10 Serial Killers Who Were Doctors

Doctors are regarded as human gods. They can save a person's life by their expertise in medical science. They have an expert understanding of the fragility of human body. But what if a practitioner starts using his understanding of medical science in an evil way? They have access to a wide range of lethal instruments and toxic drugs. And some of them develop egos and pride fed by the feelings of control over someone's life and death. 

History has witnessed doctors who ended up killing more than 200 people in their lifetime. Who were these evil doctors, and why did they kill so many people? That is what we are about to answer.

10. Robert Knox

Robert Knox was an anatomist from Scotland. His most significant development includes the revolutionary idea of transcendental anatomy. He was a popular lecturer in the college, and students admired him for his precise dissection sessions held almost every day. Wait? Human dissection regularly? From where did he get so many bodies?

Knox hired Burke and Hare to supply the human bodies for his dissection. Both the men were already killing people in the neighborhood for money, but now they could earn more by looting the body and selling it. Consequently, body-snatching became so common that relatives and friends of someone who had just died kept a watch over the body until burial.

Police suspected that Knox knew about the murders, but he was ignoring all the facts. In 1847, the Royal College Edinburgh found him guilty for forging the student's certificate of attendance and refusing to accept any other credentials from him, effectively barring him from teaching in Scotland. In the same year, he was removed from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and his nomination was canceled retrospectively.

9. Harold Shipman

Harold Shipman or Dr. Death is considered to one of the cruelest serial killers of modern history. He was a general practitioner at Abraham Ormerod Medical Centre. He was the guy you could have visited for the next medical checkup and end up getting a prescription that insists on consuming weird medicines so that your body could be added to his "collection." He was found guilty of murdering 15 women by lethal injections of diamorphine.

The police have investigated other deaths Shipman had approved and investigated 15 cases of specimens. They uncovered a trend of his delivering fatal doses of diamorphine, signing patient death certificates, and then falsifying medical documents to suggest that they were in ill health. The total number of people he killed was approximately 250.

Shipman was sentenced to life imprisonment, but he later committed suicide in his jail cell. Several hypotheses have been put forward to illustrate why Shipman turned to murder. Some say he was seeking revenge for his mother's death, who died when he was 17. The more compassionate opinion is that he pumped diamorphine into elderly ladies as a means to relieve the pressure on the NHS.

8. Marcel Petiot

Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot was a French doctor. Petiot joined the advanced educational program for war veterans, completed medical school in eight months. He was awarded his medical degree in December 1921 and later moved to Paris after plenty of illegal fraud to pursue his desire to kill people in his basement. He is suspected of killing about 60 people in his lifetime, but the true figure is uncertain.

The neighbors who lived near the Petiot's house complained to the police regarding foul smell throughout the society and a black smoky cloudy which was hovering over his house. When police reached the house, and they saw the most horrific scene of their lives. The remains of more than 20 people were lying like garbage, and some were burning in the coal pit. He never confessed to all the murders and kept insisting that he was innocent.

On May 25, 1946, Petiot was decapitated after a stay of a few days due to a guillotine release mechanism problem.

7. Kermit Gosnell

Among all other killers on the list, Kermit Gosnell is the biggest shame to humanity. Although the number of people he killed was not many, his murders were most brutal and ruthless. He killed three infants who were alive during the abortion procedures and was also accused of killing a woman.

Gosnell owned and managed a Women's Medical Society facility in Philadelphia, which was referred to as the "House of Horrors" abortion clinic during the trial. It was the place for new mothers for frequent checkups, and Gosnell played his dirty game under the veil of a medical facility.

Gosnell was later guilty of 21 criminal counts of unlawful late-term abortion and 211 counts of violation of the 24-hour informed consent rule.

6. Linda Hazzard

Linda Laura Hazzard was an American doctor and serial killer famous for promoting fasting as a treatment. She did not hold a medical degree but was licensed to practice medicine in Washington due to a disparity that had prevailed in other non-graduated complementary medicine practitioners.

During her medical practice, Hazzard published three books about what she believed to be fasting science and how it could heal diseases. These books were utterly illogical and based on baseless conjectures. She was also known as a "starvation doctor" because she forced her patient to remain on fast until the treatment goes on, and it led to the death of more than 15 people.

In 1912, Claire Williamson, a rich British woman who weighed less than 50 pounds at the time of her death, was killed by Hazzard. It was proved at the tribunal that Hazzard had forged Williamson's will and stole much of her valuables. Hazzard was sentenced, and she served in the Washington State Penitentiary.

5. William Palmer

William Palmer, also known as the Rugeley Poisoner or the Prince of Poisoners, was an English surgeon found guilty of murder in one of the most controversial crimes of the 19th century. He studied medicine in London and became a physician in August 1846.

Palmer brutally killed his friend John Cook. He poisoned Cook with strychnine and was also suspected of poisoning many other people, including his brother, mother-in-law, as well as four of his children who died of "convulsions" before their first birthdays.

His main purpose for killing his relatives and other people was money. He acquired a hefty amount of money after the killing of John Cook and his brother. Around 30,000 spectators were taken to Stafford Prison on June 14, 1856, to witness Palmer's public execution hanging.

4. Joseph Michael Swango

Michael Swan, also known as Dr. Death, was an American doctor and serial murderer. Swango graduated from Quincy summa cum laude and received the American Chemical Society Award. After college, Swango attended a medical school at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.

Swango is believed to have been engaged in as many as 60 lethal poisonings of patients and colleagues. During her surgical internship at Ohio State University Medical Center, nurses found that a growing number of seemingly stable patients were unexpectedly dying. They reported their complaints to the administrators; however, in 1984, Dr. Swango was cleared of all wrongdoing after a cursory investigation.

He was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences without the chance of parole in 2000 and is serving his sentence in the ADX Florence Supermax prison near Florence, Colorado.

3. John Bodkin Adams

John Bodkin Adams was a British general practitioner who was accused of bribery and alleged serial murderer. Between 1946-1956, more than 160 of his patients died mysteriously, and 132 of whom had put Dr. Adams in their will before he passed away, which was extremely surprising. While he was tried for the murder of one patient in 1957, he was never proven guilty of the crime.

He was later tried and acquitted for the murder of one patient in 1957. The trial became the headline all around the world and was portrayed as "one of the best murder trials of all time." A subsequent trial found him guilty of 13 offenses, including prescription fraud, misleading on cremation forms, obstructing police searches, and failure to maintain a record of dangerous drugs.

He was withdrawn from the Medical Registry in 1957 and reintroduced in 1961 following two unsuccessful applications. He continued to practice medicine until he died of natural causes in 1983.

2. Carl Clauberg

Carl Clauberg was a German gynecologist who performed surgical research on human subjects primarily Jewish in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He operated as an infantryman throughout the First World War. After the war, he practiced medicine and finally became Chief Doctor of the University Gynecological Clinic. He joined the Nazi party in 1933, and due to the prevalent friction between Nazi and Jewish people, he was appointed to perform mass sterilization on women.

Clauberg aimed to find a simple and inexpensive way of sterilizing women so that they could never get pregnant. He inserted formaldehyde formulations into their uterus without anesthetics. His study subjects were Jewish and Romani women who had suffered permanent injury and severe infections. Many of the participants were killed because of the experiments. Estimates of those that have been sterilized are about 700.

In 1955, after a public outcry from groups of women who survived his sterilization procedure, Clauberg was arrested and put on trial. He died before trial on August 9, 1957.

1. H. H. Holmes

H. H. Holmes had the intelligence of Sherlock Holmes and the desires of Kermit Goswell. Holmes is considered one of the most horrific killers of all time, and his murders started around the Jack The Ripper killings, which made it more terrible for the people.

Holmes was tried and sentenced to death for just one crime, the murder of accomplice and business associate Benjamin Pitezel.

It is estimated that he may have killed as many as 200 people as possible. Holmes did almost everything that each killer in the list did, including abortion killings, torture, lethal poisoning, basement killings, burning bodies, issuing wrong prescriptions, kidnappings, and the list never ends.

He constructed a "Murder Castle," which was like a maze designed explicitly for killing women and men. The house had almost everything required for complete destruction of the human body. Holmes was hanged in Philadelphia County Jail on May 7, 1896, for the murder of Pitezel. Until his passing, Holmes remained peaceful and polite, displaying very few panic, anxiety, or depression symptoms. Despite this, he demanded that his coffin be contained in concrete and buried 10 feet underground because he was afraid that grave robbers would seize his body and use it for dissecting.