Flipping through the pages of the book about the Serial Killer Dubbed "Doctor Death," I got to the section containing all my personalized notes.
A habit I formed back in the early days of my investigations was note-taking, wherein I would essentially try to find the exact point of why it all went wrong for the killer, i.e., the moment they ensured they would be captured by law enforcement.
And for Harlow, in my opinion, it was the moment he began his ploy to acquire more drugs.
Although he was an addict and had been for some years, with his drug of choice being a strong opioid pain reliever named Pethidine, he needed a way to gather copious amounts of Morphine.
The finalized idea he came up with was overprescribing terminal patients and pocketing the excess. In a sense, this was the first of many dominos that would inevitably lead to his downfall, as each time he over-prescribed patients for Morphine, he would, in turn, leave a paper trail.
However, when even that proved not to meet the expectations of his required amount of the drug, he really stepped outside the circle of comfort and even began purposely misdiagnosing people.
Patients would come in, concerned about specific aches and pains, and BOOM, they were suddenly told they had terminal cancer. They would then be placed on a full regiment of medication, allowing Harlow to obtain more Morphine.
If this was a one-off thing, I probably could have written it off and looked at one of the other LARGE fuck ups the man exhibited; however, it wasn’t just one time; he ended up doing this with multiple people, so much so that it even alerted authorities.
Unfortunately, luck was on Harlow’s side, as he was able to evade the eyes of the law and, in the end, was left free to continue his chain of killings.
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To make matters worse, forging false prescriptions wasn’t even the only thing he did to leave a paper trail. As it was the late ’80s and Early ’90s, computers had begun taking the place of physical documents and charts. Harlow, believing himself to be OH SO smart, took it upon himself to continuously alter patient charts, inventing ailments and reasons to justify his prescriptions.
Now, from the 2000’s onward, there was no conceivable way this would have been a logical possibility, as everything is so tightly monitored; still, with the budding emergence and superiority of technology in the field, it was early enough that he was able to adjust and modify everything manually.
"Truly a foolish man, his paper trail continued to grow to the point that once the final piece fell in place, it was all easily traced back to him, and all because he got greedy and wanted more morphine to continue killing." Shaking my head, I stood by my reasoning, believing this was the start of his downfall.
"Sure, other things happened later, one which directly correlated with his capture; however, had he attempted to evolve his killing method instead of falsifying things and trying to be smarter than he truly was, he would have stayed a free man much longer than he did." I mused to myself.
"As his killing window was massively unstable, sometimes up to six times a week, and others not a death for months, it can be directly tied to whether he was able to get his hands on the meds."
"With his need for more Morphine increasing at a steady pace, he needed to create new channels to obtain it constantly, and in the end felt he was ahead of the police so long as he "Cooked the Books" or falsified documents." Flipping through my notes, I continued on to the next puzzle piece, the one that inevitably signaled his downfall.
Although numerous deaths could be attributed to him involving children or even young adults, as I said, his primary target was the elderly.
The reason being he could weasel his way into their lives and, by hook or crook, convince them to hand over all their inheritance to him, and here we find the next major domino, one which, in the end, was the reason he got caught.
After being nearly caught, thanks to his fucking up with a misdiagnosis case, the police, although having botched the case and missing their opportunity to stop him, scared the shit out of Harlow to the point where he shifted gears and went after wealthy targets.
Up until now, he was satisfied being a low-tier thief, swiping the pocket change of his victims, but now, with Damocles’s sword hanging over his head, he needed to get enough money to flee the country and go on the run; thus he changed his MO and even succeeded in getting a bunch of old women to hand over their life savings to him.
Come 1998, though, his house of cards, unstable as it was, came crashing down when he chose the wrong target and made a massive mistake.
During one particular murder, he slipped up and, in his haste, left such a trail as even a child could point their finger at him. Basically, after killing a particular old lady, Harlow positioned her body in a chair that her family knew she would never sit in, as it wouldn’t allow her to see out the front window, something the lady was known to enjoy doing.
He had also tricked the woman into signing over her house and over 300 thousand British pounds to him, and well, her family, mainly her daughter, called foul.
It was a lesson in Serial Killer 101; a simple mistake can fuck it all up in an instant, and that was precisely what happened. Once the lady got the cops onboard and they exhumed the woman’s body, they found incredibly high traces of Morphine in her muscle tissue and liver, and with that single thread pulled, everything came to light.
Having created an EXTENSIVE paper trail leading back to him, it wasn’t long before Harlow Sheffield was behind bars, and in 1999 he was put on trial.