Todays story comes from Sheffield in South Yorkshire, a City of almost 560,000 people around 160 miles north-west of London and 35 miles or so south of the focal point of world football, Leeds. Very close to the M1 motorway, it is also very close to the peak district and has more trees than any other city in Europe – about 4.5 million of them. Bands from the City include Pulp, the Human League and the Arctic Monkeys.
Carol and Colin Shawcross were both studying medicine in Sheffield when they met in March 1974 at a student party. As part of her studies, Carol spent three months of that year in working in Africa, and when she returned home her then-boyfriend was waiting at the airport. The time apart had made him realise he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Carol and so he proposed to her. The couple married in March 1975 and, three years after the wedding, Dr Colin Shawcross took up a partnership at Firth Park surgery in Sheffield a where he stayed until he retired and then went to work at nearby Royal Hallamshire Hospital. He was by all accounts an excellent GP and very popular with his patients.
The couple had three boys and Colin was a very hands-on Dad. Over their marriage they lived a very full life, both successful in their careers, lots of travel and their children all progressed well. In summary, life was good.
Julie Hill was a nurse working in the endoscopy unit of the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield. Also working there at this time was Doctor Colin Shawcross. As so often happens in workplaces all over the country in January 2008, the obvious attraction between the couple led to a sexual relationship developing. There was a slight issue as both were married and living with their partners. However, the relationship continued to deepen and by the summer both realised that they wanted to be with each other. This meant they both had the dreadful task of telling their partners that they were leaving them.
In August, Colin told his wife of 33 years about the affair and moved into a rented house in the Aston area of Sheffield. Julie, who had a 12 year old son with her engineer husband Andrew, told him that she would be leaving him to move in with her lover. Andrew was utterly devastated and told Julie that if she left him he would take his own life as he couldn’t live without her. This put Julie in a terrible position as she feared that her husband would follow through with his threats and she decided to stay in the marital home for the time being.
Feeling that is he improved his behaviour towards his wife, there was a chance she would try again with him, Andrew Hill did all he could to rekindle what they once had. Well, certainly in terms of material possessions anyway. He immediately started work in the house with a full redecoration along with spending almost £1500 on carpets. After 15 years of marriage to Julie he didn’t want to split up. He also promised his wife that he would buy her a sports car. Andrew even phone Colin and in a call he said the following: ‘I wanted to know why he had to have my wife. I wanted her back. ‘I implored him to leave her alone. I wanted him to go back to his wife.’
An emotional Andrew shared with his wife emotional letters where he talked of suicide and this had a real impact on Julie who was taken aback by the strength of his feelings and she met Colin Shawcross alone to sort things out one way or the other’.
Andrew nervously waited for Julie to return from this meeting, feeling that absolutely everything depended on the outcome. And when she came home Andrew was delighted when she told him that the affair was now over for good. He said, ‘It was finished between them. I was overjoyed. I could have forgiven her anything.’
But just two weeks later he was utterly crushed when he looked at his wife’s mobile phone bill and saw that the affair was anything but over as Julie had been calling and texting Colin over the last couple of weeks.
On 23 January, Julie told him that their marriage really was over and she was leaving him for Colin. Andrew became very angry and started shouting.’ Hill shouted to their son George that it was ‘all his mother’s fault’ and that she was ‘splitting up the family’. He then threw Julie and their son out of their house, tossing her clothes and toiletries out of the window as she tried to pack some things into a bag for her and her son. He refused to let Julie take the car keys and she fell to the floor as he ‘grabbed’ her to get the keys from her pocket. In a violent and volatile mood he smashed her mobile phone against a wall and snapped the SIM card.
One neighbour drove over the clothes and apologised but Andrew said to her, that for all he cared, she could have driven over them a few times as they were his wife’s clothes and she’d been having an affair.”
One of his Neighbours put up Julie and her son for the night, and the neighbour tried to calm Andrew down. She said: “I asked Andrew why he thought Julie was having an affair with Colin Shawcross and he said, ‘well, it’s the money’. I said money wasn’t everything.
At the neighbours house, Julie borrowed a mobile and texted Colin and he sent her a text message at 11.54pm. Julie arranged to meet Colin at 7.30am the next morning. But when she arrived at his house on that Saturday morning he wasn’t there. There was no sign. But there was a large pool of blood on the back patio and his car was on the drive with signs of blood in the boot and on the driver’s seatbelt. In a state of deep shock Julies fingers trembled as she dialled 999.
Andrew Hill was arrested straight away on suspicion of murdering Colin Shawcross. When he was arrested by police at his home in Woodall, the morning after Colin had disappeared and he was told why he was being arrested he replied: “Colin? I’d give him a slap if I knew where he was.”
During police interviews, Hill denied murdering Colin. He didn’t deny that he was incredible angry with him and would have liked to be violent towards him as Hill told officers that he would have “liked to have got hold of him and knock seven bells out of him.” He told police that he would have liked to “punch his lights out” but somebody beat him to it.
Forensic experts and a pathologist at Colin’s house were very clear that it would have been impossible for someone to have lost so much blood discovered in the doctor’s house to have survived without receiving urgent medical attention.
At the start of the February, the Shawcross’s family said they had to accept that he had been killed and they were stunned by his death. A statement from the family referred to the gentle nature of a man who was never violent.
It said: “We are stunned by the death of our father. “Always a gentle man, never violent, he appears to have met his death by brutal means. “The family said Dr Shawcross and his wife of 33 years, had separated last August but they remained on good terms and he had shared the family Christmas celebrations. It continued: “The recovery of our father’s body, would provide solace for so many, especially our mother. “It would go some way to providing closure, and let us celebrate the life of such a well loved, valued and respected man.”
But still Andrew Hill wasn’t admitting responsibility. He denied knowledge of murder or where the body was now and claimed to have hired Irish “hardmen” to carry out an attack on Colin. He said, “I fully accept being involved to some degree. But I never anticipated the horrendous outcome. The truth is I never gave any thought to what these two men could have done. All I asked of them was to frighten Colin away”.
As there was no actual proof that the doctor had died due to their being no body, detectives wanted to be absolutely sure that the charge they were looking at was murder. Detectives contacted every hospital and dental surgery in the country to confirm nobody of the doctor’s name had been treated or registered as a new patient since he disappeared. They went even further to check no new utilities had been registered and contacted every supplier of gas, water, electricity and satellite and cable TV in the country to prove the doctor had not registered as a new customer. In addition, banks and mobile phone companies were approached while ports and airports were also contacted to ensure he had not tried to leave the country.
It was almost five months later as home when Julie realised that the wheelbarrow was missing. The search for this wheelbarrow led police to look in local woods as this wheelbarrow could well have been used to bury a body? Despite a number of red herrings, this line of enquiry eventually took the Police to Loscar Wood just a few miles from where Colin had lived in the rental house. This is large piece of land, a 37-acre wood that could take up to 2 years to thoroughly search properly but the police were fortunate that through good old fashioned police work they quickly spotted disturbed twigs were spotted.
This led to the discovery of Colin Shawcross’s body, found buried in a six foot deep hole.
Hill was forced to admits that a spade and a wheelbarrow found in Loscar Woods close to where the doctor’s body was found, belonged to him. But he still denied murdering him. He also admitted to being in possession of Colin’s jaguar. But he insisted it was the Irish men he had hired who must have done something as he hadn’t. Needless to say these two men were never traced.
With the discovery of Colin’s body, Detectives were now even more convinced that Hill was responsible. Julie Roberts, a specialist in forensic archaeology and anthropology, told them that of the hundreds of graves she’d excavated during her career, this was one of the best hidden and up to three times deeper than the average grave. She said, “I’ve encountered them dug that deep when machinery has been used, but not by hand. There’d been quite a concerted effort at concealment.” It was a very well-dug grave. It was a very good spot to pick.”
“It would have been surprising if that spot had been stumbled upon by chance.”
And of course, this was what Andrew Hill did for a living. As a telecoms engineer he dug deep holes for cables.
But detectives didn’t believe him for one moment. They thought that shortly after Colin Shawcross sent his final text to Julie Hill, Andrew Hill drove his wife’s Honda Civic car to Colin’s home and fatally fractured his skull with a ‘blunt instrument’ in a ‘lethal and violent attack’. Probably a pick axe handle or similar. The person who attacked Colin had been seen by a neighbour looking across from a bedroom window who saw ‘somebody hitting downwards several times and with force with some kind of stick or club or weapon’. The killer then dragged Colin’s body into his beloved jaguar and drove him away to dispose of the body. They though his intention had been to set the Jaguar on fire but he was disturbed. Instead, after he had buried the body locally, he drove the car back to the Colin’s house house and then drove his wife’s car home. What’s more, blood and fibre evidence from the Honda Civic all led in his direction.
Hill was charged with the murder of Colin Shawcross.
When the jury returned, they delivered a verdict of guilty of murder. Hill didn’t seem to be able to quite take it in and as he wept, he clung to the security glass in front of the dock at Sheffield Crown Court.
Before the sentence was passed, Colin’s wife Carol told how the murder of her husband had affected her and her three sons, then aged 25, 27 and 30. She said:
‘It has brought indescribable distress and misery which has been compounded by the concealment of his body,’ ‘Until his remains were found our lives were sad and our thoughts negative which adversely impacted on our professional, social and family life.’ ‘Although we were temporarily separated we had discussed his return to the family home and I feel that given time we would have been reunited.’ ‘His murder has robbed me of the companionship, contentment and security that Colin and I had planned in retirement’.
The judge turned to Hill and sentenced him to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 17 years. In passing sentence, the judge said, “You acted in a devious, vengeful, cowardly and unmanly way. You deliberately armed yourself with a deadly weapon and engineered a situation where you were free to surprise Dr. Shawcross and strike him.
“You have been found guilty of the murder of Dr. Colin Shawcross, a man who had devoted himself for 30 years as a GP to caring for the health and well-being of his fellows. He still had a great deal to give both to society and his family.”
When the judge described his story of hiring hardmen as “utter fabrication” Hill shouted: “It wasn’t sir”. And he was taken down to the cells continuing to protest his innocence, and he is still behind bars today. Six weeks after being sent to prison for the murder, Hill wrote to the local paper from prison where he said, “I have not killed anybody. I will never come to terms with having been found guilty of murder.”
And through his sentence he has maintained that he was no guilty of murder. He could be a free man again in 2027.
Carol Shawcross spoke to the media saying: “Colin and I had a long, happy and loving marriage for 34 years. The last five months were a temporary blip. “I’m confident, given time, we would have sorted out our marital difficulties and would have had a long and happy retirement together. “He never took Julie Hill out socially with his friends or introduced her to our sons. This liaison was a small and short part of his life which he didn’t share with anyone.”
This blog was also released as Episode 408 of the UK true Crime Podcast. The sources used are below:
Affair was just a blip, says murdered doctor’s widow (yorkshirepost.co.uk)
https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Man_jailed_for_murder_of_doctor_in_South_Yorkshire,_England
Seventeen years jail for murdering wife’s GP lover in a jealous rage (yorkshirepost.co.uk)
Man who killed Sheffield doctor could soon be free (thestar.co.uk)
‘Nurse’s jealous husband murdered doctor over affair’ | Daily Mail Online
Accused husband ‘seen with GP’s Jaguar’ (yorkshirepost.co.uk)