.....and with the topics that have been flowing around here, this is
something for you to read in your idle time. Someone sent it to me for some
reason....and it is kind of interesting....
Hollywood movies are crawling with cold-blooded murderers, so why all the
fuss over Hannibal Lecter? Yes, there's Anthony Hopkins's icy and brilliant
performance as the coolly deranged killer. But what really sends us into
spine-chilling overtime is not that he's just a killer...but a killer MD.
Doctors take oaths promising to "First, do no harm." We are taught to trust
them from the time our parents first took us to the pediatrician. Doctors
are
intelligent, not some half-human, half-animal product of a sorry upbringing
and poor education harboring a need for revenge. And so we are presented
with
the most frightening thing of all -- something we just can't understand. As
the London Daily Telegraph wrote about Dr. Harold Shipman, one of the
murderous docs detailed below, "Shipman has never given the slightest clue
to
what drove him to do what he did. It is this lack of a plausible explanation
that makes Shipman so scary."
If a couple hours with Hannibal wasn't enough to swear you off of any kind
of
doctor except a Ph.D. in Asian History, then have a look at our College of
Killer Physicians below. And remember...An apple a day...
Dr. Michael Swango -- Deadly Doc du Jour
Since the early 1980s, nurses and other medical colleagues had looked at Dr.
Michael Swango with a suspicious eye. Beginning with his residency at Ohio
State University Hospital, an unsettling number of Swango's patients
developed unexplained complications and often died under his care. But
before
enough evidence could be assembled, Swango moved on. He did stints at
various
hospitals across the country, each time taking off when people started to
suspect something. He was finally imprisoned for falsifying his professional
medical history, and during that time prosecutors were able to secure enough
evidence to charge Swango with murder.
The deadly doc favored trusty, proven potions such as ant poison and
arsenic,
sometimes administering them to unsuspecting coworkers via laced doughnuts
and tea. Many think Swango was less interested in murdering than he was in
the research aspects of his gruesome science experiments. "I think he wanted
to take them to the edge of death," Dennis Cashman, the presiding judge in
the trial, told "20/20" last August. "If he wanted to kill these people, he
had plenty of arsenic to do the job. But he didn't do it. And he was calling
them regularly and checking on their symptoms."
Source: ABC News
Dr. Harold Shipman -- Dr. Death
What Harold Shipman lacked in creativity he made up in sheer homicidal
quantity. Convicted of killing 15 women patients with lethal injections of
morphine between March 1995 and June 1998, this British doc is suspected of
causing some 300 deaths. He's now serving 15 life sentences, one for each
homicide he was convicted of plus an extra four years for forgery: After one
of his victims was dead, Shipman had the gall to falsify the poor woman's
will, leaving him with $1 million. In response to public outrage over the
fact that Shipman was allowed to get away with so many killings before he
was
caught, the British government has created an agency aimed at nipping future
Shipmans in the bud. No longer will warning signs ("Dear Mr. Blair -- Dr.
Shipman killed me mum") be taken so lightly.
Source: APBnews.com
Dr. Thomas Neill Cream -- Was He Jack the Ripper?
Like Hannibal Lecter, Dr. Cream was a clever fella, but his love of the
notoriety his murders brought him would prove to be his downfall. While he
was serving a life sentence in the 1880s, Cream's father died, leaving him
$25,000. The good doctor was paroled after only 10 years, and it is thought
his early release had more to do with bribery than with good behavior. Upon
his release, Cream went on to poison patients, neighbors, and anyone else
who
didn't tickle his fancy, including at least four prostitutes from 1891-1892.
At the time some believed he was actually the notorious London serial
killer,
Jack the Ripper, a possibility the attention-loving Cream did little to
dispel. However, it's almost certain he wasn't, as Dr. Cream was in Chicago
at the time of the Whitechapel murders.
Sources: The Medical Post, The Mirror, Casebook.org
Dr. Glennon Engleman -- the Deadly Dentist
Unlike most killer doctors, who tend to use their medical specialties as
weapons, Glennon Engleman chose a more traditional route to homicide --
which
seems strange to us, considering the wide array of deadly weapons that he,
as
a dentist, had at his fingertips. Over 22 years, he killed seven people for
their life insurance and for unpaid dentistry bills, using a variety of
tactics, including car bombs and good old-fashioned bullets. He collected
the
insurance by killing his former male patients and then wooing their widowed
wives to give him money to invest for business purposes. Former female
patients who didn't pay their bills, on the other hand, were just killed. He
was eventually caught by a would-be female victim who wore an undercover
microphone, and was sentenced to three life terms.
Source: Appointment for Murder: The Story of the Killing Dentist. (Putnam,
1988)
Dr. Sirot Karnjanaprasertpol & Dr. Weeradech Lertdamronglak -- Urban Legend
Comes to Life
It's everyone's favorite urban legend: After a night of partying with two
new
friends, you wake up in a bathtub full of ice with a stiched-up incision
where your right kidney used to be. What's different about this case,
however, is that the kidney thieves don't even bother letting you live. In
August 2000, these two Thai docs were charged with purposely letting two
patients die so they could remove their kidneys and sell them to wealthy
patients. Karnjanaprasertpol and Lertdamronglak are also charged with
issuing
medical documents falsely certifying that the victims were brain-dead. If
convicted, they could face the death penalty.
Source: Associated Press
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