Doctors who kill

Hypocritical oaths

In Britain, the best-known murderer-doctors after Harold Shipman are probably Dr Crippen and John Bodkin Adams.

Shipman perpetrated more than 200 proven murders and may, in fact, have committed hundreds more. In many instances he had no financial interest in the outcome - he was not a beneficiary of the insurance policies or in the wills of the people he killed. However, in the one murder that started the process of unravelling many others, that of Mrs Kathleen Grundy, he was her beneficiary in the will he so incompetently forged.

American-born Hawley Harvey Crippen lived in North London with his second wife Cora Turner. Crippen is best remembered for the manner of his arrest. He was on a ship bound for New York with his mistress when the remains of his wife were found in their London residence at 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Holloway. A British bobby set off in hot pursuit across the Atlantic. Crippen had a head start but the copper took a faster ship, arrived in New York before Crippen did, and welcomed him with handcuffs. Crippen was returned to England, tried, convicted, and hanged.

Crippen's motive for murder was romantic, not materialistic - get rid of the spouse to enjoy the mistress.

Eastbourne general practitioner Dr John Bodkin Adams stood trial in 1957 on a murder charge - a single murder. Although he admitted that he "eased the passing" of numerous elderly patients, he was acquitted. Nevertheless, he was widely believed to have eased the passing of many of his patients, 132 of whom left gifts for him in their wills. When he died on 4 July 1983, aged 84, his estate was worth £402,970. (See quote at bottom of page.)

According to Herbert G Kinnell, a retired consultant psychiatrist, Adams may have been a role model for Shipman. Kinnell makes this speculation in an article in the British Medical Journal published soon after Shipman's conviction in 2000. Kinnell also identifies many other doctors who did away with patients, spouses and other relatives - often for financial gain and sometimes for no discernible motive.

Several were multiple murderers, although not on the Shipman scale.

The individual with the distinction of being the last person to be publicly hanged in Glasgow was American-born doctor Edward William Pritchard (d.1865). Pritchard killed one of his children and then poisoned his mother-in-law and first wife. A girl who worked for him died mysteriously - and Pritchard happened to have insured her prior to her sudden death.

Other doctors who killed relatives include an American in St Louis murdered one of his sons for his insurance money and, some time later, killed his other son for the same reason.

Dr De La Pommerais kill his mother-in-law for her estate and then his mistress for her insurance money in 1863. Dr George Henry Lamson poisoned his two brothers-in-law for their legacies in 1881.

All three wives of Dr J Milton Bowers were insured, and all three of them died in suspicious circumstances. Fifteen years later, in the 1889s, his brother-in-law was poisoned. Bowers died in 1905.

in America a little more than a hundred years ago, Dr Bennett Clarke Hyde killed three of his in-laws while a fourth also came down with “the typhoid”but survived. The deceased has all been in line to inherit the family fortune. Dr Hyde was hauled before a court but the doctor who was to testify against him died before giving evidence.

If many doctors literally got away with murders, others faced justice, although not always of the normal judicial kind.

Dr John Hill had a rich wife who died young, and in mysterious circumstances. Her father wanted toxicological tests to be performed on her body, but it was quickly embalmed. Dr Hill remarried, and wife number too believed that he tried to kill her. She further alleged that Dr Hill had told her of other murders he had committed: he admitted to killing his father, his brother and a friend. Dr Hill was himself then murdered.

A different kind of poetic justice befell Dr Robert George Clements, a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, who murdered his fourth wife for her money - and may also have murdered each of his first three wives. Clements committed suicide.