For decades, Harold Shipman was known as "the good doctor", a GP in the British town of Hyde, who was always happy to make house calls to visit his elderly patients.
But behind the friendly facade of a retiring family man was a monster with a secret.
Shipman was Britain's most prolific serial killer.
WARNING: This story contains details that some readers might find distressing.
Targeting mostly older women, the GP's modus operandi was almost always the same.
He would call on his patient at home to treat a mild ailment, inject her with a deadly dose of morphine, alter her medical notes to suggest she'd been gravely ill, and then encourage the family to opt for a cremation over a burial to incinerate any evidence of his crimes.
When he was finally caught, he was convicted of 15 murders.
But an inquiry later concluded that he might have killed as many as 250 patients, the youngest, a four-year-old girl.
By the time he died in prison in January 2004, Shipman had earned himself a new nickname, "the angel of death".
His motive remains something of an enigma.
While most serial killers are driven by the pursuit of sex or money, Shipman seemed to simply enjoy choosing who lived and who died.
"He was exercising the ultimate power of controlling life and death and repeated it so often that he must have found the drama of taking life to his taste," prosecutor Richard Henriques QC said during the murder trial.
But perhaps the greatest mystery of all is why a serial killer as careful as Shipman made a string of errors with his final victim.
Always quiet and methodical in his violence, Shipman suddenly became sloppy as he made a wealthy widow his next target.
The murder of Kathleen Grundy, and the trail of evidence that pointed directly to her doctor's involvement, left investigators wondering if the angel of death wanted to be caught.
The tragedy that may have shaped a killer's life
The defining event of Shipman's strange and violent life bears eerie similarities to his future career as Britain's worst serial killer.
At the age of 17, his beloved mother Vera became terminally ill with lung cancer.
There was nothing doctors could do but make her comfortable in her final months, and a young Shipman watched on as she was given large doses of morphine to keep the pain at bay.
Shipman refused to ever talk about his motives, but soon after his mother's death, he enrolled in Leeds University Medical School to become a doctor.
He married his wife, Primrose, and together, they had four children.
When he graduated, he got a job at Pontefract General Infirmary in West Yorkshire, where he may have committed his first murder.
In 1972, Shipman was a 26-year-old junior doctor, assigned to look after Susie Garfitt, a four-year-old suffering from pneumonia triggered by her quadriplegia and cerebral palsy.
Her mother later told the Shipman Inquiry that the young doctor encouraged her to go have a cup of tea down at the hospital cafeteria while he looked after the child.
When she returned 10 minutes later, her child was dead.
"The fact that the death occurred so soon gives rise to the suspicion that Shipman somehow precipitated the death," the inquiry chairwoman, Dame Janet Smith, said in 2005.
The girl's death did not arouse suspicions at the time, and Shipman soon completed his hospital internship and joined a private practice in West Yorkshire.
There, his colleagues soon began to notice that large quantities of the painkiller pethidine were going missing.
When Shipman was discovered in 1976, he was hopelessly addicted to the drug, injecting himself with 600 to 700 milligrams of pethidine a day — so much that his veins had begun to collapse.
"It is indeed a very sad case — that almost at the beginning of your career you should find yourself in this position," Magistrate Maurice Goldin told Shipman when he fined him $1,200 for obtaining a drug by deception, as well as seven counts of forgery.
Shipman agreed to enter counselling and attend a rehab program, so he was not struck off the medical register.
This reprieve allowed him to join a practice in Hyde, where he quickly established himself as a pillar of the community.
It was also the place where he began to kill on an industrial scale.
Dr Jekyll moves to Hyde
Hyde is a small town on the fringes of Manchester, not far from vast swathes of windswept, isolated moorland for which the area is famous.
It also has a grisly past.
Throughout the 60s, local Hyde couple Ian Brady and Myra Hindley would kidnap children from the area, drive them out to the surrounding moors, and murder them.
By the time Shipman moved in, Hyde hoped there was nothing left to fear.
But they were wrong.
Shipman set up a thriving doctor's surgery on Market Street, which soon boasted a patient list of nearly 3,000 people.
"I genuinely thought he was a great doctor, very intelligent," former patient Paul Spence later told the court.
"I went to see him with different things, and he always had time to talk. You would expect to be kept waiting … but you accepted it because you knew he would spend time with you.
"There was a year-long wait to get onto his list. He was the most popular doctor in Hyde."
Locals remembered him as an odd, gruff figure — his house was famously spooky, swallowed up by ivy and weeds, and he was known to be rude and arrogant to his colleagues.
But his patients adored him.
"Many patients describe Shipman as having a wonderful bedside manner, especially with the elderly," Dame Janet later concluded.
"He would make much of them and sometimes tease them gently. They liked it. He made them feel that he was a real friend as well as their doctor. Yet he would kill them."
He could be blunt with his patients' loved ones, but they often appreciated his candour.
In February 1998, when the son-in-law of a 77-year-old patient asked how much longer he had, Shipman tersely responded: "I wouldn't buy him Easter eggs."
What made Shipman really special in the eyes of the community was how willing he was to make house calls.
It took decades before some locals noticed the correlation between Shipman's visit to an elderly patient's bedside, and their sudden, unexplained demise.
Usually, he would wait until the relative left the room before he injected his patient with diamorphine hydrochloride.
In one instance, he administered 12,000mg of the drug to a patient — enough to kill 360 people.
His presence at the scene meant that he could fill out the death certificate, and advise the family against asking for a post-mortem.
"Some of his descriptions of sudden death are breathtaking," Dame Janet wrote in the Shipman Inquiry findings.
"'I turned round to get my stethoscope out of my bag and she just collapsed and died'; 'I was telephoning for an ambulance and she gave one cough. When I turned round, I could see that she had died'; 'She just died while I was examining her.'"
There were periods during Shipman's decades-long career as a serial killer when he stopped for a while — usually because an attempted murder had gone wrong, or a nurse who was a stickler for paperwork became suspicious of him — but these brief periods of restraint never lasted long.
"When he resumed killing, he did so gradually, sometimes beginning with a terminally ill patient," Dame Janet said.
"It was as if he were entering the pool at the shallow end to see if he could swim."
But by 1997, Shipman seemed to be spiralling out of his own control.
In the course of just one year, he committed 37 murders, meaning that he killed a patient every 10 or so days.
A local GP who was often asked to co-sign cremation forms for Shipman began to see a ghoulish pattern emerge. She reported him to the local coroner.
So too did a taxi driver who drove many elderly patients to their appointments at Shipman's surgery. He phoned the police.
Authorities concluded there wasn't enough evidence to suggest that Shipman was anything but a kind GP who went above and beyond for his elderly patients during their final days.
Shipman might have gone on killing for years.
But in 1998, he set his sights on the former mayoress of Hyde, Kathleen Grundy.
This time, he diverged so wildly from his own modus operandi, and made so many blunders in the process, that the mask slipped, and the monster beneath was finally revealed.
The 'angel of death' meets his match
Like 79.5 per cent of Shipman's known victims, Grundy was an older woman.
And at 81, she was still extremely active in the town she loved, taking part in charity work and maintaining a wide circle of friends.
On June 23, 1998, she went to her regular GP's surgery to have her ears syringed, and he offered to make a house call the next day to see how she was going.
Four hours after Shipman visited Ms Grundy at home, her friends found her dead, sitting fully clothed on her couch.
Distraught, they called Shipman back to the house, where he declared that his long-time patient must have suffered from a cardiac arrest.
He then phoned the local coroner's office and offered to write out the death certificate, stating "old age" as the cause.
By 1998, Shipman was well practised in taking a patient's life without arousing much suspicion.
But in choosing Ms Grundy as his victim, he put himself in the path of her formidable daughter, Angela Woodruff.
Something about her mother's sudden death didn't sit right with the lawyer, despite Shipman's claims that she was in poor health and may have been addicted to morphine.
A month after she died, Ms Woodruff made a startling discovery: She had been written out of the will.
"I give all my estate, money and house to my doctor," Ms Grundy apparently wrote in a will drawn up just weeks before her death.
"My family are not in need and I want to reward him for all the care he has given to me and the people of Hyde."
Ms Woodruff immediately went to the police, and would not give up until they opened an investigation.
"Once they knew that I was a lawyer, it became much easier," she told the BBC in 2000.
"I suppose I was more likely to be objective being a solicitor. I also realised the seriousness of the case straight away."
The evidence against Shipman was undeniable.
Ms Grundy's will, leaving her $780,000 estate to her doctor, was deemed a "hopelessly incompetent" forgery by the Shipman Inquiry.
He had typed it himself on a manual typewriter police found in his surgery, leaving a fingerprint on the document, and sending it to a local solicitor, who had never represented Ms Grundy before.
Ms Woodruff had also resisted Shipman's pressure to have her mother's body cremated, and when her remains were exhumed, they found lethal amounts of morphine in her liver.
Shipman was arrested, and police soon began to dig into his past, where they discovered untold horrors.
To this day, psychiatrists remain puzzled over Shipman's decision to forge the will.
Some who contributed to the Shipman inquiry believe he had lost touch with reality, and thought himself to be untouchable.
Others suspect that either consciously or subconsciously, he wanted to be caught. By 1998, he was killing one patient a week, and his insatiable appetite for death only seemed to grow.
"I think he might have devised a fantasy plan, by which he could obtain Ms Grundy's money, run away and stop being a doctor," concluded Dame Janet.
"Whether he needed to end the killings only because he feared detection or whether there were other psychological needs, I do not know.
"But I think that the intolerable tension between his drive to kill and his need to stop lay at the root of this fantasy. That is the best explanation I can offer for the final event."
How did this happen?
For decades, Shipman relied on society's disregard for the elderly to get away with murder.
He focused his violence on women — "old ladies" whose deaths might seem inevitable.
But to the people who knew and loved his victims, they were much more than that. They were grandmothers, matriarchs, active members of the Hyde community, who still had life to live.
After insisting he was innocent, and weeping through his trial, Shipman was sentenced to life in prison in January 2000.
Two years later, a day before his 58th birthday, Shipman died by suicide in his prison cell.
Some relatives of his victims said they felt "cheated" because he never offered an explanation for his unimaginable actions.
But the timing of his death — two years before his 60th birthday — meant that his wife, Primrose, was able to claim a tax-free lump sum of more than $200,000, as well as an annual payout of $20,000 under the National Health Service's pension scheme.
The Shipman Inquiry was convened to investigate the scale of the doctor's crimes, how institutions had failed to stop him for so long, and what changes were needed to prevent it happening again.
In 2005, after taking 2,500 witness statements and analysing 270,000 pages of evidence, Dame Janet released a 5,000-page report.
In it, she called for a shake-up of the procedures that follow a death in Britain, and recommended a new coroners' service with legal and medical expertise.
She said coroners should be backed by a team of expert investigators to ensure that a homicidal doctor would not be able to exploit the system again.
"As a general practitioner, Shipman was trusted implicitly by his patients and their families," Dame Janet concluded.
"He betrayed their trust in a way and to an extent that I believe is unparalleled in history.
"The way in which Shipman could kill, face the relatives and walk away unsuspected would be dismissed as fanciful if described in a work of fiction."
