Sentencing, Execution
Petiot was imprisoned in La Sante Prison. He claimed that he was not guilty and that he had only killed enemies of France. He said that he had discovered the pile of bodies in February of 1944, but had assumed that they were associates killed by members of his Resistance network. The police, however, found that Petiot had no friends in any of the key Resistance groups. Some of the Resistance groups he spoke of had never existed, and there was no verification for any of his claimed exploits. Prosecutors finally charged him with at least twenty-seven murders for profit. Their approximation of his ill-gotten gains was in excess of two hundred million Francs.
On March 19, 1946, Petiot went on trial facing one hundred and thirty-five criminal charges. Rene Floriot acted for the defense against a panel consisting of state prosecutors and twelve civil lawyers hired by relatives of Petiot's victims. Petiot ridiculed the prosecuting lawyers, claiming that the assorted victims had all been collaborators or double agents, or that the vanished were living in South America under new names. He did finally admit to killing nineteen of the twenty-seven victims found in his house, claiming that they were Germans and collaborators, part of a total of sixty-three – what he called ‘enemy kills.’ His lawyer attempted to depict Petiot as a Resistance champion, but the judges and jurors were unimpressed. Petiot was convicted of twenty-six counts of murder and sentenced to death.
Petiot was beheaded on May 25, 1946, after waiting a few days due to a problem in the release device of the guillotine.
Dr. Harold Frederick Shipman
Born: January 14, 1946
Place: Nottingham, England
Killing Span: 1975–1998
Number of Killings: 218
Captured: September, 1998
Background
Harold Frederick Shipman is a former doctor and a British Serial Killer. He is responsible for the deaths of 218 innocent patients.
Born in Nottingham, England, Shipman was the second of four children born to Harold and Vera Shipman. His working class parents were dedicated Methodists and Harold was very close to his mother who died of cancer when he was just seventeen. In the later stages of her disease, she had morphine administered at home by a doctor on June 21, 1963.
Shipman was a bright student in school and he received a scholarship to attend Leeds School of Medicine, from which he graduated in 1970. After university, he started work at Pontefract General Infirmary in Pontefract, West Riding of Yorkshire, and in 1974, took his first position as a General Practitioner at the Abraham Ormerod Medical Centre in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. In 1975, he was caught forging prescriptions of Pethidine for his own personal use. He was fined ?600, and temporarily attended a drug rehabilitation clinic in York. After a short stint as Medical Officer for Hatfield College, Durham, while doing temporary work for the National Coal Board, he became a General Practitioner 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 practice on Market Street in 1993, becoming a beloved member of the community.
Investigation
In March, 1998, Dr. Linda Reynolds of Brooke Surgery, in Hyde, encouraged by Deborah Massey from Frank Massey and Son's Funeral Parlor, expressed concerns to John Pollard, the Coroner for the South Manchester District, about the high death rate among Shipman's patients. In particular, she was troubled by the huge number of cremation forms for elderly women that he needed countersigned. The issue was brought to the attention of the police. The police, however, proved incapable of finding sufficient evidence to bring charges. The Shipman Inquiry afterward would blame the police for assigning inexperienced officers to the case. However, between April 17, 1998, when the police discarded the investigation, and Shipman's ultimate arrest, he killed an additional three more people. His last victim was Kathleen Grundy, a former Mayor of Hyde, who was found dead at her home on June 24, 1998. Shipman was the last person to see her alive, and later signed her death certificate, recording ‘old age’ as cause of death.
Kathleen Grundy's daughter, Angela Woodruff, a lawyer, became concerned when Solicitor Brian Burgess informed her that a will had been produced, apparently by her mother, but that there were doubts about its authenticity. The will expelled Woodruff and her children, but left ?386,000 to Dr. Shipman. Burgess told Woodruff to report it and went to the police, who then commenced an investigation. Grundy's body was exhumed, and when examined, found to contain traces of Diamorphine, also known as heroin, which is often used for controlling pain in terminal cancer patients. Shipman was arrested on September 7, 1998, and was found to own a typewriter of the variety used to make the forged will.
The police then investigated other deaths Shipman had certified, and produced a list of fifteen sampling cases to investigate. They discovered a deadly pattern. Shipman would administer lethal overdoses of Diamorphine, sign patients' death certificates, and then forge medical records indicating that the patients had been in poor health.
Trial, Sentencing
On October 5, 1999, Shipman's trial began. He was charged with the murders of Marie West, Ivy Lomas, Irene Turner, Lizzie Adams, Muriel Grimshaw, Jean Lilley, Marie Quinn, Bianka Pomfret, Kathleen Wagstaff, Norah Nuttall, Pamela Hillier, Maureen Ward, Joan Melia Winifred Mellor, and Kathleen Grundy, all of whom had died between 1995 and 1998. After six days of deliberation, the jury found Shipman guilty of killing all fifteen of his patients by lethal injections of Diamorphine, and of forging the will of Kathleen Grundy. The trial judge sentenced him to fifteen successive life sentences and recommended that he never be released. Shipman also received four years for forging the will.
Shipman consistently denied his guilt, disputing the scientific facts against him. His defense tried and failed to have the count of murder of Mrs. Grundy, where a clear intention was alleged, tried separately from the others, where no noticeable motive was apparent. His wife, Primrose, denied his crimes as well. Although countless other cases could have been brought to court, the authorities concluded it would be hard to have a fair trial in view of the massive publicity surrounding the original trial. In addition, given the sentences from the first trial, an added trial was unnecessary. The Shipman Inquiry concluded that Shipman was probability responsible for about 218 deaths.
Shipman is the only doctor in British history to be found guilty of killing his patients.
According to historian Pamela Cullen, Dr. Adams had also been a serial killer, potentially killing up to 165 of
