British Serial Killer Is Found Dead in Prison

Dr. Harold “Fred” Shipman, the reserved English family doctor who exploited his patients’ trust to become the country’s most prolific mass murderer, was found dead in his prison cell Tuesday morning, hanged by a bedsheet strung around the bars of his cell.

Prison officials, who called the death an apparent suicide, said he had been taken off a suicide watch 18 months ago.

Shipman was convicted in 2000 of murdering 15 of his patients between 1975, when he opened his family practice, and 1998, when an amateurish attempt to forge his last victim’s will was exposed. A subsequent judicial inquiry ruled that 200 of his other patients -- and perhaps 45 more -- had died “unlawfully,” usually from Shipman lethally flooding their bodies with opiates.

He killed old ladies and younger men, the healthy as well as the infirm, in his 23-year spree.

Shipman was serving 15 concurrent life sentences and had been told by the British government he would never be paroled. He had shown no remorse for -- nor ever admitted to -- his crimes, insisting he always delivered appropriate treatment to his patients. He was planning an appeal of the convictions when he died.

There were immediate calls for an investigation into how such a notorious inmate at Wakefield Prison, regarded as one of the country’s better high-security penitentiaries, was apparently able to kill himself.

The British government said that Stephen Shaw, its prisons ombudsman, would investigate the circumstances leading to Shipman’s death.

Inquest, a group that monitors deaths in custody in England and Wales, said there were a near-record 94 suicides by prisoners last year, including 11 by inmates serving life sentences.

Prison reform activists blame what they say is an overcrowded system. There are almost 74,000 inmates in English and Welsh jails, more per capita than any country in the European Union -- but just less than one-sixth of the U.S. per capita figure. (Scotland runs its own system.)

“Overcrowding means prisoners get left in their cells longer, and staff is less able to pick up signs that there is a problem with a particular prisoner,” said Fran Russell of the Howard League for Penal Reform.

For 23 years, Shipman had convinced people in the close-knit Manchester suburb of Hyde that he was a gentle family doctor, while undertaking a pattern of crime that amounted to nearly a murder a month over a little less than a quarter of a century.

The judicial inquiry found no motive for the killings. Not money. Not sexual depravity.

“Opportunity seems to have been all that was required,” said British High Court Judge Janet Smith, who spent a year looking into the deaths of more than 500 patients registered to Shipman’s practice. Possibly, she said, he was simply “addicted to killing.”

His death leaves many of his victims’ families feeling “extremely distressed,” Ann Alexander, a lawyer representing many of the relatives, said in a statement. “Our clients were really hoping one day they would find out why.”