Dr Harold Shipman has today been found guilty of murdering 15 female patients while working at his Manchester surgery.
As Shipman was receiving 15 life sentences, sources close to the investigation confirmed that files on the deaths of 23 other patients have been submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service with a view to bringing further murder charges against the 54-year-old married father of four.
Mr Justice Forbes, the trial judge at Preston crown court, told Shipman that he would "spend the remainder of your days in prison" for his "wicked, wicked crimes".
"In your case life must mean life," he said.
A jury of seven men and five women delivered the verdicts after six days of deliberations, bringing an end to a four-month trial in which more than 120 witnesses were called. Shipman had denied all the charges.
Shipman, who becomes one of the worst serial killers in modern British history, was found guilty of murdering Kathleen Grundy, 81, by injecting her with heroin on June 24, 1998.
In addition, he was convicted of forging widow Mrs Grundy's £386,000 will, an act which led to his arrest in August 1998. Shipman received an additional four-year sentence for this charge.
The jury also found Shipman, from Mottram, near Hyde, Greater Manchester, guilty of the murder of Bianka Pomfret, 49, Winifred Mellor, 73, Joan Melia, 73, Ivy Lomas, 63, Marie Quinn, 67, Irene Turner, 67, Jean Lilley, 59, Muriel Grimshaw, 76, Marie West, 81, Lizzie Adams, 77, Kathleen Wagstaff, 81, Norah Nuttall, 65, Pamela Hillier, 68, Maureen Ward, 57.
He killed all 15 women between March 1995 and June 1998.
Harold Shipman ran a thriving practice with 3,100 patients. His defence argued that the case against him was based solely on "unreliable and unsafe" scientific evidence of the levels of morphine found in the bodies of his victims.
But in the end the jury was convinced by the overwhelming weight of evidence that made it, in the words of Mr Richard Henriques QC, prosecuting, "quite incredible" that all 15 patients could have suddenly died natural deaths on the very day they were seen by the GP.
Shipman stockpiled vast quantities of morphine and then used it to kill his victims by giving them a lethal injection.
He was not licensed - by his own choice - to hold drugs at his surgery, probably because of his conviction for misuse of drugs more than 20 years earlier, but obtained the morphine and diamorphine by prescribing it for other patients who did not need it, or who had died.
Detectives remained baffled about the motivations for many of the murders. In only one known case - that of his last victim, wealthy widow Kathleen Grundy - did the GP stand to benefit financially, through his clumsy attempt to forge her £350,000 will.
Police concluded that Shipman was probably motivated to murder by his desire for control, which developed into an obsession with the power of life and death. Detective chief inspector Mike Williams, who interviewed the GP, said: "He likes control, and the ultimate control is over life and death."
