The Loose Women star shared how her father spoke to the serial killer multiple times before the truth was revealed
Loose Women's Sunetra Sarker's shared her unexpected link to killer Harold Shipman while speaking to Jane Moore on Loose Women: The Podcast.
The podcast was launched earlier in March to celebrate International Women's Day. Each week, a new presenting duo will tackle subjects close to their hearts as well as answering viewers questions and concerns.
In episode five Sunetra Sarker and Jane Moore discussed divorce, being an only child, the Royal Family, true crime and Jane's time as a journalist.
Jane recalled some of the past criminal cases she has covered as a journalist as she explained: "I suppose probably the most famous one is Rose West, so I covered the Rose West trial back in [1995]...
"I was not a crime reporter, I was what they call a colour writer. I would go in and sort of just focus on her, Rose West, and write about her reactions, what she looks like…"
Adding that she was one of the only females on the press bench at the time, Jane said: "And she just kept staring at me, in a very sort of weird way. I mean, I didn't feel scared, it was just quite unsettling. The thing about Rose West was her normality, she had on these big sort of glasses that looked sort of, from the 70s."
Sunetra then asked her co-star if Rose looked "evil" to which Jane responded: "She just looked like a middle aged woman” before adding: “I remember at the very beginning, because obviously there were a stream of witnesses and things - and it gets inside your head, it's terrifying the evidence.
"I'm not going to say it because it's too distressing but the evidence was horrific. But then I realised after a certain amount of time, it was sort of affecting me less, because it almost gets to the point where you're hearing all the same stuff and it's so evil that you can't comprehend it."
Jane admitted that she was affected by this case, as she continued: "I think because I had a young child as well. But the other one that really affected me was the murder of James Bulger, because my daughter wasn't even a year old."
As the conversation shifted to criminals hiding in plain sight, Sunetra had a surprised story of her own as she shared her family's link to Harold Shipman - a notorious serial killer who murdered over 200 of his patients.
Sunetra confessed: "My dad's a GP and he'd gone away to India for two, maybe three weeks with my mum, and I just kept the newspapers for them, the Sunday papers and everything that got delivered. Instead of them just building up outside the door, I'd bring them in and put them on the table for him.
"I remember my dad came back to me, 'Oh, have you got the papers?' I said, 'Yeah, they're all there' and I saw him picking up the last week's news and he saw the front cover of the Sunday Times, and he literally went, 'Harold' and I went, 'Dad, do you know Harold Shipman?' and he went 'Yes, it's Harold, he sits next to me at the medical convention'… Because Manchester and Liverpool, they had like the Northwest Regional Doctors Conferences and Dad would sit in alphabetical order, Sarker, Shipman, they were on the same table."
She added: "He said, 'I've spoken to him. He's a very gentle man… I don't understand what's going on'. I was like, 'Wait until you read that' and I thought, you are not going to believe what you're going to read, Dad.
"I remember him sitting there, his head in hands, just in disbelief that this mild mannered doctor that he'd sat next to, who he'd never, ever have questioned… Hiding in plain sight."
