The Sunday Times Magazine • 41Clockwise from top left: Eva Lyons is thought to have been his first victim; the GP in custody; Dame Janet Smith, who chaired the Shipman
Inquiry; vials of diamorphine; newspapers report the murders and the doctor’s eventual suicide; Shipman’s final victim, Kathleen GrundyREX, BBC, STEVE COPLEY, GREATER MANCHESTER POLICE, NEWSGROUP NEWSPAPERS LTD, PA
controlled drugs and forging NHS
prescriptions, with 74 further
offences taken into consideration.
He was found guilty on all counts,
fined £600 and fired from his job.
The crucial decision, whether
he could keep practising, lay with
the General Medical Council.
McKeating believed Shipman
should be struck off. “Would you
trust a doctor who was jacking up
hundreds of milligrams of
pethidine in his body to treat
you?” His fear was that Shipman
would kill a patient by accident.
By the time his case came before
the Penal Cases Committee, in
April 1976, Shipman had already
secured another job as a clinical
medical officer for the Durham
Area Health Authority. The
meeting was supposed to decide
whether Shipman’s case should go
on to be heard by the disciplinary
panel of the General Medical
Council, which has the power to
strike doctors off.
McKeating arrived in the
morning, expecting to be called
to make a statement. Eventually
someone came out. “He said,
‘You’re not needed George.’”
McKeating assumed the
decision had been made and
Shipman would be referred
to the next stage of the
process. But the official told
him: “The chairman
says he is no
longer a threat
to the public.”
McKeating
couldn’t believe whattotal number could be 250. The
vast majority were women and the
average age was 76.
McKeating is now 80. It has
been 45 years since he met the
doctor, but Shipman is still often
on his mind. He believes we have
a duty to continue to re-examine
cases such as Shipman’s where a
litany of errors were made.
Whatever the doctor thought of
his own intellect, Shipman was
not too clever to catch. In 1998
Linda Reynolds, another doctor in
Hyde, alerted the police to the
high volume of cremation forms
for elderly women that Shipman
needed to be co-signed. But the
investigation closed in April —
and Shipman went on to kill three
more people.
For McKeating there was one
more warning shot. A couple of
years after the 1970s drug
conviction, a friend called out of
the blue. “Do you know a man
called Shipman?” he said. The
doctor had applied for a job with
the National Coal Board, which
would require him to go down
into collieries and inspect their
medical supplies — supplies that
included pethidine. “It would have
been like a kid in a sweet shop,”
McKeating says. The NCB never
returned his call. Reports suggest
he did work there briefly before
moving to Hyde.
Ever since McKeating saw the
news that day, there has been a
question in the back of his mind:
“Could I have done more? It’s the
question I ask myself all the time.” n“Would
you trust
a doctor
who was
jacking up
hundreds of
milligrams
of pethidine
in his body
to treat
you?”
he was hearing. “I was absolutely
livid,” he says. Every doctor he had
convicted for drug offences had
been struck off. With hindsight,
he thinks that Shipman was able
to con the committee. The doctor
had given a written statement
saying, “I have no future intention
to return to general practice or
work in a situation where I could
obtain supplies of pethidine.”
They believed him.
Hauntingly, there is evidence
to suggest that Shipman had killed
for the first time by then. He is
suspected of giving Eva Lyons,
a 70-year-old with terminal cancer,
a lethal injection at her home in
March 1975. For Shipman it was
the beginning of an addiction
of a different sort. By 1977 he was
practising as a GP in Hyde, near
Manchester. He had a reputation
for being a conscientious family
doctor, often visiting his elderly
patients at their homes.
He established his own surgery
in 1993 and was a respected
member of the local community.
In reality he was killing people
with lethal injections. It would
take years for the true horrors
of his crimes to come to light.
On January 31, 2000, he was
convicted of 15 counts of
murder and imprisoned for life.
Four years later, the day before
his 58th birthday, he
took his own life in his
cell at Wakefield prison.
The Shipman Inquiry
identified 215 victims,
but estimated that the