Harold Frederick Shipman, also known as Fred Shipman, or Dr. Death, was a British serial killer known for killing up to two-hundred sixty patients from 1975 to 1998 while he was a general practitioner in Todmorden, Lancashire, and Hyde, Greater Manchester. A suspicion of Shipman arose when a funeral director, Deborah Massa, and Brooke Surgery doctor Linda Reynolds noticed the high mortality rate among elderly women in his care, however, police did not find anything in their investigation. More suspicions arose when the daughter of one of his victims found her previously healthy 81-year-old mother Kathleen Grundy dead in her apartment only hours after Shipman had visited her. She became especially wary of Shipman after he was named a beneficiary in Kathleen’s will. 

When the investigation was re-opened, police properly investigated Shipman and found that Kathleen Grundy had traces of heroin in her system. While going through Shipman’s medical journal, it police found that he had added that Kathleen was an addict after her time of death. Shipman was then charged with fifteen counts of murder and one count of forgery in 2000. He was sentenced to life in prison and hanged himself in his cell four years later. The government then launched an investigation to figure out how many people he had really killed and come up with up to two-hundred sixty cases.