Taxi driver feared Shipman had murdered elderly women

A TAXI driver suspected Harold Shipman was killing his elderly customers because they were dying “suddenly and unexpectedly“, the inquiry into the former doctor’s crimes heard yesterday.

John Shaw said he did not report the GP to the police at first as he thought nobody would believe his “crazy and fantastic” fears.

He told the hearing in Manchester that he still felt guilty that “at least 20 people died because I had got no-one to turn to or speak to“.

Mr Shaw, a taxi driver in Hyde, Greater Manchester, from 1988 to 1998, said he would have felt able to go to an independent body if one had been in place.

“I did consider getting in touch with the General Medical Council, but I think I was put off because there had been lots of scandals in the medical profession and I had no confidence they would investigate Shipman.”

Mr Shaw, who is now retired, took a number of the serial killer’s patients as regular customers to weekly or fortnightly appointments.

“They became my friends,” he said. “Then relatives would ring me and say go and pick up my mum, she is dead.

“I got to a strange way of thinking, I was asking who was their doctor?

“The thing that made me suspicious was that they had all been in good health prior to their deaths.”

Mr Shaw said he first had concerns in March 1995 following the death of Netta Ashcroft. He gradually saw a pattern emerging.

After another patient, Millicent Garside, died in October 1996, Mr Shaw was told by her son Keith that Shipman had given her an injection.

“I wanted to say ’He’s murdered your mum’,” Mr Shaw said.

He felt he would not be believed and his wife Kathleen advised him to keep quiet in case he was wrong and could be sued for libel. “I couldn’t believe what my suspicions were.”

Mr Shaw eventually contacted police in August 1998 with concerns over the deaths of 21 people who had been patients of Shipman. He was interviewed two days later.

Shipman, 57, was jailed for life at Preston Crown Court in January 2000 for the murders of 15 patients.

Last year, the inquiry decided he had claimed the lives of at least 215 of his patients in Hyde and Todmorden, West Yorkshire, over a 23-year period. A woman whose aunt and neighbour were both killed by Shipman told the inquiry she had concerns about the GP but could not report her fears to the “unapproachable” medical profession.

Shirley Harrison, of Hyde, said: “If there had been a Manchester-based body I would have felt it was easier to report but I couldn’t report it near Hyde.”

Mrs Harrison’s aunt Erla Copeland died in January 1996 after Shipman advised her family she should stay home for three weeks.

“At the time we all thought my aunt was dying,” she said. “Shipman spun a web of lies which we believed about my aunt’s health.”