A public inquiry into killings carried out by Harold Shipman, suspected of being the world's worst serial killer, heard on its opening day yesterday he had a history of drug abuse but had still been allowed to practice.
Ms Caroline Swift, leading the inquiry's legal team, told the hearing that Shipman, called "Doctor Death", had been convicted in 1975 of forging prescriptions to feed his reliance on the painkiller pethidine, but authorities had ignored it.
Shipman (55) was convicted in January last year of killing 15 of his elderly patients in Hyde near Manchester by injecting them with overdoses of heroin.
Inquests have since added another 25 to the list of unlawful killings, and a report has linked him directly to 236 more suspicious deaths.
The public inquiry at Manchester Town Hall under Dame Janet Smith will examine a total of 466 cases - a number she said last month could rise still further as the hearings proceeded.
This figure would put him top of the world serial killer league, well ahead of Colombian Pedro Alonso Lopez, suspected of killing 300 people.
A comparison with family practices in the area showed that Shipman signed 345 more death certificates than the others. Many died in the afternoon, at home and alone.
Dame Janet said her team had written to the relatives of more than 150 people whose death certificates Shipman had signed to get details about the deaths.
The grey-haired, bespectacled doctor is serving 15 concurrent life terms, and the judge who sentenced him told him he would never be released from prison.
His wife, Primrose, was at every day of his trial and has visited him regularly in jail. She has never spoken in public about the case.
Shipman, who was a family doctor in northern England for 24 years, was trusted and respected by his patients until the murderous details of his life emerged during a trial that made world headlines.