Meet forensic pathologist, Dr Richard Shepherd. A detective in his own right, Dr Shepherd has solved the mystery of sudden and unexplained deaths  and now he takes to the road in his first ever theatre tour. What's On recently caught up with him to find out more...

Are you nervous about doing your first ever live tour, “Dr Richard Shepherd - Unnatural Causes?

Yes. There are those two o'clock in the morning moments where you wake up and think, “what am I doing? Why on earth have I agreed to do this?” It’s funny, I'm not scared stepping into a witness box at a trial and I'm not scared about standing up in front of an audience of 800 doctors or medical students. But put me on my own on a theatre stage and it’s an entirely different matter. It’s an untried quantity but one I think I’m, in the end, going to enjoy.

Can you amplify that?

As a forensic pathologist, I have a lot of life skills, but standing on the stage on my own is not one of them. So, I am nervous, not about the words and not about drying, although maybe I should be! I hope it will be a marvellous show, but I’m still nervous about occupying the stage – even dear old Larry Olivier struggled at times to occupy the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Company! The other thing is I'm used to standing up and taking an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And now I'm going to pop up on the stage and tell some of the truth some of the time, but still to the best of my ability! All the same, I'm so looking forward to it because it's a new experience in my life, and life should be full of new experiences.

Talk us through the show.

The thread that runs through the first half is an investigation of a possible murder. I tell that story, and it gives me the chance to explain how amazing the human body is. Yes, the body can go wrong, but it can also be made to go wrong by people poisoning it or hitting it or stabbing it. In my job as a forensic pathologist, I have to understand diseases and also what happens when people are injured, why they die,  so I can interpret those injuries and recount the story of what happened. So, we weave the first half of the show around the twists and turns of that investigation. Along the way, there will be clues to make people do a bit of thinking. We have a reveal after the interval, and then we go into a Q&A with the audience. We hope that during break, people will be arguing amongst themselves. Is it murder? Is it suicide? Or just maybe an accident!

Why do you think your first book, Unnatural Causes, which charted the immense personal cost of your work as a forensic pathologist, proved so popular?

It's always difficult to know exactly what it is that readers like about a book- all I know is what people have said to me about it. They told me it was just interesting. I was always determined that it wouldn’t just be “20 Cases What I Done”. I was certain that it had to be much more than that. So, I constructed a format that went into the story of my life, and many people really seem to have connected with that personal / professional interface.

What else appealed to the readers of Unnatural Causes?

I feel that doctors must be honest about the things that go wrong with them because otherwise how can we possibly expect our patients to do so? So it was important to talk about my breakdown and say it was really dreadful, but that with help, with treatment, with support, you can get through those awful times

Can you expand on why honesty is the best policy?

Of course, I don't reveal all of myself in Unnatural Causes. There are still some hidden compartments. I'm not going to tell you what I got up to with an old girlfriend in the doorway at the back of the Baptist Church. But I think if you're going to write an autobiography, you have to be as open as you possibly can be. But as doctors, I think if we're talking about ourselves, we do need to say, “this is what happened to me, and this is what I felt.” In my new book that's coming out in September, “The Seven Ages of Death: A Forensic Pathologist’s Journey Through Life,” I'm not labouring my own woes here, but I do write about being diagnosed with  prostate cancer and how that felt. Fortunately, it was treated very quickly and now it is finished and sorted. Beforehand, I was really wary about writing about it. But I think it is important to say that some bad things did happen to you, but modern medicine can be brilliant. So that level of honesty is, I think, essential.

Do you think the job was worth it because it really did take its toll on you?

Of course. I know lots of doctors in lots of branches of medicine who have had very similar things. I know accountants and lawyers who have been through it, too. So, it's not unique to me, but I think the unique thing was that I was prepared to write about it in Unnatural Causes. It was awful. But the important thing is that I got through it.

Was it in fact therapeutic to write about it?

Yes, writing Unnatural Causes was quite cathartic. Although it was written after the event, it was quite interesting to go back and look at those dark times again. But not all those times were dark – for instance when I drove up to the house of my psychologist for my first therapy session, I noticed that it was called Wit’s End! I thought, “I trust this lady already” And in fact she was tremendous. Other than my wife, she was the person who I felt was there just to help me. So, I was very lucky to find her. I was also very lucky to have the help of my colleagues and for a short time a marvellous drug called Sertraline!

You are one of the country’s foremost forensic pathologists and have been involved in some extraordinarily high-profile investigations. Can you tell us, for instance, about the enquiry into the death of Princess Diana?

That was a fascinating case to work on. What interested me was that they were in a Mercedes which are phenomenally good and safe cars which are engineered to crumple in a crash and to withstand high-speed impacts. It became clear that if Diana and Dodi Fayed had been wearing seatbelts, they both should have survived. It’s like those old adverts used to put it, “clunk, click every trip.”

That’s very sobering, isn’t it?

Absolutely. Of course, every death of a young mother is an awful thing. But I think it's particularly sad when it was their own decision not to wear the seat belts that went badly wrong.

Was that one of the most headline-grabbing investigations that you have ever been part of?

Yes, I think it probably must have been one of the most high-profile cases I've ever been involved with. What was particularly interesting was to watch the internal mechanics of a well-funded and well supported investigation working.

You also investigated the serial killer Dr Harold Shipman. Did the fact that he was a fellow doctor get to you?

Yes, because as a medical professional, you should be caring. Even as a Forensic Pathologist I think we must be caring. What upsets me is the fact there were so many opportunities to have stopped Shipman earlier. There had been a previous police investigation, but the allegations were dismissed.  It’s really quite scary that he was allowed to keep going and amazingly he was known to the local undertakers as Dr Death.

How did he get away with it?

So many people loved and trusted him as their GP. He was said to have had a fantastic bedside manner. And if he said, “listen, I think we'll just take some blood for tests. Roll up your sleeve,” you’d immediately agree. Then instead of taking a blood sample he would inject morphine. It upsets me that he wasn't stopped when he should have been. But it also upsets me that Dame Janet Smith's long, public inquiry made all sorts of recommendations about how deaths should be properly and correctly certified, and very few have ever been followed up. I pretty much think that Shipman was not then, and maybe even now, the not the only serial killer doctor in the country.

Why are people so fascinated by true-crime stories?

I think because it's a part of life that people don't understand. Also, you can always form your own opinion about a crime. People always like to try to second-guess the experts. And then there's also the frisson of, “oh my goodness, that could be me there. How would I cope in that situation?” Very few people come across a dead body these days, let alone a murdered dead body. So, as it’s unusual and also hidden away it just sets up a fascination in people. There are always lots of fantasies about what has happened, which are usually a long way away from the truth, but people relish that challenge of understanding what has taken place.

Tell us about your new book, The Seven Ages of Death.

In my career of over 23,000 cases, I’ve examined everyone from babies through the middle aged to the old.  My cases cover all the seven ages of man, according to Shakespeare. So, I thought that following that arc from birth to dementia would be a great way to structure the book and so I talk about diseases and traumatic deaths in all of these seven ages.

Your wife Linda is a forensic physician. How did you meet her?

It was through work. I went to London to give a lecture at the Royal Society of Medicine. It was a conference about the legal aspects of medicine. There were loads of lawyers there pontificating about how crucial some small aspects of the law were. Then I got up to speak and I said, “It's quite clear that doctors are from Venus and lawyers are from Mars.” Linda says she fell in love with me at that moment. After the conference finished, I asked her if she fancied going out for a drink?” She said, “No, I've got to go and buy some shoes.” So that really set the tone for our marriage!

Now you have retired as a forensic pathologist, what hobbies do you have?

I keep bees. I don’t think I’m a very good beekeeper, but now I have three hives buzzing away. They’re difficult little creatures, but beekeeping is one of those things I always thought I would like to do. I've been doing it for about eight or nine years now. It's very interesting and hard work learning about them and about how the hives work. Also, at the end of the year, there's honey and that’s when the family suddenly appear!

Any other hobbies?

I've also taken up clock mending. I was looking for a practical hobby where I could just sit somewhere and mend things and Horology is really both complex and interesting as well as being practical and when the clock ticks away and chimes it’s very satisfying too. I was talking to a psychologist about this the other day and they said, “That's really interesting. At the end of 40 years of pulling things apart and not being able to put them back together to work, you've chosen a hobby that involves putting things back together and getting them to work again.”   I’d never thought of that.

You are also a qualified pilot - tell us about that?

In my opinion flying is the world's most fantastic pastime. Flying is absolutely the best, most liberating thing in the whole world. I just love it. It's just that sense of freedom. I’m also nosey, so I like looking into people’s gardens! Last summer, I left Liverpool at nine o'clock in the morning and in the evening was eating dinner at a restaurant in a French town called Troyes drinking wine and eating Moules. It’s just fantastic to travel about in these places under my own steam.

Finally, what do you hope that audiences will take away from Dr Richard Shepherd – Unnatural Causes?

At the age of 13 or 14 a friend borrowed his father’s Forensic Pathology textbook and I literally had a Damascene moment where I suddenly realised that being a forensic pathologist would be absolutely the best thing ever. And so I just hope that I can show people a little bit of the fascination I have for my world. I also hope they see that pathology, and forensic pathology, isn’t awful but that it is  a brilliant and useful job. I'm so fortunate to have found this career when I was so young. And then to have achieved it and to have done it for 40 years - I really do consider myself an incredibly lucky person.

Dr Richard Shepherd brings his Unnatural Causes tour to Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury on Tuesday 5 October and then Malvern Theatres on Monday 18 October.