A FORMER nurse has revealed how she is haunted by the night she worked with serial killer Dr Harold Shipman – after realising she might have been able to halt his killing spree.
When aged 18, Sandra Whitehead worked with the medic – reckoned to have killed up to 265 patients – at Pontefract General Infirmary where he was a junior doctor.
Now, in her first TV interview for Harold Shipman: Doctor Death, Sandra says she had suspicions about the GP 26 years before he was finally caught. She says: “I can remember these DOCTOR DEATH Dr Harold Shipman
THE seemingly genial family GP was unmasked as a serial killer in 1998 after suspicions were raised about the death of one of his patients, Kathleen Grundy in Hyde, near Manchester. The 81-year-old had seemingly left Shipman her entire estate in her will but police found his fingerprints on it and linked it to his typewriter. And when they exhumed Kathleen’s body they found she had been given a lethal dose of diamorphine. Detectives uncovered a string of other similar deaths linked to Shipman, a former drug addict. In 2000 the father-of-four was convicted of 15 murders but committed suicide in 2004, aged 57, while serving a life sentence in Wakefield prison. An inquiry found that Shipman may have had 265 victims, making him Britain’s worst serial killer. BODY IN THE CELLAR
Dr Crippen
WHEN Cora, the wife of Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, went missing in 1910 he claimed that the music hall singer had left him.
Her friends had become suspicious after seeing his new lover Ethel Le Neve wearing her jewellery. When he and Le Neve suddenly fled the country, police searched Crippen’s London home and found Cora’s dismembered human torso in the basement. Crippen, 48, was caught disembarking from a ship in Canada and hanged for her murder. injection packs he would leave many a time on the bedside locker.
“One night we had three deaths, there just didn’t seem any reason. ” But Sandra didn’t report her concerns, admitting: “I was just too young or too naïve to maybe say: ‘I’m not happy about this!’”
The ITV documentary, to mark 20 years ANGEL OF DEATH Beverley Allitt
WHEN an unusually large number of children began dying at the Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, Lincs, in 1991 it appeared that there was a killer on the wards.
Many of the youngsters had died unexpectedly from heart problems and it emerged that they had been murdered, mostly with high doses of insulin. A police investigation identified that the deaths had one thing in common – nurse Beverley Allitt, 23, had been on duty.
In 1993, she was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing four children and attempting to murder many others. Allitt is currently being held at a high security psychiatric hospital.
THE ‘MERCY’ KILLER Charles Cullen
THE American confessed to killing
40 patients during his 16-year nursing career at nine different hospitals, but is suspected of murdering scores more. In fact, police think he may have been responsible for murdering as many as 400 patients!
When Cullen was finally caught in
2003 he claimed that he had given victims overdoses to ease their suffering but many were not dying.
His horror history only came to light when priest Florian Gall died unexpectedly and the hospital discovered high levels of the heart drug digoxin in his blood. The death was linked to Cullen. In 2006 he was handed six life sentences and, aged 58, is still behind bars.
THE DEVIL NURSE Victorina Chua
WHILE working in Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport in 2011 the Filipinoborn since Shipman’s arrest, has found how prison staff believed he was planning to continue murdering in jail after two inmates fell ill.
They overdosed on black market prescription drugs after seeing Shipman, who was said to be holding clinics inside prison.
Ray Rowett, who worked at Wakefield prison says: “We thought he could have had a hand in them going to intensive care.”
Shipman is not the only medical professional who has turned to murder. JAMES MOORE reveals the most shocking cases... father of two began poisoning patients by putting insulin into saline. Tracey Arden, 44, who had multiple sclerosis, was admitted for a “mild” chest infection but died at the hospital and Derek Weaver, 83, also perished.
Police found a letter in which Chua admitted being “an angel turned into an evil person”.
Described as a narcissistic psychopath who enjoyed watching people suffer, Chua was convicted of the Arden and Weaver murders in 2015 and found to have poisoned 20 others. The 49-year-old received 25 life sentences.
WILL TO MURDER
John Bodkin Adams
DRIVING around in a Rolls-Royce, Adams was one of Britain’s wealthiest GPs.
But, between 1946 and 1956, more than 160 of Dr John Bodkin Adams’s patients died in suspicious circumstances.
And 132 of those left their possessions to the GP from Eastbourne – including the posh car.
Finally, charged with the murder of
Edith Morrell in December 1956, he was sensationally acquitted at his trial the following year
But it is widely believed he murdered scores of them with injections of morphine and heroin and he was later convicted for forging prescriptions
Harold Shipman: Doctor Death is on ITV at 9pm tonight.