Courtroom discourse (2): Speeches

Wednesday, 5th January 2000

PROSECUTION CLOSING SPEECH TO THE JURY (extract)

MR. HENRIQUES: Ladies and gentlemen, the 15 ladies whose names appear as victims in this indictment,
they had all chosen or at least accepted Dr. Shipman as their doctor. In doing so, they entrusted their
health, indeed they entrusted their lives to him. They trusted him to care for them. Their relatives trusted
him to tell the truth about the circumstances in which his patient died. The community trusted him to keep
records and to complete documentation with honesty and integrity.

We submit that he has breached that trust. He did not care at all for those 15 patients: he killed them. He
did not, with truth, relate the circumstances of their death to their grieving relatives. He duped them in
order to save his own skin. His medical records were falsified in order to cover his tracks, and the
community was misled by deliberate misstatements on formal documentation.

In misleading relatives, he took advantage of their grief and their lesser knowledge of medicine and
procedures. As they grieved, this determined man deployed any and every device to ensure that no
postmortem examination took place. He would overbear, belittle, bamboozle and disadvantage relatives
until they accepted the doctor's word that they should not put their mother through it.

But these relatives, quite apart from their grief faced a further disadvantage; they only knew of the
apparent circumstances of their own loss. For example, if the Hillier family had been able to compare notes
with the Mellors and the Pomfrets, this trail of murder would have been halted the sooner. A meeting of
those three families would soon have exposed the incredible fact that the doctor was revealing, in each
case, a serious illness, known apparently only to him, yet untreated by him and unknown to any member of
the family in question.

Imagine too, members of the jury, a meeting of the West, Adams, Wagstaffe and Nuttall families, as each
discovered that their loved ones had gone to the front door, admitted the doctor to their homes, and yet
died within five minutes; with no single ambulance being called.

Unlike those isolated relatives, you have the full picture to call on. The prosecution rely upon all the
evidence and its many similarities, to establish the defendant's pattern of behaviour, his stealth and his
methods. When we look at the description of each patient's state of health as described by their relatives:
each one up and about, fully dressed -- apart from Mrs. Turner who was getting up to make phone calls and
arranging to eat a pie -- it is a quite incredible proposition that these 15 ladies could have died a natural
death, having regard to their state of health prior to facing Dr. Shipman.
At one stage of this trial, it was contended on the defendant's behalf that all 15 died a natural death. He
now concedes that Mrs. Grundy, Mrs. Lomas and Mrs. Quinn must have died from morphine poisoning, but
not, he says, at his hands. We shall, accordingly, consider the descriptions of the state of health of those 15
patients; whether anybody other than the defendant could reasonably have killed any one of them; we
shall look at his several devices; his avoidance of postmortem examinations; his failure to call ambulances;
his lies about his deceased patients having phoned the surgery; other false pretexts for attending homes;
the blood sample; the new home; the consultant's appointment; his failure to examine patients and his
failure to attempt resuscitation.

This pattern of behaviour can, we submit, only be explained by guilt. Nine bodies, which had been
exhumed, were found to contain significant and fatal levels of morphine. The defendant was stockpiling
significant amounts of diamorphine. We will consider that evidence.

But first, the state of health of those 15 patients. Mrs. Grundy's state of health was described most vividly
by several witnesses on the days leading up to her death. We will consider them in greater detail in due
course, but she was lively and jolly on Monday, 22nd June on the trip to Derbyshire. She was really bubbly
on Tuesday, 23rd in the town hall. She was very well that afternoon in the charity shop. That evening at
May Clarke's, she was very well, very alert and very confident.

The defendant had previously asserted, both on the cause of death certificate and to the police, that this
same lady died the following day of old age. Is it no surprise that, overwhelmed by evidence, he abandons
that stance? Mrs. Grundy had no need to see a doctor when he called on Wednesday, 24th June 1998.

Mrs. Pomfret had sought a home visit. "She was okay but recovering from flu and a bit run down. She felt
very tired and had done for a few weeks. Chestiness and that was about it", said her ex-husband Adrian.

Mrs. Mellor had no serious problem at all in the lead up to her death, and had not sought a visit from the
doctor. She had a cold and had chosen not to go into school to read to the children. Two weeks before her
death, she walked to the top of Werneth low, a two hour walk, and she played football with her
grandchildren. No member of the family knew of any condition of angina, because, submit the prosecution,
that is an invention on the defendant's part. She was going to a dance the night she died, and she was
thrilled at the prospect of a visit to the Holy Land.

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Thursday. 6th January 2000
DEFENCE CLOSING SPEECH TO THE JURY (extract)

MISS DAVIES: Members of the jury, the man before the court, charged with 15 Counts of murder and one
of forgery, is Harold Shipman; a doctor; specifically a general medical practitioner. A doctor's primary
objective is to care for his patients. A doctor's training, the knowledge he acquires, is directed to that one
aim. Doctors are there to care for their patients, not kill them. And this particular doctor, Dr. Shipman, has
been in general medical practice since the 1970s. He is a doctor whose following in the Hyde area was such
that when he left his old practice, the Donnybrook practice, and set up as a single handed practitioner in
1992, many patients went with him; patients -- one of whom was Kathleen Grundy -- who had previously
been patients of other doctors at the practice. At the time of his arrest in 1998, his list size, that is his list
size of patients, was 3,100.

He wasn't the only doctor in that area. You have heard, for example, from those other doctors who would
fill in form C on the cremation certificates, that their practice was just across the road. You know that not
too far away was his old practice, the Donnybrook practice. No patient had to register with Dr. Shipman,
but the fact that so many did, must be something upon which inferences can be drawn. It is not an
unreasonable inference to draw, from the size of that list, the fact that patients followed him and were
satisfied with the care which he provided; the care which is at the very core of the medical profession: the
doctor's duty to care for his patients.

Each will do it according to his or her own style. As in any other field, each individual will bring to their job
their own idiosyncrasies, some doing their job are more popular than others. With a list size of 3,100, well
above the national average, it does suggest that, in so far as the patients were concerned, Dr. Shipman
must have been doing something right. Within his own surgery, the surgery that he created and built up,
he wasn't a doctor who stood on ceremony. If he was in reception, and the telephone went, and one of the
girls on reception was tied up, he would answer it. And he was not alone in doing that.
Gillian Morgan did it, Alison Massey did it. That was the spirit, the ethos of the practice. In other words, if
there was a task to be done, and someone else was tied up, so long as that other person was able and
properly able to do it, they would do it.

Just consider Gillian Morgan, the practice nurse. She would answer the telephone if Carol Chapman or
Judith Cocker were tied up. Both Gillian Morgan and Dr. Shipman had their own patients and their own
appointments. And both, according to the staff, would see patients who came in, notwithstanding the fact
that there was no appointment for that patient, notwithstanding the fact it was outside open surgery. If
either Gillian Morgan or Dr. Shipman could do it, they would.

You heard that evidence from Gillian Morgan as well as the other staff, and it was accepted that on those
occasions, there was a real chance that any patient so seen, that patient's name would not show on the
appointments book. Well, common sense would dictate that, wouldn't it? But just fitting in patients just
outside those regulated surgery hours is, we suggest, wholly in keeping with the spirit, not only of the
practice but of all those who worked in it, and it was that very practice, that very ethos, which Dr. Shipman,
in the first instance, created and thereafter continued.

In keeping with the spirit of that practice, there are other examples of the way in which Dr. Shipman carried
out his work. For example, calling on patients when not strictly required so to do, to see that they were
alright. In the context of this case, and the way in which the prosecution has presented it, that has taken on
a sinister significance, but the fact is that doctors do cold call, as it has been described. They have every
right to cold call. It is part of their duty, their care for their patients. Some may say it is an extension of it.
Other examples of the care that perhaps on occasion went beyond the call of duty as shown by Dr.
Shipman; calling at the home of a patient to carry out a procedure when in fact that meant the patient
would not have to come to surgery. The easiest example that comes to mind is that of Mrs. Grundy, a lady
of 81, early in the morning, sparing her the journey to surgery, so that he could take that fresh blood
sample which he needed.

Another example is taking time with relatives well outside surgery hours. You heard, in the cases of Mellor,
Lomas and Quinn, how during the course of the evening -- in the case of Mellor and Quinn at about eight
o'clock in the evening and in the case of Lomas it was in fact about 10 o'clock -- how Dr. Shipman went to
the home, and there spoke to people, either the relatives or those directly concerned with the death.
He didn't have to do that, members of the jury. It is something that could have been done the next day or
the day after. It is, we say, evidence of how he was prepared to take that extra step. He was prepared to go
beyond the call of duty, and now what the prosecution in this case are trying to do is turn it on its head:
turn that very caring evidence against him.