Dr Harold Shipman, who killed around 250 of his patients over the course of 30 years.
On the other hand nearly all of them were people who would have died within a few months anyway (which was how he was able to pass their deaths off as natural) and he wasn’t cruel: he put them to sleep like dogs with an injection while pretending to treat them.
It’s even possible that the first few deaths were genuinely intended as mercy killings. But over the years he grew to enjoy having the power of life and death, and also to get very good at sweet-talking elderly patients into naming him in their wills. He was only caught when he had killed so many that he created a noticeable statistical blip.
He’s the reason btw that US gun enthusiasts claim there was a spike in murders in the UK after we tightened up gun controls. The UK counts murders in the year in which they were determined to have been murders, not the year in which the victims died, and Shipman all by himself increased the murder rate in England and Wales for 2001 by about 45%, even though he’d started killing in the early1970s. Murders then remained high for several years because of a series of mass deaths of illegal immigrants, drowned in Morecambe Bay or suffocated in lorries: these deaths were accidental but were counted as murders because they were being illegally imported and exploited by gang bosses who were careless of their safety. T5Continue reading
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