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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did and how. Episode 196.
We continue our sojourn into the life and crimes of the world's probably penultimate serial killer, if we count number of victims. Harold Shipman, the Doctor of Death. Last episode ended, as I sometimes do on this show, with the end of the road for Shipman. His final murder, and how it was discovered. Tonight we take a closer look at the man Shipman was.
More precisely, I will detail for you, dear listener, his childhood and youth. Enjoy.
As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club. Their names are...
Magic Man, Marilyn, Meow, Missy, Nick, Oakley, Anjay, Operation Brownie Pockets, Robert O., Robert R., Russell, Sabina, Skortnia, Scott, Sputnik, The Radio, Susanna, The Duggletons, Trent, Val, and Vanessa. You are the backbone of the Serial Killer podcast, and without you, there would be no show.
You have my deepest gratitude. Thank you. I am forever grateful for my elite TSK Producers Club, and I want to show you that your patronage is not given in vain. All TSK episodes will be available 100% ad-free to my TSK Producers Club on patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast.
No generic ads, no ad reads, no jingles. I promise. And of course, if you wish to donate $15 a month, that's only $7.50 per episode, you are more than welcome to join the ranks of the TSK Producers Club too. So don't miss out and join now. Imagine, if you will, the Alizena, the quiet streets of Nottingham.
It was the early hours of a wet Saturday morning. In many ways a working-class town, many of the working men at the time relaxed on the weekends by drinking at their local pub and bars. But even the most drunken of the late-night partying people had gone home or fallen asleep in some ditch. However, we see a short, somewhat burly youth, wearing shorts and a red singlet, running across a football field.
The pace of the boy is steady and determined. He does not seem to care about the rain at all, other than the fact that he is keeping his head low. He has muscled legs and seems used to running. Pain is apparent when we take a closer look at the boy's face. Pain, not from physical exertion, but from loss. The thoughts and memories he was struggling to suppress.
came from the most traumatic experience in his short life only hours earlier fred shipman had been at the bedside of his mother watching her die he was only seventeen and although for weeks and months he had known her death was inevitable even longed for it as she howled in unimaginable agony on her bed it was still awful to him
He had loved his mother. Sleep was impossible that night. His mother had achieved rest and peace, but he could not. The thought that he might never sleep again occurred to him. An accomplished athlete, happier on a sports field than anywhere else, he had thus put on his school P.E. kit and went out for a run.
He ran and ran through the night, arriving home long after dawn as the glistening streets began to come alive with newspaper and milk deliveries and shift workers, many of them terribly hungover, making their way to and from factories. Towards the end of her life, every day filled with agony and the looming fear of death, Vera Shipman sat at her windowsill.
The Shipmans lived in a brick council-house in Longmead Drive, Nottingham. There she sat, waiting for her son Fred to arrive home from school.
Fred, the middle of her three children, was the apple of her eye. He was the clever one, the one she had plans for, the one who was going to make it all worth it, the one to make all the scrimping and saving to send him to private school worth while.
Some dying people cling to the past, to old happy memories. For Vera, only 43 years old, her only motivation to keep going was the dream of Fred's future, a dream of his achievements, success, and wealth enough to put government housing project life behind him.
The shipments were no better or worse off financially than their neighbors on the Edwards Lane housing projects. Vera's husband, Harold, after whom their first son, Harold Frederick, was named, was a lorry driver. The boy was always known as Fred, to avoid confusion in the immediate family. Vera tolerated Freddy and Fred for her son.
The husband, also known in his childhood as Fred, had changed to Harold at her insistence when they married, because she preferred it. From the day her first child, Fred's older sister Pauline, was born, Vera had been determined that her children would have a better life. The shipments
though polite enough, were regarded as standoffish by some of their neighbors, although plenty of others approved the tight control Vera exerted over her well-mannered children. For Fred, seventeen years old, and in the first year of the sixth form, making him what in the U.S. is known as a senior at High Pavement Grammar School, it was a terrible time.
He had never made friends easily, and he confided in nobody as he watched his beloved mother wasting away. Vera had lung cancer, and in 1963, before chemotherapy and radiotherapy made a dent in the mortality statistics, she was under sentence of a slow, agonizing death.
There were only two bright points in the dark cloud of pain that hung over her. One was the arrival home each afternoon of Fred, her favorite child. The other relief, and a sweeter one, was the doctor's visit, when an injection of morphine would dull the sharp edges of her pain and make what life she had left more bearable. For Fred,
Who was well aware of the pain his mother was in, the injections achieved a mythic importance. He too lived from one day to the next, watching as her pain ebbed away when the opiate flooded her system. When, finally, on the 21st of June 1963, Vera died,
it was as peaceful a passing as could be hoped for with the morphine soothing the physical suffering and with her husband and children by her side but while friends and family
murmured the usual platitudes about a blessed release, and while her husband, Harold, daughter Pauline, and youngest son, Clive, all began to come to terms with their grief, nobody realized the profound and ultimately devastating effect of his mother's death on seventeen-year-old Fred Shipman.
it would be another thirty-four years before his twin obsessions with death and morphine would come to light the edwards lane council estate is in the sherwood area of nottingham the district takes its name from the famous forest where legend says robin hood robbed from the rich and gave to the poor
a latter-day robin hood would find worthier recipients for his generosity than the inhabitants of the edward slain estate while not exactly poor the people living there were considered respectable with most houses and gardens well maintained
The estate is five minutes' walk away from Nottingham City Hospital. There are playing fields and a swimming pool nearby, and work to be had in local factories. Unlike many other Victorian-era cities, Nottingham diversified early in the twentieth century and relied not just on traditional trades,
the city also had what was then new industries like bicycles tobacco and pharmacy to provide good working-class jobs what more compared to the soulless massive developments thrown up after the war
There is an intimacy about the Edwards Lane estate, which is no more than a couple of dozen roads of 1930s red-brick houses, more solid and individual-looking than their post-war counterparts. It was livelier and nosier back in the immediate post-war years, when Fred was little.
The average age of residents was younger, but they were still difficult times for young couples trying to establish a normal family life after the strange hiatus of wartime. There were occasional drunken brawls between young men, odd incidents of name-calling between wives, nothing serious, nothing that would even raise an eyebrow on the estates.
in America called Projects of Big Cities Today.
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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. As a family man with three kids, I know firsthand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care. But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh.
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Visit BetterHelp.com slash Serial Killer today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash Serial Killer. Harold Frederick Shipman was born on the 14th of January 1946.
he was what was known as a celebration baby whose birth eight months after victory in europe day v e day came at the beginning of a huge boom in the population he was indeed part of the original so-called boomer generation
young couples rushed headlong into starting a family making up for the lost time of the war years when many of them were separated for long periods for a great many of these husbands and wives the end of the war marked the beginning of their lives together
But for Harold and Vera Shipman, married three days before the end of 1937, and with their first child, Pauline, born in March 1938, it was a matter of picking up where they had left off, before Harold went off on war service with the Sherwood Foresters Regiment.
Vera was eighteen when she married. Harold, who was five years older, was working at that time as a printer's assistant. They were both of solid, working-class stock. Vera's father was a bricklayer's laborer, and Harold's was a hosiery warehouse man. Vera's mother worked in another traditional local trade. She was a lace clipper.
The birth of Fred, followed just over four years later by their third child, Clive, gave them the family they had planned and for whom they had both high hopes. Fred's father, Harold, came from a large poor family of eight children. It was a quiet man, who nobody turned their heads at around town. Known to be a hard worker who provided for his family, he was not ambitious.
He left that to Vera, whose own humble origins gave her a quiet determination that her children would do well and better themselves. For Harold, after a day's work driving his Bedford tipper lorry, moving stones and broken tarmac for local building firms, the garden was a relaxation, and a trip to the local football match on Saturday afternoons was pleasure.
He smoked a pipe and wore a trilby hat over his thinning gray hair. Vera was an attractive, slender woman. She seldom raised her voice, but everyone around town knew that in the Shipman household she was, as the saying went, the one with the pants on. Of her children she expected excellence and duty. Never one for corporal punishment, she instead paid her children a great deal of attention and love.
If they did not live up to her standards, she became disappointed, not angry. And that, especially to young Fred, was far worse. Decades later, when psychiatrists pored over every detail of Dr. Harold Fred Shipman's childhood, very little came up that could explain him becoming such a villain as an adult.
One thing that set the Shipman children somewhat apart from the others in the neighborhood was that Vera tended to seldom let her children play with other children. The three siblings usually played among themselves, and on the rare occasions when they were allowed to join a birthday party or community event, they spent most of their time amongst themselves.
Fred was never bullied at school. In fact, he was a British version of what my American listeners will know as a jock. He was a member of the school football team. No, not American football, actual proper English football. This fact led to young Fred being in very good physical shape, and to girls he was known as attractive.
However, he was never one for socializing much, not even after he started attending private school. It was Fred's mother's death and the close contact it brought him with the medical profession that inspired him to want to be a doctor. He had already opted for the right A-levels for a medical career,
But a clear picture of what he wanted to do only emerged as he watched at her bedside as morphine was injected into her. Whether it was the skill of the doctor, the respect in which doctors were held in working-class communities, or the lure of working with the drug that offered his mother so much relief, is impossible to say, perhaps not even by him.
But it was in his mother's death that his careers were born. Two careers. One as a caring and much-valued GP, the other as the exact antithesis, a doctor who murdered some of the people he was supposed to be looking after. Fred Shipman failed to get the grades for Leeds University Medical School at his first attempt in the summer term of 1964.
Perhaps his mother's death the previous year had seriously disrupted his studies more than he showed to his school friends. Or perhaps he simply found three science A levels too difficult. He was not alone among the medical students at Leeds in having to redo some term papers. His academic achievements at school were sound rather than spectacular. This would be entirely irrelevant
Were it not for the fact that in later life Fred Shipman made a point of stressing his intellectual superiority, his ultimate condemnation of anyone was to describe them as stupid. This is not a word that could ever be attached to him, but it is important not to lose sight of the fact that he was no intellectual superstar either.
He took A-level resits in November 1964, and then took the rest of the year off school, waiting to start at Leeds in September 1965. Because his lorry driver father was not earning a high wage, he qualified for a full student grant from his local authority. This came to £340, the equivalent of around $10,000 today.
Although not generous, it was enough to live on at the time. All tuition fees were paid for British students in those days, so the maintenance grants had to cover his rent, food, books and entertainment. Money was tight for all students on grants, but there were many of them in the same boat, and university life was geared to living as cheaply as possible. Medicine was a popular choice of Carrere,
There were strenuous government effort in the mid-1960s to attract more students to it because of an acute shortage of family doctors since the establishment of socialized medicine in the UK, known as the National Health Service, usually just referred to as the NHS.
The shortage of doctors reached its most critical phase in 1965, just as Fred left home to go to medical school. At the time, many GPs across the country had more than the permitted limit of 3,500 patients on their list. Leeds, too, offered a new beginning.
fred the quiet schoolboy always on the edge of the group but always watching what others were doing was aware of the changing world around him it was the middle of the nineteen sixties the beetles were as john lennon would say more famous than jesus
The Who released the youth anthem My Generation, and minis, both miniskirts and moresminicars, defined the times.
Fred, who had taken his older sister to a school dance, who had never joined in the dirty joke routines of his contemporaries, who stood at a bar with the others without drinking alcohol, who never had a detention and who seldom dropped doing a cross-country run no matter what other tempting option was available, was beginning to tire of always being on the sidelines of life.
At Leeds, he would start again, and he would be a participator, not an observer. Seventeen-year-old Primrose Oxtoby was five feet four inches, that's about one hundred and sixty-two centimeters, and sturdily built. Not exactly fat, but not slim either.
Beneath a very unflattering haircut, her face was pleasant, almost pretty. She was active in sports and also proved to be a natural organizer. She was an enthusiastic member of the Guides, in America known as the Girl Scouts.
Her guide training proved a great asset when a small group of girls persuaded one of their teachers, Esther Barnes, to take them on a hiking trip in the Yorkshire Dales during the final half-term of their school lives. Miss Barnes enjoyed walking, and with her sister to help out, she took six girls' youth hosteling for four days. All of those who went on the trip would later have fond memories of it.
a last rite of fun and innocent companionship before they started work and a serious business of life. Unlike contemporary youth, these girls were expected to grow up at fifteen, to get jobs, find boyfriends, marry, and bring up families as housewives. On the regular bus to university, it was Primrose who caught Fred's eye.
perhaps because she had already fixed hers on him it took several journeys over a few weeks before they plucked up the courage to speak to each other at first exchanging shy smiles graduating to nods and eventually to banter and chat and a date
the other girls noticed the burgeoning friendship with amusement and pleasure happy for primrose who was popular that she had found herself a boyfriend at last the others some of them already sporting diamond engagement rings knew about the rituals of courtship and naively assumed that she did too
It never occurred to any of them that Primrose needed advice, a confidant, support. They all had mothers and sisters and friends with whom they could share their worries about boys going too far or wanting only one thing. It was, compared with today, an innocent age.
The common denominator for Fred and Primrose was that they were both lonely and sexually frustrated, and the secret glances between them on the top deck of the Weatherby bus, interpreted so easily as falling in love, were founded on a recognition of their own need in each other.
Within a few months of arriving in Leeds, Fred had acquired the status he craved. He had a girlfriend. They were extremely attracted to each other, and very much enjoyed each other's company. Neither of them had any sexual experience, so they tentatively started exploring each other. They were intensely happy.
high on first love, proud of sexual success, and as confused as many others at the time about just how much of the new freedom to enjoy. Not knowing the rules of how far to go, not daring to buy condoms, they had unprotected sex, and Primrose, to the astonishment of everyone who knew her, became pregnant.
I don't know.
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And with that, we come to the end of part two in this sojourn into the life and crime of Harold Shipman. I hope you enjoyed listening to me telling it to you. Next episode will continue his saga. So as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. What follows is a message to my dear Norwegian listeners in Norwegian.
I remind you that my Norwegian-language podcast, Seriemordepodden, is available to listen to both on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other places you listen to podcasts. As they say in Radio Land, follow along.
