The awfulness of Harold Shipman
Brian Masters
PRESCRIPTION FOR MURDER by Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie Warner Books, £5.99, pp. 348 here is one crucial discipline which must be exercised whenever one writes about addictive murderers (quite apart, that is, from studiously refusing to call them 'serial killers', which is a mathemati- cal observation bereft of any useful descrip- tive value), and that is to hone the professional detachment necessary to clear thinking. It is no good getting upset by the viciousness of slow strangulation and the squalor of dismemberment if one wants to comprehend and explain the kind of mentality which can make the perpetrator indifferent to them. You need to analyse, not to shudder.
And yet, in the recent trial of Dr Ship- man at Preston, I found it impossible not to loathe and despise the man, precisely because, I suppose, his crimes were not violent but performed with ostensible kind- liness. The ladies he killed rolled up their sleeves and thanked him as he despatched them into their darkness. The betrayal of trust was so wicked it is no wonder the judge was almost in tears as he passed sen- tence upon this monster. Nevertheless, now that the court has decided upon the facts, the case still merits objective examination of the character of this man, and a book is called for to do the job properly.
Unfortunately, this is not such a book. Obviously written before the verdicts were returned, and finished off the week before last, it is little more than a rehearsal of the evidence heard in court, supplemented by some resourceful digging into Shipman's past, all of which one has already found in the extensive newspaper coverage. We learn that this was everybody's idea of the perfect family doctor, like a 'favourite uncle', on the one hand, and a little tyrant on the other, rude to subordinates, super- cilious, bullying, full of his own cleverness, and living in the sort of dump that makes you want to wipe your shoes as you leave. But the authors have not spoken to Ship- man, nor to his wife, nor to his children. Their only contacts have been the police, neighbours, and the families of the bereaved, all of whom gave statements or evidence in open court. In a short chapter at the end, they interview half a dozen experts who offer their shorthand opinions but had nothing to do with the case. Only one of these, the thoughtful Mark Greswell at Rampton, adds anything worthwhile, and that is reduced to one paragraph.
Considering also that their style allows them to compare detectives to their fiction- al counterparts on television, to inform us that Mrs Shipman wore in court 'a volumi- nous dark-blue cotton suit patterned with gold motifs', and to opine that Shipman 'turned the Hippocratic oath into the hypo- critical oath', one would be optimistic to expect a work of literature.
One shaft of insight does give pause. It has been reported everywhere that the killer's mother died of cancer when he was 17 and that he spent the night afterwards running in the rain. The wretched woman, only 42 years old, was given morphine to ease her agony, a process that the grieving son would probably have witnessed. Whittle and Ritchie suggest that he might even have helped administer the drug. In that case, all his subsequent murders could have been selfish repetitions of that blissful moment when he watched his mother's release.
But they do not pursue the line they have opened. Instead, they rely on the fashion- able clichés that Shipman wanted to exer- cise power, to play God, to be in total control, all of which dances around the nut without trying to crack it. They also take it for granted that he planned the murders with Machiavellian cunning and skill, mur- ders which he probably did not anticipate for more than a few moments, and he almost certainly would not have regarded them as murderous. (The way in which he stockpiled morphine is not inconsistent with this; one may make rational prepara- tions for an irrational moment). As to why this obsessive control and power and plan- ning should have been devoted to slaugh- ter, Whittle and Ritchie tell us 'it was a deep need within his own personality'. Well, thanks a lot.
They are right to point out that Shipman was able to regard the bodies of his victims 'separately from the individuals who inhab- ited them', but they give no indication that they know why they are right. They do not explore the nature of necrophilic pleasure or the personality of the necrophile (which is often not sexual at all); indeed, they do not even mention the word. When they quote Gresswell's important observation 'Be gentle with that doll, Sweetheart. It's not a toy.' about the addictive element in repetitive murder, they drop it immediately and pass on to something else. All this is very disap- pointing; it belongs in a Sunday colour magazine.
The awfulness of Harold Shipman's crimes resides in their perverted delicacy. They were his private, sordid, secret, furtive little moments, seen by nobody, free of interference, uncontaminated by the dodginess of sharing, as guilty in his mind as having a forbidden fag behind the bicycle shed. For he was not so much inter- ested in murder as in the presence of death. The authors of the book under review might not spot the difference.
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