Probe launched into Shipman hanging

An independent inquiry into the death of doctor Harold Shipman was beginning today at the prison where he died.

Britain’s most prolific serial killer was discovered hanged in his cell yesterday morning with a ligature made from bedsheets.

The prisons spokeswoman said Shipman had been behaving “utterly normally” and shown no signs of suicidal tendencies – even down to a telephone conversation with wife Primrose the night before.

The former GP’s apparent suicide – the day before his 58th birthday – was met with shock and disgust by relatives who said he had “taken the easy way out”.

Today, Stephen Shaw, Britain's Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, was visiting Wakefield Prison in West Yorkshire to talk to both staff and prisoners.

Mr Shaw said his inquiry would look into whether warning signs that Shipman was planning suicide had been missed by prison authorities.

Setting out how he plans to conduct the inquiry, Mr Shaw said he wanted to find out whether the treatment Shipman received at the prison was “proper”.

A key question will be why the former GP was not put on suicide watch, as he had been at other jails earlier in his sentence, and what impact the withdrawal of privileges last month had on him.

Mr Shaw said if he found Shipman was correctly dealt with according to UK Prison Service procedures, it was quite possible he would conclude that there was nothing that could have been done to prevent the suicide.

Mr Shaw told Britain's Channel 4 News yesterday: “I will be reviewing Harold Shipman’s whole five and a half years in custody to see if there were any indications that he might have been planning to take his own life.

“What I need to be sure of is that there were no triggers – whether inside prison or outside – that were missed and that his treatment was proper and the things that were supposed to happen, in terms of checking on him, were done.”

He added: “I hope to conduct it in as open a way as possible. As with any death there will be a coroner’s inquest and I must be careful not to impede in any way that process.”

It was a “plain fact of the matter” that prisoners could not be kept under surveillance 24 hours a day in order to ensure they did not harm themselves, said Mr Shaw.

The case was unusual because the majority of prison suicides happened early in sentences or while suspects were being held on remand, he said.

Shipman was jailed for life at Preston Crown Court in January 2000 for murdering 15 patients.

He targeted mainly unsuspecting middle-aged and elderly women patients, murdering many with diamorphine injections.

His killing spree was described by trial judge Mr Justice Forbes as “shocking beyond belief” and in 2002 UK Home Secretary David Blunkett ruled he should spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Dame Janet Smith, who chairs the ongoing inquiry into his killings, reported in 2002 that she believed Shipman had killed 215 patients and there was a “real suspicion” over another 45.

His death ends all hopes of ever knowing why the bespectacled Shipman killed so many over a 23-year period in Hyde, Greater Manchester, and Todmorden, West Yorkshire.

Jayne Gaskill, from Hyde, whose 68-year-old mother Bertha Moss died at the deadly doctor’s hands, said: “He has won again. He has taken the easy way out.

“He has controlled us all the way through and he has controlled the last step and I hate him for it.”

Thea Morgan, 65, who lost her 90-year-old mother Dorothea Renwick, said: “I want to see the end of him but I think he should have stayed in his cell and rotted.”

At the former premises of Shipman’s surgery the word “Justice” had been scrawled 12 times across metal shutters.