In 2000 Dr Harold Shipman was jailed for life after being convicted of the murder of 15 of his patients. An official enquiry lead by Dame Janet Smith found that Shipman may have killed another 250 people, making him England’s most prolific serial killer. Dr Shipman’s last victim was a Mrs Kathleen Grundy who was given a lethal dose of morphine during what was meant to be a routine blood test. Then he crudely forged her will leaving a substantial piece of her estate to him. Mrs Grundy had no serious illness and neither did any of Shipman’s victims who mysteriously died shortly after his visits.
In 1983 a new law came into force in the UK requiring both driver and front seat passengers to wear a seat belt with the hope of saving 1,000 lives a year.
In 1971 NASA’s Luna 14 mission launched on this day. The American mission was to land on the moon (this was NASA’s third mission to do so), collect samples, perform seismic studies and moonwalk as well as take images from the Luna Module while in orbit. Commander Alan Shepard , Command Module Pilot Stuart Roosa and Lunar Module Pilot Edgar Mitchell were aboard the module. Shepard and Michcell landed on the moons surface using the Luna Module while Roosa stayed in the moon's orbit onboard the command module, taking photos of the. Shepard and Mitchell landed on the 5th of February and stayed on the surface for 33 hours, 9 of which were spent outside the module. Shepard famously hit golf balls from the Luna surface on this trip.
In 1961 Ham, the chimp returns to Earth safely after his journey into space 157 miles above the Earths surface. Ham (named after the Holloman Aerospace Medical Centre) was one of six chimps trained by the United States to perform certain tasks in space. Unlike the Russians, who preferred dogs, the US chose chimps to test in space flights as they have more similarities to humans. Ham, who was originally from Cameroon, had the task of pressing buttons and pulling levers in response to certain lights while in space. This was to test if future pilots would still have cognitive abilities while in space flight. Ham lived to the age of 25 (19 years after his space flight) and his body was buried at the International Space Hall of Fame in New Mexico.
