:48] Henderson had spent decades doing this work and repaired
[10:52] plenty of other surgeons mistakes, and to him this didn't
[10:55] look like a series of mistakes. It looked like someone who
[10:59] didn't know what a spine was supposed to look like.
[11:02] Which is what led him to the imposter theory and the
[11:05] photograph he sent to Memphis. In the meantime, Floella Brown's
[11:10] family took her off life support and the Dallas Medical Center
[11:14] let Duntsch go. Once again, the report that
[11:18] might have ended his career didn't reach the databank in
[11:21] time to matter. From that point on, 2 surgeons
[11:25] set out on a mission to end the career of Doctor Duntsch once
[11:28] and for all. These were Doctor Henderson, of
[11:31] course, and that vascular specialist Doctor Randall Kirby,
[11:35] who'd seen Dunch's sloppy work up close and come away appalled.
[11:41] Dr. Kirby had been looking for someone in Doctor Dunch's own
[11:44] specialty who could verify his suspicions, and Dr. Henderson
[11:48] was just the man to do that. Henderson reported him to the
[11:53] Texas Medical Board in the summer of 2012, backed by
[11:57] detailed documentation, then watched, increasingly enraged,
[12:02] as very little happened. The board took months to
[12:06] investigate, and meanwhile Duntsch kept finding work,
[12:10] drifting down the food chain of Dallas Area medicine.
[12:14] He could no longer find work in prestige hospitals, so he went
[12:19] to outpatient surgery centers and struggling hospitals, hungry
[12:22] for the revenue a spine surgeon brings.
[12:26] At a facility in Frisco, he operated on a woman named
[12:29] Jacqueline Troy and damaged her vocal cords and an artery,
[12:34] leaving her sedated for weeks and fed through a tube.
[12:37] Other patients from this period, men like Philip Mayfield and
[12:41] Marshall Muse, came off his table with lasting damage.
[12:46] Each institution discovered what he was and each showed him the
[12:49] door. If you're wondering why nobody
[12:52] just sued him into oblivion, Texas law had an answer.
[12:57] A 2003 tort reform package capped non economic damages in
[13:01] malpractice cases at $250,000. Suing a hospital for
[13:07] credentialing a dangerous doctor required proving the hospital
[13:12] acted with something close to malice.
[13:15] And while I personally wish I could say that a brave plaintiff
[13:18] personal injury lawyer solved this case, attorneys turned
[13:22] Dunch's victims away because the math didn't work.
[13:26] As someone who spent over a decade doing personal injury
[13:29] work, I have to question whether Doctor Duntsch knowingly
[13:32] targeted people based on this tort reform law.
[13:36] In fact, I have to question whether his entire reason for
[13:39] choosing Texas as a place to work was based upon this law.
[13:43] Medical malpractice cases are extremely difficult, and
[13:47] disbursements in the form of expert reports can easily run
[13:51] into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[13:54] Doctor Duntsch surely knew this and likely realized that if he
[13:59] targeted people who in essence would have had a claim for pain
[14:02] and suffering only, no one would ever sue him.
[14:06] After all, it wouldn't make much sense to sue someone if you were
[14:10] going to end up in the hole after a settlement or a trial
[14:13] victory. Anyway, that's just my educated
[14:17] speculation on the matter based on my experience from my
[14:19] profession. In June 2013, at a small
[14:25] hospital on the South side of Dallas, Duntsch performed what
[14:28] turned out to be his final surgery on a patient named Jeff
[14:32] Glidewell. He mistook part of Glidewell's
[14:35] neck anatomy for a tumor and started cutting it out, damaging
[14:40] his esophagus and vocal cords and slicing an artery.
[14:44] He then packed the wound with a sponge and closed him up, just
[14:48] leaving it there. Operating room staff reportedly
[14:51] tried to warn him mid procedure, but he just kept on doing what
[14:55] he was doing. The sponge stayed inside, and
[14:59] Glidewell developed sepsis. Dr. Kirby helped with the
[15:03] rescue, then filed A sworn complaint with the medical board
[15:06] that read like a public safety bulletin.
[15:09] He called Duntsch a sociopath and warned that more patients
[15:12] would be maimed or worse unless the board acted immediately.
[15:17] This time it worked, and on June 26th, 2013, the Texas Medical
[15:24] Board suspended Dutch's license, and by December it was revoked.
[15:30] In about 18 months, he'd operated on 38 patients in the
[15:33] Dallas area, and prosecutors would later conclude that all
[15:37] but a handful were maimed or worse. 1 document in this case
[15:42] pulls everything into a darker focus, and it was written before
[15:46] most of the harm happened. In December 2011, around the
[15:51] time of his earliest Dallas surgeries, Duntsch sat down at
[15:55] about 4:00 in the morning and sent a rambling e-mail.
[15:59] It was pages of bizarre grievance and self mythology
[16:03] sent to his surgical assistant and sometime girlfriend buried
[16:08] inside it was a passage prosecutors would later read
[16:11] aloud to a jury. He wrote that the people closest
[16:15] to him saw him as something between God, Einstein and the
[16:20] Antichrist. Then he announced that he was
[16:23] ready to leave behind the love, kindness, and patience mixed
[16:26] into who he was and to become a cold blooded killer.
[16:31] His lawyer pointed out that the same e-mail rambled about vodka
[16:34] and stimulants and they'd call the whole thing drunken venting.
[16:40] The state of Texas would call it evidence that he wasn't just a
[16:43] big old goofball who didn't know an esophagus from a tumor.
[16:46] He was a serial killer in scrubs.
[16:50] With the civil courts effectively closed due to the
[16:52] tort reform law, the Dallas County District Attorney's
[16:55] office tried something that had never really been done.
[16:59] A team of prosecutors spent months combing through medical
[17:02] records and building a criminal case against a licensed surgeon
[17:06] for what he did inside an operating room.
[17:09] The legal theory was untested, but in July 2015, Duntsch was
[17:14] taken into custody. By then he was broke, bankrupt
[17:19] and fresh off an arrest for walking out of a Walmart with
[17:22] nearly $900 worth of merchandise.
[17:26] The indictment included multiple counts of aggravated assault and
[17:30] one count of injury to an elderly individual.
[17:33] The charge tied to Mary Efford. The trial opened in Dallas in
[17:37] February 2017, and the prosecution did something
[17:42] unusual. Rather than argue a single
[17:45] botched surgery, they put more than a dozen of his former
[17:48] patients in front of the jury to establish a pattern.
[17:52] They argued that Duntsch knew the harm he was causing and kept
[17:55] operating anyway. The defense countered that he
[17:58] was a poorly trained surgeon, failed by the institutions
[18:02] around him, incompetent but not criminal.
[18:06] The jury heard about the e-mail, the warnings, the friend in the
[18:10] wheelchair and the women who never went home.
[18:14] They convicted him of injuring Mary Efford, and in February
[18:18] 2017, he was sentenced to life in prison.
[18:22] This was a result widely described as the first of its
[18:25] kind for an American surgeon's conduct in the operating room.
[18:30] An appeals court upheld the conviction in 2018, and he'll be
[18:34] eligible for parole in 2045, when he's 74 years old.
[18:40] Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the case of Doctor
[18:43] Duntsch is that the true extent of the harm he caused remains a
[18:47] mystery. He had access to patients in
[18:50] some capacity or another for a period of almost 20 years, and I
[18:54] have to question how many he actually harmed over that time.
[18:59] The disturbing emails seem to suggest that he was a complete
[19:02] sociopath with virtually unfettered access to people who
[19:05] trusted him to be on their side. Most of us never truly second
[19:10] guess what our physicians say, especially specialist physicians
[19:14] like neurosurgeons. While Doctor Duntsch only
[19:18] officially ended the lives of two people and left countless
[19:22] others permanently damaged, I have to think that's just the
[19:25] tip of the iceberg. This is speculation on my part,
[19:30] but I think there's a good chance that he may have built up
[19:32] to his botched surgeries over the years.
[19:36] For instance, he was in a unique position to make a small, nearly
[19:41] undetectable mistake that most people would never notice.
[19:45] He was also in the position to simply ignore problems that
[19:48] patients had and who knows how many people perish due to his
[19:51] inaction. The only reason he was ever
[19:54] caught was because he completely spiraled out of control due to
[19:57] his problems with various substances.
[20:00] Had he simply followed through on what he had said in the
[20:03] e-mail and done so without his life falling apart around him,
[20:07] we may have been looking at a much higher victim count.
[20:11] That's the scariest thought, since if he had simply been able
[20:15] to hold it together, he likely would have got away with it for
[20:18] much longer. In fact, he may never have been
[20:21] caught at all, And if he was, he may have been able to frame it
[20:25] all as negligence, as his attorneys argued at trial.
[20:32] Hey everyone, it's Jimmy with a quick reminder to hit that
[20:35] subscribe button and tap the notification bell.
[20:38] Also, don't forget to check out the Patreon or the membership to
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[20:45] Anyway, the story of Doctor Duntsch was disturbingly the
[20:50] most minor case I'm going to cover in this video, so buckle
[20:53] up. It's about to get a lot darker.
[21:00] On the afternoon of June 27th, 1997, federal agents arrested a
[21:06] fit, sandy haired American doctor at Chicago's O'Hare
[21:10] airport, midway between Africa and a new hospital job in Saudi
[21:14] Arabia. The warrant mentioned nothing
[21:17] more dramatic than fraud, A big deal for anyone, especially a
[21:22] physician. But the men in suits believed
[21:25] they were standing in front of one of the most prolific
[21:27] poisoners in American history. He was a physician who by some
[21:32] estimates had ended the lives of as many as 60 people across 2
[21:37] continents. He had spent 14 years slipping
[21:41] through every net that medicine and the law had built to catch
[21:44] him. But this time he was trapped.
[21:48] His name was Michael Swango, and this is the story of what he was
[21:53] and how he kept getting away with it.
[21:56] Swango was born on October 21st, 1954 in Tacoma, WA, the middle
[22:02] of three sons and a career military family.
[22:05] His father, John Virgil Swango, was an Army officer who served
[22:10] in Vietnam and was by most accounts, a cold and largely
[22:16] absent presence. The family eventually settled in
[22:20] Quincy, IL, a Rivertown on the Mississippi, where Michael's
[22:24] mother, Muriel, raised the boys mostly on her own.
[22:28] On paper, Michael was the son every parent in Quincy wanted,
[22:32] and he graduated valedictorian of his high school class in
[22:35] 1972. He played clarinet well enough
[22:39] to earn a music scholarship to Milliken University.
[22:42] Then he abruptly quit school, joined the Marine Corps and
[22:46] served until an honorable discharge in 1976.
[22:50] He came home, enrolled at Quincy College and graduated summa cum
[22:55] laude in chemistry and biology, picking up an award from the
[22:59] American Chemical Society along the way.
[23:03] In 1979, he was accepted into Southern Illinois University's
[23:07] School of Medicine. And that's where the first signs
[23:10] of trouble emerged. Classmates noticed he did the
[23:13] bare minimum, skipping lectures while moonlighting long hours as
[23:18] an ambulance attendant, a job he seemed to love far more than
[23:22] medicine itself. More unsettling were the
[23:25] scrapbooks. Swango collected newspaper
[23:28] clippings of plane crashes and violent disasters.
[23:32] He discussed them with an enthusiasm that made people
[23:34] uncomfortable, as if he wasn't just interested in the events
[23:39] but almost relishing them. This, of course, is one of those
[23:43] things that could have been entirely innocent in retrospect,
[23:46] but given who Swango turned out to be, it looked more like a
[23:50] dark omen. When his estranged father passed
[23:54] away during his medical school years, the family reportedly
[23:58] discovered that the old soldier had kept a collection of grim
[24:01] newspaper clippings of his own. Michael apparently treated the
[24:05] discovery as a point of kinship to a man he otherwise had almost
[24:09] no relationship with. His clinical work, meanwhile,
[24:13] was so unreliable that fellow students took to rechecking his
[24:17] patient workups. In a grim irony, his classmates
[24:21] took to calling him Double O Swango, a James Bond reference.
[24:27] The joke was that he was so negligent that handing him a
[24:30] medical license would be the equivalent of a license to kill.
[24:36] That said, everyone seems to agree that this nickname didn't
[24:40] indicate that he would do this willfully, but that he was just
[24:43] such a lazy dunce that he'd leave his patients in the
[24:46] morgue. I'm not sure if that makes it
[24:49] better or not, but the nickname stuck at least among his fellow
[24:53] medical students. In his final year, he was very
[24:57] nearly expelled when a supervisor concluded he'd
[25:01] fabricated parts of his patient histories, which seems like it
[25:05] should have been the end of the line for him.
[25:07] The school's leadership moved to expel him, and under rules that
[25:11] required a unanimous vote, a single committee members hold
[25:15] out reportedly kept him in. He was permitted to graduate in
[25:19] 1983 behind his original class after repeating the work that he
[25:24] had fraudulently made-up. That one vote would prove to be
[25:28] among the most consequential second chances in the history of
[25:31] American medicine. In an alternative universe, it
[25:35] ended there, proving that perhaps some people don't really
[25:38] deserve second chances at all, especially when it comes to
[25:42] issues of dishonesty and positions of trust.
[25:46] And it wasn't just that he was fabricating lab data for a
[25:49] research project or something, which is bad enough in and of
[25:52] itself. He was fabricating the real
[25:55] medical histories of actual patients, indicating that it was
[25:59] well known that he was already the sort of guy who was willing
[26:02] to endanger lives. My own speculation is that
[26:06] getting away with this would embolden him, because, as you'll
[26:10] see, he was incredibly bold over the coming decades.
[26:14] And I don't mean this as praise. Despite everything, Swango
[26:19] landed a surgical internship at Ohio State University Medical
[26:23] Center beginning in 1983 with a path toward the neurosurgery
[26:27] program. Within months, nurses on his
[26:31] wards noticed something they couldn't explain.
[26:35] Patients who'd been stable were suddenly going into respiratory
[26:38] arrest, and an uncomfortable number of those emergencies
[26:41] happened when the new intern was on the floor.
[26:44] The nurses talked among themselves and grew more
[26:47] convinced with each incident, but they sat near the bottom of
[26:50] a hospital hierarchy that wasn't built to take their suspicions
[26:54] seriously. One of those patients was
[26:58] Cynthia Ann McGee, a 19 year old college gymnast recovering after
[27:02] being struck by a car while cycling in January 1984.
[27:08] She passed away in her hospital bed, and nobody suspected a
[27:11] thing at the time. The young motorist who'd hit her
[27:14] carried the legal blame for her death, and 16 years would pass
[27:18] before Swango admitted he'd injected potassium into her
[27:22] intravenous line. Then came the case that nearly
[27:26] stopped him in his tracks, one of the many potential off ramps
[27:30] in Swango's medical career. In February 1984, Rena Cooper, a
[27:36] 69 year old woman, was recovering from routine back
[27:39] surgery. She went into violent
[27:42] convulsions and stopped breathing.
[27:43] Moments after, a blonde doctor was seen at her bedside fiddling
[27:46] with her. IVA resuscitation team saved
[27:50] her, and because she'd been intubated and couldn't yet
[27:53] speak, she was given a pad and pencil.
[27:57] What she conveyed was unambiguous.
[28:00] An unknown male physician had put something into her line, and
[28:04] he looked like he wasn't supposed to be there, despite
[28:07] him clearly being a doctor. Her roommate described the same
[28:11] blonde physician slipping in and out of the room, and a syringe
[28:15] was found discarded nearby. The nurses pushed the alarm up
[28:19] the chain and waited for the hospital to act like a crime had
[28:22] happened on its own 9th floor. But then things got even
[28:26] weirder. What happened next has been
[28:30] picked over for decades. Ohio State conducted an internal
[28:34] inquiry that was, by nearly every later assessment, cursory.
[28:39] Senior physicians interviewed a handful of people, accepted
[28:43] Swango's denials, never called the police and concluded there
[28:47] was nothing to act on. Nobody pulled his file from
[28:51] southern Illinois, and nobody ran the simple comparison of his
[28:55] shifts against the Ward's emergencies that investigators
[28:59] would run years later. The hospital let him finish his
[29:03] internship but declined to keep him on or to give him a
[29:06] reference for any future work, which was, of course, seen as a
[29:10] massive red flag by other employers.
[29:13] The dark nickname his medical school classmates had hung on
[29:16] him, Double O Swango, was starting to look less like a
[29:20] joke and much more like a prophecy.
[29:24] A review later commissioned by the university concluded the
[29:26] original investigation had been badly inadequate, but by then
[29:30] the moment had long passed and evidence had gone stale.
[29:35] In July 1984, Swango went home to Quincy and took a job as an
[29:41] emergency medical technician with the Adams County Ambulance
[29:44] Service. It says something about his
[29:46] confidence that a man who just walked away from a poisoning
[29:49] inquiry went straight back to handling other people's food and
[29:53] drink. It also says something that a
[29:56] newly licensed physician wasn't working as a doctor, since, you
[30:01] know, physician jobs aren't exactly ever not in demand.
[30:06] Almost immediately, his colleagues at the ambulance
[30:09] service noticed a pattern that sounds absurd, or would sound
[30:13] absurd if it wasn't related to this monster.
[30:17] Whenever Swan Go made the coffee or turned up with doughnuts or
[30:20] pop, people got violently sick with nausea and dizziness that
[30:25] no shared meal could explain. That September, several
[30:30] paramedics were left retching for days following a box of
[30:33] tainted Donuts he'd brought in. His Co workers decided to do
[30:38] something the doctors at Ohio State never did, and they ran
[30:41] their own successful sting. They left him alone with a
[30:45] pitcher of iced tea, then had the tea tested and the
[30:49] laboratory found arsenic in it. When police searched his
[30:53] belongings in October 1984, they turned up arsenic based Ant
[30:58] poison syringes, assorted chemicals and handwritten notes
[31:03] about poisons. Swango insisted the whole thing
[31:07] was a misunderstanding, claiming an innocent fascination with
[31:11] chemistry. He waived his right to a jury,
[31:14] and after a 2 week bench trial in the spring of 1985, Judge
[31:18] Dennis Cashman convicted him of aggravated battery for poisoning
[31:22] his Co workers That August. Cashman handed him five years,
[31:28] remarking in substance that it was obvious this man couldn't be
[31:31] trusted around anyone, anywhere. Illinois detectives alerted
[31:36] Columbus, and the Franklin County Prosecutor's Office took
[31:40] a fresh look at the Ohio State deaths.
[31:43] Unfortunately, though, with the trail cold and the hospital's
[31:46] records thin, no charges ever came.
[31:49] Swango served roughly 2 years and walked out of prison in
[31:53] August 1987, a convicted poisoner with a medical degree
[31:58] and every intention of using it. Illinois and Ohio revoked his
[32:02] medical licenses, but a revoked license only matters if the next
[32:07] employer isn't fooled by fabricated documents.
[32:11] For the time being, though, it appeared that Doctor Swango's
[32:14] reign of terror was over. He resurfaced in Newport News,
[32:19] VA, where he found work first as a career counselor and later as
[32:24] a laboratory technician at the lab.
[32:28] Co workers reportedly began suffering bouts of unexplained
[32:31] illness, though nothing was ever proven.
[32:35] It was in this period that he met Kristen Kinney, a bright,
[32:39] well liked nurse, and the two got engaged to get back into
[32:43] medicine. Swango essentially rebuilt
[32:46] himself out of forged papers, something that wouldn't be
[32:49] possible today. He produced a forged fact sheet
[32:53] recasting his felony as a conviction over a fistfight,
[32:58] along with a fabricated document suggesting his record had been
[33:01] cleared. He mailed applications to
[33:04] residency programs across the country seeking to re establish
[33:08] himself as a physician. The system he was gaming had no
[33:12] central registry that would have flagged him, and most programs
[33:16] simply took an applicant's paperwork at face value.
[33:20] In 1992, the internal medicine program at the University of
[33:24] South Dakota in Sioux Falls took him.
[33:28] The Dean heard Swango's story about a youthful bar room brawl
[33:32] directly from the man himself, found his supposed honesty
[33:36] disarming, and decided he deserved a second chance.
[33:40] For several months, it actually worked, and supervisors found
[33:44] him capable and hard working. Kinney moved out to Sioux Falls
[33:48] to be with him, taking a nursing job of her own.
[33:51] But soon she began suffering crushing migraines unlike
[33:55] anything she'd known before. Then Swango pushed his luck by
[33:59] applying for membership in the American Medical Association,
[34:03] whose background check was more thorough than anyone else.
[34:07] It was there the Illinois poisoning conviction was
[34:10] discovered around the same time a television program aired a
[34:14] segment on his case, and colleagues recognized him before
[34:20] 1992 was out. So was he, and Kenny went home
[34:24] to Virginia and her migraines faded away once she was out of
[34:28] the apartment she'd shared with him.
[34:31] In July 1993, she was found deceased, and investigators
[34:36] ruled that she'd pulled the curtains on herself.
[34:39] Years later, Examiner's reportedly found elevated levels
[34:43] of arsenic and samples of her hair, and her mother has spent
[34:46] the years since asking what was happening to her daughter in
[34:49] Sioux Falls. Nobody has ever been charged in
[34:53] connection with her passing, and the official ruling stands.
[34:57] But it's suspected Swango may have been involved.
[35:01] Here's the part that's hard to believe, because while the South
[35:03] Dakota scandal was still warm, Swango applied to a psychiatric
[35:08] residency. This time it was at the State
[35:11] University of New York at Stony Brook and he told the same bar
[35:15] room brawl story and was believed again.
[35:19] In June 1993, he started his first rotation practicing
[35:24] internal medicine at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center
[35:27] in Northport on Long Island, with full access to patients and
[35:31] medications. The men on that ward had
[35:34] survived the worst and had given everything for their country,
[35:38] but they didn't survive their doctor.
[35:41] Over the following months, 3 veterans in his care, George
[35:45] Siano, Thomas Samarco and Aldo Serrini, passed away under his
[35:50] care. Federal prosecutors later
[35:53] established that this was due to injections of toxic substances.
[35:58] 1/4 patient Baron Harris was injected and slipped into a coma
[36:03] from which he never recovered. Families were told their fathers
[36:07] and husbands had simply declined, the kind of thing that
[36:11] happens on a ward full of elderly veterans, and the deaths
[36:15] drew no particular attention at the time.
[36:19] Some relatives would later recall details that hadn't sat
[36:22] right. But in 1993, there was no reason
[36:25] for anyone to imagine the resident was the danger.
[36:29] In October 1993, the Dean out in South Dakota learned where
[36:34] Swango had landed and picked up the phone.
[36:38] Stony Brook dismissed him within days, and the fallout cost both
[36:42] the program head who'd vouched for him and the medical school's
[36:46] Dean their positions. This time, the warning finally
[36:51] went wide. Before stepping down Stony
[36:54] Brooks Dean sent an alert about Swango to every medical school
[36:58] in the country and roughly 1000 teaching hospitals.
[37:03] American medicine was at last close to him, and a federal
[37:08] investigation into how he'd lied his way into a government
[37:11] hospital began grinding forward. That investigation would
[37:16] eventually take him down, but not before he could claim more
[37:19] victims. Swango spent 1994 working as a
[37:25] chemist at a wastewater facility in Atlanta until the FBI tracked
[37:29] him down and his employer learned exactly who it had
[37:32] hired. So in November 1994, he boarded
[37:36] a plane for Zimbabwe, and I'll let you take one guess what he
[37:40] was doing there. He arrived in Africa with forged
[37:44] credentials and a clean story, and the Evangelical Lutheran
[37:48] Church hired him to practice at Many Mission Hospital.
[37:52] This was a remote facility in Zimbabwe's Meberengwa district.
[37:56] Hours of rough Rd. from the nearest city of any size to an
[38:00] understaffed rural hospital. An American trained Dr. willing
[38:04] to work in the middle of nowhere for almost no money looked like
[38:08] a gift from heaven. The warning system that had
[38:12] finally locked him out of American medicine didn't reach
[38:14] across the Atlantic. The staff gave him
[38:17] responsibility and the patients gave him their full trust.
[38:22] But within months the same shadow fell.
[38:26] Stable patients began deteriorating overnight, and
[38:29] post operative cases who should have gone home were found
[38:33] comatose or gone by morning. This time, though, there were
[38:37] survivors willing to speak plainly.
[38:40] A patient named Canaeus Mezuzawa woke to find Swango injecting
[38:44] something into his arm and managed a single scream before
[38:48] paralysis took hold. Staff revived him, and he lived
[38:52] to accuse the doctor directly, saying that Swango had been the
[38:56] one who had done it. Another man, recovering from a
[39:00] routine leg operation, cried out to staff that the doctor had
[39:04] injected him with a bizarre substance, and he was gone
[39:07] within hours. A young woman hospitalized while
[39:13] in labor survived an injection only because her screams brought
[39:17] nurses running to her rescue. The mission doctors acted
[39:21] relatively quickly, and the supposedly clean American doctor
[39:25] was suspended in 1995, reported to police and formally accused
[39:31] of poisoning patients in the surrounding villages.
[39:34] His name became something close to a curse, the Doctor Who
[39:38] wasn't there to heal but to harm.
[39:42] He hired a lawyer and protested his innocence, but as the case
[39:46] moved toward a hearing in 1996, he slipped across the border
[39:50] into Zambia and made his way on to Namibia.
[39:54] There he took advantage of the lack of cross-border
[39:57] communication, and he found temporary medical work.
[40:01] He realized quickly, though, that Namibia could only be a
[40:04] stopover, that he needed to get out of southern Africa as soon
[40:08] as possible to avoid the law. He got to work doing what he did
[40:13] best, reinventing himself, and he began applying to hospitals
[40:17] as far away as possible. In March 1997, using a resume
[40:23] scrubbed of everything sinister, he applied for a position at a
[40:27] hospital in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, and got it.
[40:31] Thankfully, though, this time he would never get access to any
[40:34] patients. The Saudi job came with one
[40:37] catch. He had to pass back through the
[40:40] United States to sort out his visa, and his route ran through
[40:44] Chicago. I have to imagine the sort of
[40:47] hubris that he had to believe he could return home to America
[40:51] without issue. He must have thought he was
[40:54] absolutely untouchable, despite the fact that he quite clearly
[40:58] wasn't. American investigators who'd
[41:01] spent three years building a federal fraud case over the lies
[41:05] he told to get inside the Northport VA knew he was coming
[41:10] on June 27th, 1997. They took him at O'Hare without
[41:14] incident in relation to the forged paperwork and didn't give
[41:18] him any real indication what they were actually looking at
[41:21] him for. Swango pleaded guilty to fraud
[41:24] in 1998 and drew a sentence of 3 1/2 years, which handed
[41:28] prosecutors a deadline rather than a victory.
[41:32] The fraud conviction punished the lying, not the dying, and
[41:36] his release date was set for July 2000 with every reason to
[41:40] believe he'd vanish abroad the moment he walked free.
[41:44] So the FBI, federal prosecutors and Veterans Affairs
[41:48] investigators raced the calendar.
[41:51] The remains of the Northport patients were exhumed, and
[41:54] tissue analysis revealed toxins that had no business being
[41:58] there. American investigators traveled
[42:01] to Zimbabwe as well, where exhumed remains from the many
[42:04] area reportedly showed traces of poison.
[42:08] And then there were his own words.
[42:10] Investigators also held notebooks in which Swango had
[42:14] written about his compulsions in terms prosecutors would later
[42:18] read into the court record. He described the rush these
[42:22] episodes gave him and wrote in substance that they were the
[42:25] only reminder he had that he was truly alive.
[42:31] In July 2000, days before he was due to walk free, federal
[42:35] prosecutors charged him with the deaths of Siano, Samarco and
[42:39] Sereni and the poisoning of Baron Harris.
[42:43] He was also hit with an even larger stack of fraud counts
[42:47] just to make sure that something stuck.
[42:48] On the off chance that they couldn't convict on the big
[42:51] charges, he faced a possible trip to the chair.
[42:55] And Zimbabwe wanted him for trial as well, for the sick acts
[42:59] he had pulled in that country. On September 6th, 2000, in a
[43:04] federal courtroom in Uniondale, NY, Swango took a deal that
[43:08] spared his life. He admitted point by point that
[43:12] he'd poisoned the three Northport veterans and that back
[43:15] in January 1984, he'd ended the life of Cynthia McGee.
[43:20] By way of reminder, that was the 19 year old gymnast whose
[43:25] passing had been blamed on a teenage driver.
[43:28] Judge Jacob Mishler sentenced him to three consecutive life
[43:32] terms without the possibility of parole.
[43:35] Relatives of the Northport veterans watched from the
[43:38] gallery as the man who'd been their father's doctor was
[43:41] finally named for what he was. Swango was sent to ADX Florence,
[43:46] the federal supermax in Colorado, where he remains
[43:50] today. Investigators ultimately
[43:52] concluded that the four deaths he admitted to were a fraction
[43:56] of the real toll. They provided estimates running
[43:59] from 35 victims to as many as sixty across Ohio, Illinois, New
[44:05] York and Zimbabwe. That's a figure that would place
[44:09] him among the most prolific serial predators America has
[44:12] ever produced. As part of the deal that spared
[44:15] his life, he never faced trial for what happened in Zimbabwe,
[44:20] and so the true number was never settled in any courtroom.
[44:24] The only man who knows it is sitting in a concrete cell in
[44:27] Colorado, and he's never volunteered it.
[44:30] And most likely, he never will. By the summer of 1998, a taxi
[44:39] driver in the English town of Hyde had quietly counted 21
[44:43] names onto a private list, and the list kept growing.
[44:47] His regulars were mostly older women who lived alone, the kind
[44:51] of customers who booked him for shopping runs and hospital
[44:54] appointments and chatted the whole way there.
[44:57] One by one, they'd stopped calling.
[45:00] They were found in the afternoons, fully dressed,
[45:03] sitting upright in their armchairs as though they'd
[45:06] nodded off mid conversation. John Shaw couldn't prove
[45:10] anything, and for a long time he didn't dare say what he was
[45:14] thinking out loud. He'd simply noticed something
[45:17] nobody else seemed willing to see.
[45:19] Every name on his list had the same family doctor.
[45:23] Harold Frederick Shipman was born in Nottingham on January
[45:26] 14th, 1946, the middle child of a truck driver and a housewife
[45:31] in a working class era. His mother, Vera doted on him
[45:36] and by most accounts, she decided early on that Harold was
[45:39] the one of her three children destined for something better.
[45:43] Then, when he was 17, Harold's beloved mother was diagnosed
[45:47] with lung cancer and there wasn't much the doctors could do
[45:51] to actually cure her. Through the spring of 1963, the
[45:57] teenage Shipman watched a family doctor call at the house and
[46:00] administer morphine to ease her pain.
[46:04] He watched the relief settle over her each time a dosage was
[46:07] administered. She passed on June 21st, 1963 at
[46:13] the age of 43. And that night, the story goes,
[46:19] her son ran through the rain for hours.
[46:22] It's a detail that gets repeated in nearly every account of his
[46:25] life, and for good reason. The scene at his mother's
[46:29] bedside, A trusted physician arriving at the home of a dying
[46:33] woman, would become the precise template of his crimes.
[46:39] Whether it explains anything is another matter.
[46:41] And 1 He never helped anyone answer.
[46:45] Shipman won a place at Leeds University Medical School, where
[46:49] he met Primrose Octoby, a window dresser's assistant he
[46:52] reportedly got to know on the bus into the city.
[46:56] They married in November 1966 and she was soon pregnant with
[47:00] the first of their four children.
[47:03] He graduated in 1970, trained at Pontefract General Infirmary in
[47:07] West Yorkshire, and by 1974 had joined a general practice in
[47:12] Todd Morden. He was 28, energetic and by his
[47:17] colleagues accounts, unusually confident for what they call a
[47:20] junior doctor on the other side of the pond, Shipman seemed to
[47:25] have an extremely bright future ahead of him and his patients
[47:28] liked him immediately. Unfortunately, though, this
[47:32] honeymoon period would be short lived and Doctor Shipman's dark
[47:36] side would emerge. Within about a year of arriving,
[47:41] Shipman began suffering blackouts, and he told his
[47:44] colleagues it was epilepsy. The truth emerged in 1975, when
[47:50] staff at the practice noticed irregularities in the
[47:53] prescriptions. Shipman had been writing
[47:56] prescriptions for pathidine, A synthetic opioid, in the names
[48:00] of his own patients, then intercepting the drugs and
[48:03] administering them to himself. Patients on his list had
[48:07] unknowingly served as paper cover for a doctor's bad habit.
[48:12] In retrospect, this may have been around the same time he
[48:15] started his most nefarious acts, but more on that shortly.
[48:21] When the partners confronted him, he reportedly begged for a
[48:25] second chance, and when they refused, he flew into a rage and
[48:30] dared them to force him out, which they did.
[48:34] He spent the closing months of 1975 being treated at The
[48:38] Retreat, a psychiatric hospital in York, and was discharged with
[48:43] advice to remain under supervision.
[48:46] In 1976, he was convicted of forgery and drug offenses and
[48:51] fined £600 in relation to his crimes.
[48:54] And here's the part that might sound somewhat bizarre.
[48:58] Despite the severity of the offenses, his medical license
[49:01] was never revoked. It wasn't even temporarily
[49:05] suspended with the ability to reinstate it once he
[49:08] successfully completed treatment and entered an ongoing program.
[49:13] He received a warning letter and no formal restrictions were ever
[49:17] placed on his right to practice medicine.
[49:20] A doctor with a criminal conviction for forging
[49:23] prescriptions, an addiction, and a demonstrated willingness to
[49:27] use his own patients names was free to do it again.
[49:32] Within two years, that's exactly what he did.
[49:35] And this time it seemed that he may have actually been on the
[49:38] straight and narrow. Or at least he'd gotten better
[49:42] at hiding what he was doing. In 1977, Shipman joined the
[49:48] Donnybrook medical Office in Hyde, a former cotton town on
[49:52] the eastern edge of Greater Manchester.
[49:55] He stayed for 15 years and built a reputation as one of the most
[49:59] dedicated family physicians in the area.
[50:03] Shipman then left in 1992 to open a solo practice, taking a
[50:07] crowd of loyal patients with him.
[50:10] By the late 90s, his list ran to more than 3000 names, and his
[50:16] patients just called him Fred, which was his middle name.
[50:21] He made home visits without being asked, remembered
[50:24] birthdays and took time with elderly patients that other
[50:28] doctors couldn't spare. In Hyde, getting on to Doctor
[50:32] Shipman's patient list was considered a stroke of good
[50:35] luck, at least until his true nature was exposed.
[50:41] The method, pieced together later in a courtroom and a
[50:43] public inquiry, was remarkably consistent.
[50:47] He'd call on an elderly patient at home, usually in the early
[50:51] afternoon and often unannounced, on the pretext of a routine
[50:55] check or a blood test. At some point during the visit,
[50:59] he'd inject A lethal dose of diamorphine, which is medical
[51:03] grade heroin, and his patient would simply drift away in her
[51:06] chair. He kept himself supplied by
[51:09] prescribing the drug to terminally ill patients who
[51:12] didn't need that much of it, or by collecting leftover stock
[51:16] after a death. Afterward, he'd certify the
[51:19] death himself, typically attributing it to old age, a
[51:23] stroke, or coronary thrombosis. He'd assured the family that
[51:28] nothing could have been done, gently steered them away from
[51:32] requesting a post mortem, and often suggest cremation.
[51:37] Shipman would even tell the families that the deceased had
[51:39] mentioned that they didn't want an autopsy and that they
[51:42] preferred A cremation. Sometimes it was true, but often
[51:47] times it was just a means to destroy the evidence of his
[51:50] crimes. Since he was such a well
[51:53] respected and beloved figure, the families generally just took
[51:57] what he said at face value. Then he'd return to his office
[52:01] and alter the patient's records, inserting fictitious symptoms
[52:05] and consultations to build a medical history that made the
[52:09] death look expected. He had devious little
[52:12] workarounds for awkward moments with the families designed to
[52:16] let him slip through the net. In several cases described at
[52:20] his trial, he told relatives who arrived to find their mother
[52:24] gone that he'd already called an ambulance.
[52:27] He told them that he then cancelled it when it became
[52:30] clear nothing could be done. The ambulance services had no
[52:33] record of any such calls, but, as usual, nothing much was done.
[52:39] When a death needed a witness, he sometimes timed his lethal
[52:43] visits so that he could be the one to discover the body, or
[52:47] arranged to be present when someone else did.
[52:51] A later statistical audit, commissioned after his
[52:53] conviction, found that Shipman was recorded as present at or
[52:57] shortly before the deaths of his patients, at a rate more similar
[53:02] to a Hospice Dr. than a family physician.
[53:06] Unfortunately, though, nobody ran those numbers while it was
[53:10] happening, because nothing about any of it looked like crime at
[53:13] first glance. The system relies on family
[53:17] doctors to flag suspicious deaths of this nature, and in
[53:21] hide, the person doing the flagging was the one responsible
[53:24] for them. For somewhere between 2:00 and
[53:27] 3:00 decades, that single fact, as well as his charisma and good
[53:32] reputation, was the whole of his protection.
[53:36] By early 1998, people at the edges of the process had started
[53:41] to notice. At Frank Massey and Son, a local
[53:45] funeral parlor, Deborah Massey and her colleagues observed that
[53:49] they were burying or cremating A striking number of Doctor
[53:52] Shipman's patients. Across the road from his office,
[53:56] another Doctor, Reynolds, noticed how often Shipman was
[54:00] asking her practice to countersign his cremation forms.
[54:04] This was a safeguard that requires a second independent
[54:07] doctor. She did some rough arithmetic
[54:10] and found his numbers impossible to explain.
[54:13] Her own practice had several doctors and roughly 3 times as
[54:16] many patients, yet Shipman, working alone, was certifying
[54:21] deaths at about the same absolute rate.
[54:24] In March 1998, she took her concerns to the local coroner,
[54:29] John Pollard, who referred the matter to Greater Manchester
[54:32] Police. What followed is one of the most
[54:35] criticized police investigations in modern British history.
[54:40] The inquiry was conducted quietly by a single Detective
[54:43] Inspector over a few weeks. Reynolds calculations were never
[54:48] properly followed up on, and the medical records in question were
[54:52] never meaningfully examined. Nobody ran the routine check
[54:56] that would have surfaced Shipman's 1976 conviction for
[55:00] forging prescriptions to obtain opioids.
[55:04] In April, the matter was closed for lack of evidence, and the
[55:07] Shipman inquiry's second report later concluded that the
[55:11] investigation had been superficial at best.
[55:14] The cost of that failure can be counted precisely between the
[55:18] file closing and his arrest. Three more women passed at his
[55:22] hands. But then, just like that, he
[55:26] decided to pull his most audacious crime yet.
[55:30] And this time, he was caught. Kathleen Grundy was about the
[55:35] closest thing Hyde had to a legitimate local celebrity.
[55:39] She'd served as mayor, ran charity lunches, kept her own
[55:44] cottage, and was described by nearly everyone as fitter than
[55:47] people 20 years younger. On the morning of June 24th,
[55:52] Shipman called at her home, ostensibly to take a blood
[55:56] sample for a study on aging. A few hours later, friends found
[56:01] her on the sofa, fully dressed. Shipman recorded the cause of
[56:05] death as old age and then a will turned up.
[56:09] And this is where Shipman really hit the fan.
[56:13] A firm called Hamilton Ward had received a clumsily typed
[56:16] document supposedly from Misses Grundy.
[56:20] In it, she left her entire estate of £386,000 to her
[56:26] doctor, Harold Shipman, and nothing whatsoever to her
[56:30] family. The will dated June 9th arrived
[56:34] at the firm on the very day she passed, and six days later came
[56:38] a second type letter letting the lawyers know their new client
[56:41] was gone. Her daughter, Angela Woodruff,
[56:45] happened to be a lawyer herself and her own firm had always
[56:48] handled her mother's affairs. One look at the document told
[56:52] her everything. The typing was sloppy, the
[56:56] wording was strange, and the signature didn't match.
[57:01] Her mother had been meticulous her entire life, and this thing
[57:05] was anything but. And Woodruff started making
[57:07] inquiries of her own, then went to the police.
[57:11] This time, the investigation landed with Detective
[57:14] Superintendent Bernard Postals, who grasped almost immediately
[57:18] what he might be looking at. On August 1st, 1998, Kathleen
[57:24] Grundy's body was exhumed from the cemetery at Hyde Chapel.
[57:28] The first exhumation of what would become 12 tissue samples
[57:33] revealed morphine at lethal levels, administered within
[57:36] hours of her death in a woman with no prescription for it.
[57:41] A brother typewriter recovered from Shipman's office matched
[57:44] the forged will, and his explanation that Misses Grundy
[57:48] used to borrow it from him convinced nobody his fingerprint
[57:53] was on the document, and his computer almost instantly
[57:56] betrayed him. The system kept an audit trail
[57:59] he apparently didn't know about, and it showed him creating
[58:02] backdated entries that painted Grundy as a morphine addict.
[58:07] Some of them were typed within hours of her passing, indicating
[58:11] what would later be known as a much wider pattern.
[58:14] He was arrested on September 7th, 1998, and once detectives
[58:19] started counting, things looked grim.
[58:23] Police reviewed dozens of recent deaths among Shipments patients,
[58:27] exhumed further bodies and eventually settled on the 15
[58:31] strongest cases. All of them were women, all had
[58:35] died between 1995 and 1998, and every death certificate carried
[58:41] his signature. The trial opened at Preston
[58:45] Crown Court on October 5th, 1999, with Shipman facing 15
[58:50] counts related to the deaths and one for forging the will.
[58:54] The prosecution laid out the morphine findings from the
[58:57] exhumations, the falsified computer records with their time
[59:01] stamped audit trail, and the forged will.
[59:05] His defense did what it could, attacking the toxicology by
[59:09] arguing that morphine readings from long buried tissue couldn't
[59:12] be trusted. They also reminded the jury that
[59:15] not a single witness had ever seen him administer anything to
[59:18] anyone. Shipman himself spent days in
[59:22] the witness box by turns condescending and evasive,
[59:26] correcting lawyers on medical terminology while explaining
[59:30] none of the evidence against him.
[59:33] He wouldn't even admit to falsifying the records, despite
[59:36] the fact that the computerized audit trail clearly showed that
[59:40] he had done so. In the end, he gave oral
[59:44] testimony for a total of 12 days and ended up alienating most of
[59:48] those who believed he was a kind family physician.
[59:52] That said, through all of it, a portion of Hyde simply refused
[59:56] to believe the charges, and some of his patients reportedly went
[1:00:00] on defending him right up to the verdict.
[1:00:03] The jury deliberated for six days, and on January 31st, 2000,
[1:00:09] they convicted him on every count.
[1:00:11] The judge imposed 15 life sentences and, perhaps
[1:00:15] unsurprisingly, recommended that he never be released.
[1:00:20] After the conviction, the question became how many people
[1:00:23] had actually perished at the hands of Doctor Shipman.
[1:00:27] The government appointed a High Court judge to chair a public
[1:00:30] inquiry and her team spent years combing through the deaths of
[1:00:34] Shipman's patients going back to the 1970's.
[1:00:38] The first report, published in July 2002, concluded that
[1:00:42] Shipman had slain at least 215 of his patients between 1975 and
[1:00:47] 1998. However, there was some
[1:00:51] difficulty ascertaining when exactly he began his crime
[1:00:54] spree, though it appeared clear that he had started slow and
[1:00:58] become more bold over the years. Roughly 4 out of five victims
[1:01:02] were women and the oldest was 93, while the youngest confirmed
[1:01:07] victim was a man of 41. A later report from the inquiry
[1:01:12] looking at his early hospital years in Pontefract pushed the
[1:01:15] plausible total to around 250. That figure makes him, by some
[1:01:21] counts, the most prolific predator in recorded history.
[1:01:26] And unlike nearly every other name on that grim Ledger, he did
[1:01:30] it in plain sight, in a respectable profession over 1/4
[1:01:35] of a century. While his community thanked him
[1:01:38] for it, he never explained himself to anyone.
[1:01:42] And on the morning of January 13th, 2004, the day before his
[1:01:47] 58th birthday, Harold Shipman was found hanging in his cell.
[1:01:52] He left no note expressing remorse to the families of his
[1:01:55] victims and no answer to the question of why he did it.

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