Just after 6am on Tuesday, Harold Shipman, described as a man addicted to murder by the judge inquiring into his 23-year killing spree, wound one end of a prison sheet round his neck and the other round the bars of his cell and took his own life. It was the eve of his 58th birthday.
Shipman, Britain's most prolific serial killer, will go to his grave having apparently left no explanation as to why he murdered 215 of his patients.
He died in Wakefield prison in northern England, to which he was moved from Frankland jail in Durham in June last year. His "obnoxious" arrogance and rudeness to prison staff had quickly led him into trouble.
Just before Christmas his enhanced status was reduced to basic. He was deprived of the TV set in his cell and had to wear prison uniform rather than his own clothes.
Last week Shipman was moved back up to standard level and some of his privileges were restored.
Some of the relatives of his victims said good riddance yesterday, saying he had chosen to die the way the state should have disposed of him. Some felt a sense of closure, but many continue to feel a desperate anger at a man who may have killed simply because he could.
His 57-day trial late in 1999 had thrown up no motive. At the end Shipman did not bat an eyelid when, after six days of deliberation, the foreman of the jury announced unanimous guilty verdicts on 15 murder charges.
Wearing his usual light brown suit and striped tie, he stood in the dock at Preston Crown Court and said nothing, giving no clue to the grieving families of his victims as to why he had so often reached for his lethal morphine syringe.
At 5:07pm on Jan. 31, 2000, Justice Forbes passed 15 life sentences. But neither the judge, nor the jury, the barristers, the solicitors, or even the psychiatrists had any more clue then as to why Shipman had become Britain's most lethal serial killer than they had when the extraordinary story first came to light.
Sir David Ramsbotham, the UK's former chief inspector of prisons, suggested in the Guardian that the "life means life" sentence Shipman faced was in fact "little more than a living death sentence" and may have contributed to his suicide.
"The mental state of someone without hope of release must be almost impossible to predict," he says.
Charles Bushell of the Prison Governors' Association said that since Shipman knew he was never going to be released the only control left to him was to decide the date of his death.
It is one factor that Stephen Shaw, the UK's prisons and probation ombudsman, who was asked yesterday by the home secretary to carry out a full inquiry into Shipman's death, will have to consider.
Shaw yesterday promised to publish as much of his findings as possible.
"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. If there were, I must reveal that. If there were not, then part of my function is to educate people into what are the realities of trying to run a prison in a reasonably decent and sensible way," he said.
The decision to appoint Shaw to undertake the investigation means an early start for the prisons ombudsman in his new role of investigating deaths in prison, which was due to start in April.
Shipman was placed under suicide watch when he entered prison five years ago, but this ended when he was moved to Wakefield.
As a high-security, category-A prisoner, checks were made on him hourly throughout the night on Monday. His body was discovered when the routine 6am general check was made on all inmates in the prison.
The UK Prison Service said there was no reason to believe that Shipman was a suicide risk. He had been behaving "utterly normally" and had shown no signs of suicidal tendencies. Shipman had a six-minute phone call with his wife, Primrose, on Monday night but the staff at Wakefield who monitored it said nothing untoward had been mentioned.
Jane Gaskill, daughter of one of Shipman's victims, 68-year-old Bertha Moss, said: "He has won again. He has taken the easy way out. He has controlled us all the way through and he has controlled the last step and I hate him for it."
In the village of Walshford, 48km from Wakefield, where Shipman's family lives, one of the doctor's three sons said there would be no further statement from the family for the rest of the day.
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