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The enquiry also found that the post-mortem examination of 47-year-old Renate Overton, who lingered in a coma for over a year after Shipman gave her a lethal injection in 1994, was inadequate and there should have been an inquest. Dame Jane said: ‘Had the circumstances of her admission to hospital been fully investigated at that time, there is a real possibility that it would have been appreciated that Shipman had deliberately administered a lethal dose of morphine – it was a missed opportunity.’

Shipman claimed over a hundred more victims after Mrs Overton died on 21 April 1995.

Shipman maintained his innocence to the end, though he enjoyed being the star turn at his trial. At 6 a.m. on 13 January 2004, he was found hanging in his cell at Wakefield jail. An inquiry found that he had committed suicide using bed sheets tied to the bars of his cell window. He was not on suicide watch, though he had been at Durham jail beforehand. He had been moved to Wakefield the previous June to make it easier for his wife to visit him.

It was said that Shipman was ‘obnoxious and arrogant to the prison staff. Just before Christmas his enhanced status was reduced to basic. He was deprived of the television set in his cell and had to wear prison uniform rather than his own clothes’. However, some privileges had been restored shortly before he died.

‘He was showing no signs whatsoever of pre-suicidal behaviour at all,’ said a spokesman.

Shipman’s wife and four children never accepted that he was guilty. They even believed that he had been murdered in his cell.

With Shipman dead, the reason he killed will never be known. The murders seemed to provide no sexual thrill. There were no signs of violence, no hint of sadistic excitement. And, except in the case of Kathleen Grundy, there was no apparent motive. Serial killers often like to toy with their terrified victims, to glory in their power over them. But Shipman’s victims did not know what was happening to them. They all seem to have died peacefully, often in their own homes in surroundings where they felt safe.

Some psychiatrists speculate that he hated older women, often saying that the elderly were a drain on the National Health Service. Others feel he had a deep masochistic need to re-create the scenario of his mother’s death – though an unshakeable belief in their own superiority is not usually a trait found in masochists.

Dr Richard Badcock, a psychiatrist at Rampton High Security Hospital, spoke at length with Shipman after the conviction. He believed that ‘Shipman’s choice of career might have been influenced by his developing tendencies towards necrophilia, perhaps originally triggered by the death of his mother from cancer when he was 17’. Having complete control over life and death ‘can give a sense of power and omnipotent invulnerability in itself’, Dr Badcock theorised.

The fact that he left so many clues have led some to believe that Shipman wanted to be found out and stopped, as if he was fighting a compulsion he could not control. On the other hand, his sense of superiority may have led him to believe that he could do whatever he wanted without fear of discovery. But there is a contradiction inherent in that too. He must have known that he was not as clever as he made out as he had already been caught forging prescriptions and stockpiling drugs.

South Manchester coroner John Pollard speculated that Shipman ‘simply enjoyed viewing the process of dying and enjoyed feeling the control over life and death’, while the official report simply stated that he was ‘addicted to killing’ in the way he was addicted to painkillers around the time the murders started.

Chapter 19

Columbine

Names: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold

Nationality: American

Age: 19 and 17

Reign of terror: 20 April 1999

Number of victims: 13 killed, 23 injured

Favoured method of killing: shooting

Final note: ‘Good wombs hath borne bad sons’

At 11.10 a.m. on 20 April 1999, 19-year-old Eric Harris drove into the student car park at Columbine High