The Shipman Files: A Very British Crime Story - Episode Guide

Chris Wilson re-examines the case of Harold Shipman, exploring how attitudes to the elderly enabled the GP to get away with the murder of hundreds of patients.

Chris Wilson examines how the idea of `a good death" helped Harold Shipman escape detection. Since his victims died painlessly in the comfort of their own home, many family members were too grateful for the lack of suffering to question anything untoward about the doctor's actions. He talks to the family that led a successful campaign to reexamine every death connected to Shipman throughout his medical career - going back to 1974.

The final edition opens by looking at the first report of the public inquiry into the deaths of Harold Shipman's patients, concluding that while working as a GP he had murdered 260 of them. Chris Wilson explores the reaction to the staggering total, exploring how attention began to focus on the killer as experts and commentators came up with a range of psychological profiles and theories to try to understand why one, seemingly ordinary doctor had killed so many people.