'Britain's worst serial killer murdered my gran - now I'm playing him on stage'
20.08.2023 - 09:37
/ manchestereveningnews.co.uk
The man with a big bushy beard who had a bowl of midget gems on his desk - that's how Edwin Flay remembers his family doctor.
But the world would come to remember him as Britain's worst serial killer.
Harold Shipman was found to have killed at least 215 people, and one of them was 47-year-old Edwin's grandma.
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Now, Edwin has written a one-man show, The Quality of Mercy, in which he stars as the mass murderer.
And he says that while trying to write the play - which is currently running at the Edinburgh Fringe - he realised that the passage of time since Shipman's conviction had meant some people had lost sight of how truly evil his crimes were.
He said: “I remember talking about trying to write it to someone.. I said I had been working on a play about Harold Shipman, and I’ll never forget that she said, ‘Oh yes, he helped a few old dears over the threshold,’ and I had to say ‘No. He killed 218 people, and those are just the confirmed ones.’
“It hit me that people were losing sight of it – that I’d lost sight of it – just how terrible the extent of his crimes were.”
He says when he first set out on writing the play, he wanted to explore whether assisted dying was a motivator for Shipman, Cheshire Live reports.
"But then, of course, as soon as I started doing research I was absolutely stunned by how awful it was and how plainly it was an act of megalomania rather than any sort of compassion.”
Edwin, a political journalist and researcher at the BBC for more than 20 years, was born a year after Shipman’s first confirmed killing, and lived in Hyde, Tameside, for the first eight years of his life. Of the 215 people