London
A British family doctor convicted of killing 15 of his patients actually murdered more than 200, an official inquiry has found. Dr. Harold Shipman has been serving a life sentence since 2000 for murdering more than a dozen elderly female patients by lethal injection, mostly during house calls. Dame Janet Smith, a judge investigating hundreds of Shipman’s past cases, said last week that the doctor killed at least 215 people, adding that “the true number is far greater and cannot be counted.” The toll makes Shipman Britain’s most prolific serial killer. Richard Badcock, a psychiatrist who interviewed Shipman shortly after his arrest, pronounced him a “classic necrophiliac”—a man obsessed not with having sex with the dead, but with watching the moment of death.
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