Shipman's victim total may be 192, says inquiry

A 22-month investigation into serial killer Harold Shipman was finally wound down yesterday, revealing that he may have killed 192 times.

What began on 24 July 1998, when a woman voiced her suspicions about her mother's will leaving £386,402 to Shipman, ended as Britain's biggest murder inquiry of the past 100 years.

When Shipman, 54, was convicted and jailed for life in January for murdering 15 patients with lethal injections of diamorphine, 136 deaths had been examined. Another five cases emerged a day after the conviction and within a week police said the number of suspicious deaths stood at 175. In total, 59 new deaths were brought to the police within five weeks.

Though some of the 192 deaths have been investigated on slender evidence, the scope of the inquiry would have been even larger had police sought out suspicious deaths. In the event, they confined their work to deaths brought to them by relatives.

Shipman's guilt could never have been determined in some cases dating to before 1985 because the itemised telephone bills, medical records and cremation certificates on which detectives have relied do not exist.

Shipman's case dwarfs Britain's biggest murder investigations - those into Dennis Nilsen, who admitted killing 16 gay men in London between 1978 and 1983; arsonist Bruce Lee, jailed in 1981 for murdering 15 people by setting their houses ablaze; Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe who killed 13 times; and the Wests, who murdered at least 12 young women. The world's most notorious killers include Andrei Chikatilo, who murdered 52 women and boys in the Soviet Union between 1978 and 1990.

Though the Director of Public Prosecutions ruled out charging Shipman with more deaths because the defendant could not get a fair trial, a team of 20 officers has continued investigating cases out of a moral obligation to families in Hyde, Greater Manchester, where he operated his solo medical practice.

Detective Superintendent Bernard Postles, who led the inquiry, said most of the work was now complete. The incident unit at Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester, is moving to a smaller office in Stalybridge, though officers were still informing the relatives of suspected victims of the investigation's outcome.

The announcement came three days after the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, ordered inquests into the deaths of 23 suspected victims, all women, on which detectives submitted papers to the Crown Prosecution Service. Dr John Pollard, the South Manchester coroner, told Mr Straw he wanted to hold further inquests.

Shipman is serving 15 life sentences at Frankland prison in County Durham.