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Winnifred Mellor’s neighbour Gloria Ellis played a key role in securing his conviction. She had witnessed Shipman’s visit to Winnie Mellor just hours before her death. When he returned later, he knocked on Gloria Ellis’s door. He said he had come to see Winifred Mellor. He could see her sat in a chair and thought she was dead. So the two of them went to Winifred Mellor’s house and found her dead in a chair.

Then, when Gloria asked: “You were here before, weren’t you?” Shipman did not answer.

“Has Gloria had a stroke?” she asked.

Shipman then grew hostile. He called her a ‘stupid girl’. Far from being stupid, she recorded to the minute the times of Shipman’s visits.

Shipman was similarly heartless in the case of 63-year-old Ivy Lomas, the only one of the 15 to have died in his surgery. Detective Constable Philip Reade had gone to the doctor’s office hoping Shipman would help him locate Ivy’s next of kin.

‘He was laughing,’ said Reade. ‘He said he considered her such a nuisance that he was having part of the seating area permanently reserved for Ivy with a plaque to the effect “Seat permanently reserved for Ivy Lomas”.’

Shipman also told Reade that as he left the room Ivy ‘could have taken her last breath’. Once again, he had made no effort to resuscitate the woman. Instead, he left her alone while he attended other patients.

‘This was a medical emergency,’ said Dr Grenville. ‘I would have given my entire attention to this particular patient.’

But Shipman knew Ivy was beyond resuscitation. She was dying from an overdose of morphine.

Henriques pointed out that ‘the poisoner fears pathology, ambulances and hospitals’. And Shipman went to great lengths to avoid any sort of investigation. When 68-year-old Pamela Hillier died in mysterious circumstances on 9 February 1998, a paramedic from the ambulance service suggested they call the police. Shipman said simply: ‘I don’t think there is any need to do that.’

Mrs Hillier’s family was also far from happy with Shipman’s cavalier attitude to the diagnosis. When entering the cause of death on the death certificate, he said: ‘Let’s put it down to a stroke.’ This made no sense to the relatives. Pamela Hillier had been both strong and active before Shipman paid a visit. Her son Keith wanted a post-mortem, but Shipman advised against it, saying that it was ‘an unpleasant thing… to put my mum through’.

Shipman also went to great lengths to persuade families to have their loved ones cremated. In the case of Kathleen Grundy, he had even ticked the cremation box on the relevant form. But fortunately Angela Woodruff knew that her mother wanted to be buried.

Shipman’s defence tried, against all odds, to paint a picture of him as an old-fashioned family doctor – one prepared to go the extra mile for his patients – as well as a family man with a loving wife and well-adjusted children (Shipman and his wife had four children in all, but all were grown up before his addiction to murder was uncovered).

Naturally his previous convictions of drug abuse and forgery went unmentioned. But still they had to overturn the forensic evidence.

Davies questioned whether it was possible to tell whether the morphine found in the bodies came from a single overdose – as the prosecution contended – or from multiple doses.

‘I can’t say,’ the forensic analyst replied.

Plainly, the defence hoped that if they could convince the jury that the morphine in the victims’ bodies came from long-term use, they could contend that they had not been murdered by Dr Shipman, but that they were drug addicts who had been killed by their own habit. They were clutching at straws.

The prosecution then put American forensic expert Dr Karch Steven on the stand. He described the technique he had used. It was new and details of the procedure had only been published in The Lancet the year before. This technique proved conclusively that none of the victims had been a long-term morphine user. In each case, the