Serial killer chatted up pharmacist to get drugs

8.25am - By IAN HERBERT

LONDON - A pharmacist who allowed herself to be so charmed by serial killer Dr Harold Shipman that she lost all professional objectivity was severely censured yesterday for handing him the drugs he used to kill scores of patients.

Ghislaine Brant, who still dispenses drugs from the pharmacy next door to Shipman's old practice in Market Street, Hyde, Greater Manchester, was "chatted up" by Shipman, whose charm offensive included asking for her advice and reminders and telling her tales from his surgery, according to Dame Janet Smith, chair of the Shipman Inquiry.

Mrs Brant, a former Boots trainee, was so taken with the GP that she unquestioningly allowed him to take regular quantities of diamorphine, the drug he injected into his victims.

Shipman who was convicted of 15 murders in January 2000 and is suspected of at least 245 in all, was found dead in his prison cell six months ago.

Dame Janet was particularly alarmed by Mrs Brant's willingness to accept Shipman's bizarre requests for 14 30mg ampoules of the drug - enough to kill 24 people - during a seven month period in 1993.

The 30mg quantities were too large to treat the pain experienced after a heart attack (the use Shipman claimed he was putting them to) yet too small to treat a cancer patient, and they were always collected by Shipman - which was highly unusual.

In fact, the 14 prescriptions, signed for in the name of patients who, it later emerged, either did not have cancer or were dead, were added to the stockpile which gave Shipman the means to kill.

When she testified at Manchester town hall at the inquiry into the GP's killing spree, Mrs Brant said the 30mg quantities had not made her suspicious because Shipman's first request had been for 5mg (the appropriate amount for a heart attack patient) and that she had supplied him with 30mg because she had no small ampoules in stock.

Thereafter, he had prescribed 30mg ampoules.

Dame Janet rejected her testimony.

"I found that Shipman had prescribed 30mg ampules from the start," she said.

Mrs Brant had no notion of Shipman's crimes and it was simply her "misfortune" that, within 12 months of her starting work at a pharmacy in Market Street, Shipman moved into the surgery next door, Dame Janet said.

"To use a colloquial expression, he chatted her up," she said.

"[Mrs Brant] did not fulfil her professional obligation in questioning Shipman. My criticism of her is mitigated because I have no doubt Shipman had deliberately set out to win her confidence and to deceive her."

Ahead of the report, Mrs Brant had been given the day off yesterday by the pharmacy's new owner, Co-op.

A certificate on the pharmacy wall attests to her membership of the Pharmacological Society of Great Britain.

The situation in Hyde was exacerbated by the presence of an inexperienced Greater Manchester Police detective constable, Patrick Kelly, who was three months into a part-time role checking up on controlled drugs registers when he visited Mrs Brant's premises.

Mr Kelly's inadequate training, which amounted to a few weeks shadowing his predecessor, contributed to his failure to spot Shipman's activities.

Had either Mrs Brant or Mr Kelly alerted the authorities, an investigation would have revealed that Shipman had a conviction from the 1970s for hoarding pethidine to feed his own addiction.

"The investigation would have had a salutary effect on Shipman, who would probably have ceased killing for some time," said Dame Janet.

"In that way, at least some lives would have been saved."

Instead, between 1992 and 1998 Shipman obtained more than 24,000mg of diamorphine illicitly and during the same period he killed at least 143 patients.

On one occasion, in 1996, he managed to acquire "an enormous" 12,000mg of the drug in one go - enough to kill 360 people.

The report, the fourth to be issued by Dame Janet and her inquiry team, observed that the controlled drugs regime, unchanged since 1973, remains open to abuses by doctors and nurses who prescribe drugs for themselves, friends and family.

The report called for the establishment of a drugs inspectorate to monitor and audit the prescription and handling of controlled drugs.

It called for forms to allow prescriptions to be more easily monitored, said that the identity of anybody who goes to a pharmacy to obtain them should be recorded, and that there should be stricter rules around the disposal of such drugs.

- INDEPENDENT