Top British murderer commits suicide

LONDON -- The once-respected family doctor who became Britain's worst serial killer was found hanged in his prison cell Tuesday, cheating his victims' relatives of the one consolation they had hoped for -- an explanation of his 23-year murder spree.\nOfficials are investigating why there was no suicide watch on Dr. Harold Shipman, who was convicted in 2000 of killing 15 patients and later was found to have murdered at least 200 more, mostly by lethal injection. He always maintained his innocence.\nGuards found him hanging from bedsheets attached to the window bars of his cell at Wakefield Prison in northern England at 6:20 a.m., the Prison Service said. He was pronounced dead about two hours later, a day before his 58th birthday.\nThea Morgan, whose mother, Dorothea Renwick, 90, was among Shipman's suspected victims, said she hoped the inquiry into his death would look at "why he was allowed to get away with doing this to himself."\n"I want to see the end of him, but I think he should have stayed in his cell and rotted," she said.\nMany believe Shipman, labeled "Dr. Death" by tabloid newspapers, killed because he enjoyed the feeling of control it gave him. Some of his victims' survivors said committing suicide allowed him to maintain that power.\n"He has controlled us all the way through, and he has controlled the last step and I hate him for it," said Jayne Gaskill, whose mother, Bertha Moss, 68, was thought to have been killed by the doctor. "He has won again. He has taken the easy way out."\nIn a statement announcing an investigation of Shipman's death, Prisons Minister Paul Goggins did not say whether officials believed someone else could have harmed the doctor.\nStephen Shaw, the new prison's ombudsman named to head the inquiry, focused on suicide as the likely cause of death.\nHe said it was unrealistic to expect all Britain's 70,000 inmates to be constantly monitored.\n"That isn't possible, it isn't desirable, it isn't humane," he told BBC radio. "What I will need to investigate is whether there were any warning signs at Wakefield in the case of Shipman, whether there were any slip-ups in terms of proper procedures."\nGiovanni di Stefano, one of Shipman's lawyers, told Sky News he was stunned, since he had been seeking to appeal Shipman's conviction.\n"It is extremely strange, to put it mildly," di Stefano said. "Something is not really quite right there."\nTwo years after Shipman's conviction for the 15 murders, High Court Judge Janet Smith, appointed to determine the true number of victims, reported that he had murdered at least 200 more between 1975 to 1998, when he was a trusted and beloved physician in West Yorkshire and then in Hyde, outside Manchester.\nSmith said there were also 45 deaths for which a "real suspicion" fell on Shipman, and a further 38 lacking insufficient evidence to form any conclusion. Prosecutors had ruled out further trials.\nSmith's count makes Shipman the worst serial killer in British history.\nBritain's most famous serial killer is Jack the Ripper, who in 1888 roamed the smog-clouded streets of London's East End by night, killing and mutilating at least five prostitutes. He was never caught or identified.\nThe motivation behind Shipman's murder spree has never been determined, and remains one of British criminology's biggest mysteries.\nIn all but one case there was no evidence he killed for money, and "no suggestion of any form of sexual depravity," Smith reported. One victim made Shipman the beneficiary of her will.\nThe doctor's death is deeply frustrating for the families, said retired Detective Supt. Bernard Postles, who led the investigation into the murders.\n"For the last four years, they have held out some hope he would tell them the reasoning behind these offenses," Postles said. "Unfortunately, that never came to pass and he's now dead and taken the secrets to his grave."\nPostles said he believed Shipman might eventually have confessed to the killings had he lived.\n"I am not sorry he has gone, but it brings it all back and it stirs it all up for us again," said Kathleen Wood, whose 83-year-old mother, Elizabeth Baddeley, was murdered by Shipman in 1997.\nIn the small town of Hyde, where many once looked up to Shipman, someone scrawled the word "Justice" on the doctor's shuttered former office.\nShipman's activities only aroused suspicion in March 1998, when another doctor, whom he had asked to co-sign some cremation certificates, expressed concern at the number of deaths. Police concluded there wasn't enough evidence to pursue charges.\nThe investigation was reopened months later after a woman discovered that her 81-year-old mother apparently had changed her will before she died, leaving everything to Shipman. That led to exhumations and to Shipman's arrest.