Richard McGown

After serving out his sentence, McGown was released, returning to his native UK. He tried to appeal in a London court in an attempt to retain his licence, since he was still eligible to practise in the UK. He admitted to breaching his duty to ensure safe recovery, but denied any serious professional misconduct and failure to properly care in the death of Lavender Khaminwa. However, the British General Medical Court, following a similar 1995 ruling by the Health Professions Council of Zimbabwe, banned him from practising medicine anywhere in the world.

Nurses who worked alongside McGown expressed their concerns about the high number of deaths, but initially, nobody took them seriously. However, in 1993 a parliamentary report alleged that the doctor had carried out clinical trials without following the necessary procedures. The nurses were the first to inform the press on the matter, but nothing could be done at that point, since most of the cases were considered sudden deaths.

McGown eventually developed a deep interest in post operative pain relief, and decided to begin experimenting with new drugs and anaesthetics in 1981 on his predominantly underage black patients. From 1986 to 1992, he performed his method on 500 patients without their knowledge. Among his victims were 10-year-old Kenyan-born girl Lavender Khaminwa (who died following a supposed appendectomy) and two and a half years old Kalpesh Nagindas, a Zimbabwean boy of Indian origin. Nagindas had been admitted to the Avenues Clinic in Harare on 13 July 1988 for a circumcision because he had problems urinating. Instead, the toddler's spine was injected with morphine to supposedly relieve the pain after the operation. Following the surgery, McGown handed the child over to his father, Mansakh Nagindas, with the following words: "Here is your child. I've brought him back from the dead." The boy was irritable and later fell into a deep sleep, before he began to vomit yellow liquid. Nagindas was taken back to the hospital, where he died six hours after his operation. McGown is also suspected of murdering 4-year-old Tsitsi Chidodo, a Zimbabwean girl, Irene Papatheocharous, a mother of Greek descent, and 62-year-old Nigerian woman Rose Apinke Osazuwa.

Richard Gladwell McGown (born 1937), also known as Dr. Death, is a Scottish-Zimbabwean former anaesthetist, murderer and suspected serial killer. He was found guilty of murdering two children from 1986 to 1992 by injecting large amounts of morphine into their bodies, but is suspected of murdering at least three others as well. He was found guilty of culpable homicide and sentenced to a year in prison, after which he was released and returned to the UK.

Richard Gladwell McGown was born in 1937 in India, but was brought up in Glasgow, later studying at the University of Edinburgh, from which he graduated in 1959. He worked in Sweden and Zambia before moving to Rhodesia (modern day Zimbabwe) in the late 1960s, where he gained a reputation as a consultant anaesthetist.