The Scotsman - UK - Families claim items from Shipman's jewel hoard

Harold Shipman, a medical doctor in the UK, was found to have killed just at 250 of his patients over three decades.

That's no typo. Two hundred fifty people died at this man's hands. He liked to give drug overdoses.

Now his widow (he hanged himself in jail) wants the police to hand over to her the jewelry they found in the Shipmans' garage at the time of his arrest, never mind that it's almost certainly stolen from his murder victims. To make it worse, many of the pieces are wedding rings, and other are undoubtedly heirlooms. The police, to do them credit, have said that of course under the law they have to hand her whatever doesn't get claimed - but are refusing to do it until they've made one more mighty attempt to find the rightful owners (or their survivors, at any rate).

The Scotman has a large archive of Shipman articles, going back to 2001.

See, for instance: http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=484&id=101652005, which gives results from the final report of the Shipman Inquiry. I mean, this guy is thought to have killed 15 people just while he was in training, and never let up from there.

The good news, if any, is that serious efforts are underway to find out how he managed to keep his crimes secret all these years, and some hidebound, circle-the-wagons institutions are having it impressed upon them that looking out for your own is only acceptable up to a point. There are also new rules on signing death certificates, etc.

As it happens, the serial killer wasn't caught until a lady noticed something funny about her mother's will. Shipman was then arrested in September 1998, and charged with the murder of Kathleen Grundy and forging her will. That investigation turned up other fishy deaths, which led to more investigation, which turned up more fishy deaths, and so on.

Up until then:

He was able to stockpile vast amounts of diamorphine - the clinical name for heroin - which he had either falsely prescribed or taken from cancer patients after their deaths.

Nor were there any procedures for detecting that the death rate among Shipman’s elderly patients was three times higher than normal for the area.

Shipman "bullied and bamboozled" relatives of many of his victims into avoiding post mortem examinations which would have revealed traces of morphine and felt safe in the knowledge that cremations would destroy vital evidence.

(excerpt from http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=484&id=43772004)