WE KNEW HIM AS FRED, A FAMILY FRIEND AND DEVOTED DOCTOR. THEN HE

HAROLD SHIPMAN killed Jane Ashton-Hibbert's grandmother 16 years after he delivered her younger sister. The trusted hands that delivered a new life - Julia - to her family belonged to the same man as the perverted, dread hands that were callously to take away an old life - Hilda - from her family.

For 20 years, Harold Frederick Shipman ("we called him Fred") was Jane's family GP. Her parents, her 10-year-old daughter, her sisters, her 81-year-old grandmother whom she used to see every day - they all used him.

Jane, 35, even went to school with Shipman's daughter, Sarah, and occasionally he gave her a lift home. She also knew Shipman's wife, Primrose, as she often worked in the reception at his Hyde surgery.

Yet what happened on the afternoon of 2 January 1996 - the afternoon that Shipman came calling to her grandmother's cottage in Joel Lane - will be etched on her mind for ever. It dragged her into a mire of grief, anger and enervating sadness. And it challenged her, almost to the point of insanity, to reconcile two irreconcilable pictures of the man she thought she knew as her devoted family GP.

Of course, we know now that the nightmare Jane has lived through is similar to that of hundreds of other families whose mothers, grandmothers - in some cases grandfathers - were killed in eerily similar circumstances. Older people, living alone, found dead in the afternoon, fully dressed in an armchair, uncannily within minutes of Shipman calling, requests for post-mortems brusquely brushed aside by the GP. Every serial killer has their modus operandi. Shipman was no exception.

In Joel Lane alone - a country road in Gee Cross, an affluent part of Hyde in Greater Manchester - no less than eight of Shipman's elderly women patients, some of them close friends of Jane's grandmother, Hilda, were to die in suspicious circumstances. The list included 81-year-old Kathleen Grundy, former mayoress of Hyde who lived up the hill at No 79, and whose murder twoanda-half years later would be Shipman's last, leading to his conviction for 15 murders and life sentence.

Today, when Dame Janet Smith, chair of the Shipman Inquiry, announces her interim findings, the families of the Joel Lane victims, and the families of more than 450 others, will have had the final moments of their loved ones disclosed in public. Each family will have already been privately informed, within the last 48 hours, as to whether their relative was murdered, died "by natural causes" or whether there is " insufficient evidence". It will have been a tortuously long 18-month wait since the inquiry's work began back in February 2001. And today, too, they and the rest of Britain will have learned just how many lives it is that the man - who will go down as Britain's biggest serial killer in history - snuffed out.

In this context, the story of Jane Ashton-Hibbert is both illuminating and surprising. Not only does it offer us a keyhole view into what many families have experienced, and the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of Shipman, but it challenges - because of the ferocious love she had for her grandmother - the way we often dismiss the lives of old people and diminish their importance in society.

What is more, it profiles the uplifting story of how an ordinary middleclass housewife found hidden reserves to take on City Hall and win. For when the Government announced back in February 2000 that a limited private inquiry would be held behind closed doors, Jane went head-to-head with the Director of Public Prosecutions on national television.

"Murder is murder," she angrily told him. "What you have offered is not justice. We demand something more."

Jane was soon appointed spokesperson for more than 160 families as they formed the Tameside Families Support Group and began their tenacious fight to force the Government to reconsider.

They sought a judicial review in the High Court, which found in their favour, and led directly to the Secretary of State for Health announcing that the inquiry would be held in public - and with a wider remit, as the families had demanded.

Today's report is the culmination of phase one of that process (phase two will investigate the police and the medical profession) - a process that for Jane began on that fateful afternoon in 1996.

Jane sits in her conservatory in her new pounds 300,000 house set amid manicured lawns, on top of a hill with stunning 360-degree views of Manchester.

Her husband, Martin, is a successful businessman and she has every material thing a young mother could want. Yet her eyes are veiled in sadness and she talks - six years on - in a still wounded voice.

"My gran liked Shipman a lot, and got on really well with him. She thought he was a good doctor and even fought to get one of her friends on his list.

We all used him, we all thought he was good, except my husband, Martin, who refused to have Shipman as his doctor because he didn't like the over-free way he prescribed drugs for his patients."

SHE says that, on one occasion, Martin accompanied her when she took their daughter to Shipman for pre-school injections. She said: "[Martin] happened to mention that he hadn't had a tetanus jab and, within about 20 seconds, Shipman had given him a jab. Shipman was very quick to give people injections. If you went along to see him, and there was some new drug out which could help you, he would always get it for you, and if you needed time he would spend it with you.

"And yet he had this other side. He was quite an authoritarian man. Once I visited him about something and he said, 'I'll tell you what you've got. I'm the doctor, not you'.

"But there were other days when he'd get his textbooks out and show you things, and you'd be in there half an hour, way beyond his call of duty.

"You never knew which side of him you'd see.

The day after I had my daughter - I had gone private - he turned up unannounced and sat on the edge of my bed while I lay there with my new baby.

I remember him telling me to take a photo of her every week so I could see the changes in her, like he had done with his family. Now tell me, how do you reconcile that caring image of him with the murderous image we have now?"

Jane has lived in Hyde since she was born. Her grandmother, Hilda Hibbert, was born there too, and lived five minutes away, a journey that Jane would make almost every day of her life.

"My gran was like a second mother to me," she begins. "My parents both worked fulltime, so I spent a lot of time with her. I had my own bedroom there and saw her every day. Gran's health was good. Although she had rheumatism, which meant that when the weather was damp her joints would stiffen up and she found it hard to walk, she was otherwise an incredibly healthy and active person.

"She wrote books on local history and was still giving talks on the subject until the week she died.

In fact, she was interviewed by Women's Hour of Radio 4 just days before.

"She was the matriarch of the family and she had a great love for cats, which she passed on to every member of the family, each of whom has at least one." She smiles and adds: "And I, well I currently have eight!"

The winter of 1995 was a typically wet one in Manchester, and around Christmas Hilda began to feel her joints stiffen up. Usually, she would rest and put up the heating when it got bad like that, but on 2 January Jane's mother, Janice, called the surgery in Hyde before she left for work and asked: "Can Fred come and check on Hilda - she's feeling a little poorly."

Jane's plan was to spend the day with her gran until Fred came later - he always did house visits in the afternoon. She arrived at 10am just as her gran was coming down the stairs. "I feel so much

better," she told Jane. "I don't think there's need to call Fred."

"Let him come and check you over, gran," replied Jane. "What harm can it do?"

Neither knew, of course, of the harm that Shipman had already wrought in verdant Joel Lane. Two years earlier, almost to the day, he had killed Joan Harding, 82, a retired social worker, who lived a few houses up the hill at No 55.

The suspicious death of Chrissie Kitchen, 70, six months after Joan's, would also end up being investigated by the police - as would those of five other elderly Joel Lane patients who died after Hilda.

They included: Carrie Leigh, 80, Hilda's best friend, who lived at No 26; Marion Elizabeth Higham, 84, who lived next door to Joan Harding; Joan Dean, a former actress and Coronation Street extra; and there were others, including Kathleen Grundy, who in a wicked twist of fate had been the one who had found the dead body of her friend and neighbour, Marion Elizabeth Higham.

The elderly residents of Joel Lane, like the residents of greater Hyde, were dropping like flies. But, at this stage, no one thought to investigate why such a high proportion of Shipman's patients were dying.

After a lunch of toasted cheese, Jane ran errands for her gran. When she left, her gran was sitting in her armchair watching Neighbours. When she returned an hour later, at about 3.30pm, the TV was off and her gran was slumped in the chair - no pulse, dead.

Within minutes, an ambulance crew arrived and, finding electrical activity in her heart, were trying to revive her. "I was unsure whether Shipman had been, so I called the surgery," recalls Jane. "Within minutes, Shipman burst through the door and shouted, without examining her, 'Leave her - she's dead!' At the time, I just thought he was taking control of the situation."

Shipman told Jane he had visited earlier and that, finding her gran's blood pressure was high, he had ordered an ambulance and left, and that she must have had a massive stroke after he left. Jane asked him about a post-mortem and he said she didn't need one, as he was the last person to see her alive.

Like the relatives of most of Shipman's victims, Jane was initially mystified at how her gran could have been fine one moment and dead the next.

Certain things niggled, like the fact that a friend had been speaking on the phone to Hilda when the doctor arrived and she'd excused herself, saying she had to answer the front door.

How could she be well enough to open the door for the doctor and yet be dead 20 minutes later?

But she trusted the doctor and accepted what he told her. She missed her gran terribly but grieved normally. At least, that was how it was until the news broke in September 1998 that Shipman was being investigated for the murder of Kathleen Grundy and that her body was to be exhumed.

"Everyone waited with bated breath. When they found traces of a lethal dose of heroin - diamorphine - in her blood, then we knew.

We started going over that last hour in our minds. Within days, mum had phoned the police. They came and took our statement.

They were looking at each other, nodding.

Something was not right.

"Within 24 hours they had assigned us a bereavement liaison officer."

It would be months before they would find out that there were dozens of families in the same situation, and that, in almost every case, the pattern was the same. They were all elderly people, living alone, killed in the afternoon, either in his surgery or in their home, with a lethal dose of diamorphine. No witnesses.

"When something like that happens," says Jane, as we walk to her gran's cottage, "a black cloud descends. You can't grieve normally. You're angry, confused, terribly sad.

And you have a hunger to know what happened, so you keep going over each detail, trying to make it all add up. The worst part is the betrayal of trust. And the loss of the twilight years. For these things I can never forgive him. And, from what I see, other families feel somewhat similar."

If there is a silver lining, it is this. Fighting for a public inquiry, ensuring that every family would get their case heard, Jane has found a strength she didn't know she had.

She knows the verdict in their case will be "unlawful killing", as theirs is one of few cases the Coroner's court pronounced on before the public inquiry began. But today hundreds of other families are sitting with their verdicts for the first time. "They will feel euphoric if the result accords with what they know in their heart of hearts. But then it sinks in, it's there in black and white, your relative was murdered."

We stand before the green door at No 36 Joel Lane, where Jane used to bound up the steps that would take her into her gran's warm embrace. Someone else lives there now. She wipes an eye and quickly walks away.

Now it is time for Jane Ashton-Hibbert to move on. She owes it to her husband and her daughter, she says. "For many families, this report is the start of being able to look to the future, whatever that may bring."

Wise words. But, when Jane Ashton-Hibbert looks back, there is one thing she can say for sure. "I did the best for my gran. She would have been proud."

Copyright 2002
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