Death Certified

On 31 January 2000 a jury at Preston Crown Court convicted Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in Hyde, Greater Manchester, of murdering fifteen patients. The verdict did not settle the larger question. A public inquiry chaired by Dame Janet Smith examined his patients' deaths one at a time and reported far bigger findings, and it was careful to say that those findings were not convictions.

Death Certified follows the case from Shipman's training and his 1976 pethidine convictions through his years at Donneybrook and Market Street, the certificates and cremation forms that passed through his hands, and the concerns raised in March 1998 by doctors across the street. It examines the police investigation that closed its file in April 1998, the forged will that finally exposed him, the trial and the Inquiry that followed.

The book draws on the Inquiry's own reports and states plainly what each number means: 15 murder convictions, 215 killings found in the First Report, 218 positively identified in the final report, and an estimate of about 250. One chapter takes the fifteen convicted cases one by one. Later chapters follow the Inquiry's reports on policing, certification, controlled drugs and regulation, and the long road to the medical examiner system that took statutory effect in England and Wales on 9 September 2024.

Every finding is tied to the public record, with chapter notes, a dated chronology, a glossary and a bibliography.