By FRANCES GRANT
Although the case of Britain's worst serial killer "Dr Death" was gruesome, two recent television documentaries on the police investigation into the murders managed to portray the horror without salacious details.
But no doubt there is a special place reserved for his case in the vault where such things are recorded for posterity: the police museum which serves as a criminal hall of fame.
Any exhibits from the trial or police investigation of Dr Harold Shipman, however, will surely pale in comparison to some of those kept under glass in Scotland Yard's infamous display space beneath its London headquarters.
Tales From The Black Museum, a series made for the Discovery Channel and screening on Prime tonight at 8, makes the most of the macabre stories behind the exhibits of Britain's most notorious cases.
Last week's episode on the Acid Bath Murder committed in 1949 by John George Haigh was not for the weak of stomach.
Haigh had his own method for disposing of the body of one Mrs Durand-Deacon after he shot her in the head and stole her fur coat and jewels. He immersed the corpse in a drum full of sulphuric acid.
The result of the rendering process, the narrator informed us, relishing Haigh's own words, was "a mess of sludge."
To make sure we got the picture, there was a re-enactment of the dissolution. And further illustrating the point, we saw the effects of the treatment on a lump of flesh and bone akin to an amputated foot.
The contents of the sludge, complete with melted body fat - Mrs Durand-Deacon was a plump woman, we learned - and gallstones, were also meticulously detailed.
The series is presented as a history of crime detection and pathology. The Acid Bath Murder was an early example of the forensic science of odontology - matching victims' teeth to dental records.
The first episode in the series traced the establishment of "the murder bag," a kit of detection tools which became a standard accessory for police investigations after a crime committed in 1924.
This was a messy one, too. After dismembering his lover's body, Patrick Mahon attempted to get rid of it by boiling and burning, and stashed the organs in a hat box and biscuit tin.
In a re-enactment of the autopsy conducted in Mahon's backyard, we saw the neighbours gawking over the fence at a table spread with grisly remains.
Despite the programme's supposedly educational purpose, you can't escape the feeling of being implicated in that kind of voyeurism.
The most gruesome scene from those documentaries on Harold Shipman was of the police tent covering the site of graveyard exhumations.
Unlike that recent crime, Tales From the Black Museum can be told from the safe distance of time. But they would be just as compelling real-life whodunits, and the series would still be an intriguing illustrated history of the development of forensic science, without all those graphic renderings of blood and body parts.
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.
Latest from Lifestyle
Heather Mills: ‘I lost my leg, had a million illnesses. You just carry on’
The former model and ex-wife of a Beatle on saving herself... and her vegan food empire.