Paperback: He was a pillar of the community, serving on local committees, donating prizes to the rugby club, organising charity collections. His patients thought the world of him: he was attentive, kind, never too busy to chat.
Yet Dr Harold Frederick Shipman was also the most prolific serial killer the world has ever known, with between 200 and 300 victims. Quietly, for many years, the small, bespectacled GP was making unexpected house calls - and walking out leaving a dead body behind.
They were near-perfect crimes. The middle-aged and elderly women he tarted trusted their doctor: they willingly rolled up their sleeves for what proved to be a fatal jab of morphine from his syringe. The murderous career of Dr Shipman only came to an end when police in Hyde, Greater Manchester, were called to investigate a forged will. Overnight, they found themselves embroiled in the biggest murder case in British history.
This is the story of Fred Shipman, a mass murderer whose motives will puzzle psychiatrists and psychologists for generations to come, and whose tally of victims will never be fully known.
Prescription for Murder (2000) is a compelling account of these monstrous crimes and of the man who committed them, examining Shipman's early life and the traumatic death of his mother, his home life with his wife and children, and his public front as a caring family doctor.
The authors have had unparalleled access to friends, colleagues and patients. Their in-depth and authoritative investigation looks at how he killed, how he was able to get away with it for so long and - most important of all - why he did it.
About the authors: Brian Whittle has been a superb feature writer and a tabloid and investigative reporter on national newspapers for more than thirty years. He was the editor and proprietor of Cavendish Press, the leading news-gathering agency in the north-west. Pictures taken by Cavendish Press of the first macabre exhumation by floodlight of one of Shipman's victims made the front pages of newspapers around the world. Brian Whittle's intimate knowledge of Hyde, the Greater Manchester area and the police investigation of Dr Harold Shipman make him ideally qualified to tell the story of the sinister GP. He saw very early on that the case was not only a huge human tragedy, but also that there were great political implications in how Shipman had got away with his murders for so long. By devoting hundreds of hours to investigating the serial killer's activities in Hyde, Brian became an expert on the subject, interviewed by the world's media. Sadly, in 2005, The Manchester journalist Brian Whittle collapsed and died, aged 59.
Jean Ritchie is also an investigative journalist with more than thirty years' experience working for national newspapers and magazines. She is the author of twenty-one successful books (from ghosted autobiographies to investigative non-fiction), including the bestselling Myra Hindley: Inside the Mind of a Murderess. Her other titles include Stalkers, the first full account of the stalking phenomenon, and The Secret World of Cults, an investigation into dangerous cults and religious sects. She joined Fleet Street as a reporter for the Daily Mail, moving to the Sun as a features writer, where she covered showbusiness, politics, human life and investigations. She has ghost written on a number of major titles including Wherever You Are: The Military Wives and The Yorkshire Shepardess.
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