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By law a doctor from an unrelated practice must countersign cremation documents. The fee paid for this service is known cynically as ‘cash for ash’. So when Dr Booth turned up at the funeral parlour of countersign some of Shipman’s cremation forms, Brambroffe told her of her misgivings.

‘She was concerned about the number of deaths of Dr Shipman’s patients that they’d attended recently,’ said Dr Booth. ‘She was also puzzled by the way in which the patients were found. They were mostly female, living on their own, found dead sitting in a chair fully dressed – not in their night-clothes lying ill in bed.’

Booth confided in her colleagues and one of them, Dr Linda Reynolds, contacted the coroner John Pollard. He, in turn, contracted the police. Shipman’s medical records were examined surreptitiously, but nothing untoward was found as the causes of death and treatments matched perfectly. What the police did not then know was that Shipman re-wrote his patients’ notes after he had killed them.

Recently this preliminary investigation has been widely criticised as the police did not check to see whether Shipman had a criminal record. Nor did they consult the General Medical Council. Had they discovered Shipman’s history of drug abuse and forgery, they might have dug a little deeper and put an end to Shipman’s killing spree there and then.

Shipman was eventually stopped by the dogged determination of Angela Woodruff, the daughter of Kathleen Grundy who died suddenly on 24 June 1998. A former mayor, Mrs Grundy was a tireless worker for local charities and a wealthy woman. Even though she was 81, she had boundless energy and her death came as a shock to the many people who knew her.

When she failed to show at an Age Concern club where she helped serve meals to elderly pensioners, someone was sent to her home to find out if anything was wrong. They found her lying on a sofa, fully dressed. She was already dead, so they called her GP, Dr Shipman.

It transpired that he had visited Mrs Grundy a few hours earlier, and was the last person to see her alive. The purpose of his visit, he said, had been to take blood samples for a study on ageing. Shipman then pronounced her dead and her daughter, Angela Woodruff, was contacted. Shipman assured Mrs Woodruff that a post-mortem was unnecessary as he had seen her mother shortly before her death.

After Mrs Grundy was buried, Mrs Woodruff got a phone call from a firm of solicitors who claimed to have a copy of Mrs Grundy’s will. Woodruff was a solicitor herself and her firm had always handled her mother’s affairs. They held a will that Mrs Grundy had lodged with them in 1996.

The moment Woodruff saw the new document, she knew it was a fake. It was a form that you can obtain from a post office or newsagents. And it was filled in sloppily, poorly worded and was badly typed.

‘My mother was a meticulously tidy person,’ she said. ‘The thought of her signing a document which is so badly typed didn’t make any sense. The signature looked strange, it looked too big.’

It also asked for the body to be cremated, which Woodruff knew was not her mother’s wish. And, tellingly, it left £386,000 to Dr Shipman.

‘It wasn’t a case of “Look, she’s not left me anything in her will,”’ Woodruff said. ‘But the concept of Mum signing a document leaving everything to her doctor was unbelievable.’

The obvious conclusion was that Dr Shipman had murdered her mother for profit. Mrs Woodruff went to the Warwickshire police, who passed the investigation on to the Greater Manchester force where it ended up in the hands of Detective Superintendent Bernard Postles. Once he saw the new will, he agreed with Angela Woodruff’s conclusions.

‘You only have to look at it once and you start thinking it’s like something off a John Bull printing press,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to have twenty years as a detective to know it’s a fake.’

A post-mortem was required to get conclusive proof that Kathleen Grundy had been murdered, so the police applied to the coroner for an exhumation order.