Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [104]
‘We did not have one officer who had ever taken part in an exhumation,’ said Detective Superintendent Postles. ‘We had to ask the National Crime Squad for advice.’
By the end of the investigation of the Shipman case, Greater Manchester Police would be all too familiar with exhumation.
Mrs Grundy’s body was disinterred one August night amid gusting wind and driving rain just five weeks after she had been buried in Hyde. The mud-streaked coffin was opened and hair and tissue samples were taken for analysis. At the same time, Shipman’s office and home were raided, so he had no chance to conceal or destroy any evidence. Shipman showed no surprise at this turn of events. Rather, he registered bemused contempt as the warrant was read.
There were some odd things about Shipman’s home. The police found mysterious pieces of jewellery, presumable stolen from his victims, and the house was littered with newspapers and filthy old clothes. For a doctor’s home, it was little short of insanitary.
One of the first things the police found was the typewriter Shipman had used to type the fraudulent will. Shipman said that Mrs Grundy sometimes borrowed it. However, Shipman’s fingerprints were found on the document, but there were none of Mrs Grundy’s fingerprints on it – and none belonging to those people who were purported to have witnessed it.
When the toxicology reports came back from the lab, Detective Superintendent Postles realised that he had an open-and-shut case. The cause of death was an overdose of morphine. What’s more, death would have occurred within three hours of receiving the lethal injection.
Postles was astounded. As a doctor, Shipman would have known morphine is one of the few poisons that remains easily identifiable in body tissue for centuries. There were plenty of other drugs that would have been lost against the background. For example, had Shipman used insulin, which the body produces naturally, to kill Mrs Grundy the case would have been impossible to prove. As it was, Shipman’s only defence was to claim that the respectable old lady was a junkie. Psychologists speculate that he wanted to be caught. Why type the forged will on his own typewriter? And why use a drug so easily traced? Others think he saw himself as invincible. As a doctor, he believed, his word would never be questioned.
The publicity surrounding the Grundy case brought a torrent of phone calls from other relatives of Shipman’s patients who had died in similar circumstances. The police immediately broadened the scope of the investigation. A pattern quickly emerged. The cause of death recorded by Dr Shipman often bore no relation to the symptoms the patient had suffered prior to their demise and Shipman was usually present at the death or had visited the patient immediately before. He also urged families to cremate their dead. But clearly the police could only proceed with cases where the relatives had ignored this advice and had buried the body.
In each case, Shipman also insisted that no further investigation into the cause of death was necessary. People trust their doctors. Even if they questioned him, Shipman could show that their loved one had died of a condition consistent with their medical history. His story would be backed by the computerised medical records he kept. Shipman would hurry to his office to rewrite immediately after he had killed one of his patients. Kathleen Grundy’s medical notes, for example, clearly showed that she was a morphine addict. This was clearly ludicrous. From the moment he asserted this, his credibility crumbled.
Convinced of his superiority, Shipman claimed he was a computer expert, but he did not know was that his hard drive recorded every alteration he made to the patient’s record, along with the time it was made. The police called in their own experts to demonstrate that he had fabricated his patients’ medical histories after