Shepherd’s first major case as a forensic pathologist was the Hungerford massacre in 1987. One of his tasks was to check that Michael Ryan was dead after he had shot himself. Fearful that Ryan had a bomb, police would not go near: “I was on my own in a classroom with the UK’s biggest mass murderer.”
In his long career, he has conducted more than 20,000 post-mortems, seeking to establish the cause of death in people who have died from illness, crime, massacre and mass disasters. It’s an emotionally challenging job, and he acknowledges it involves suspending “some aspects of our own humanity”. But he finds the unique mix of medical knowledge and detective work immensely stimulating and has never lost his sense of awe for the “remarkable mechanism” of the human body and “its beauty”.
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