Uploaded September 2020 | Updated September 2026, 5 days ago
Between 1946 and 1956, 163 of John Bodkin Adams' patients died while in a coma. 132 of 310 patients had apparently left Adams money or items in their wills. He was tried and acquitted for the murder of one patient in 1957. Was he a kindly doctor whose treatments to relieve pain for his ailing patients in their final days had inadvertently hastened their demise, as he claimed? Or was he one of Britain's worst serial killers in history?
Note that this program was made in 1995, three years before Harold Shipman was arrested. Shipman remains the only doctor successfully convicted of murdering his patients in British history as of 2020.
One of the Great Crimes and Trials 'missing' episodes.
Between 1946 and 1956, 163 of John Bodkin Adams' patients died while in a coma. 132 of 310 patients had apparently left Adams money or items in their wills. He was tried and acquitted for the murder of one patient in 1957. Was he a kindly doctor whose treatments to relieve pain for his ailing patients in their final days had inadvertently hastened their demise, as he claimed? Or was he one of Britain's worst serial killers in history?
Note that this program was made in 1995, three years before Harold Shipman was arrested. Shipman remains the only doctor successfully convicted of murdering his patients in British history as of 2020.
One of the Great Crimes and Trials 'missing' episodes.
