A woman who saw Harold Shipman visit a pal’s house to kill her has finally spoken of how she helped get him convicted.
Gloria Ellis sparked a breakthrough in the case when she called police – linking the mass-murdering GP to a scene for the first time.
She had seen him visit neighbour Winifred Mellor, a widow of 73, one afternoon in May 1998 then return hours later to “discover” her body.
Gloria said: “I saw a man pull up. I heard Mrs Mellor’s gate go. I knew it was three o’clock because I had to pick up my children from school.
“I came back and I was watching the news at six when he knocked.
“The same man was there and asked if I had a spare key for Mrs Mellor’s. I said, ‘You were here this afternoon’ and he was annoyed that I’d seen him in the afternoon.
“We went into the house and Mrs Mellor looked like she’d gone to sleep. I cried, I’d never seen anyone dead and she was a friend.”
At first, Gloria thought Shipman was just on a house call. But when he ended up on the news regularly, she went to the police.
Talking on C5’s Shipman: 5 Mistakes That Caught A Killer last night, she said: “I remember seeing it on the telly. I said, ‘That’s him, he’s the one I saw at Mrs Mellor’s’. I thought, ‘He’s got to have murdered Mrs Mellor’.”
The show also heard local priest Father Denis Maher was suspicious after an unusually high number of parishioners died suddenly.
He said: “It would come up they were a patient of Dr Shipman.”
Recalling going to see Winifred’s family, he said Shipman arrived too, adding: “[He] said there was no need for a postmortem or autopsy as he’d seen her in her final days and could sign the death certificate.”
In 1999, Shipman was convicted of murdering 15 patients in Hyde, Gtr Manchester, including Winifred. But further inquiries found evidence he killed more than 250.
He hanged himself at HM Prison Wakefield on January 13, 2004, a day before turning 58. Widow Primrose, 70, is living in the North of England.
