Harold Shipman, a GP in the Manchester suburb of Hyde, was returning home for lunch after a morning house call when he decided to kill one of his patients.Joseph Bardsley, was 83, ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog’, as his son-in-law John Hopwood would later describe him, with ‘absolutely nothing wrong with him mentally or physically’.
But at some point in his visit, Shipman carefully and calculatedly injected Joseph with a fatal dose of diamorphine. He would write on the death certificate that Joseph had died of ‘old age’.We will never know what explanation Shipman gave to Bardsley for administering the injection that would kill him.