From Lucy Letby to Marcus Osborne: The rare whole-life order handed out to the country’s most dangerous

More than 60 criminals are serving whole-life orders

Marcus Osborne has recieved a whole-life order (West Yorkshire Police )

Marcus Osborne has joined some of the country’s most dangerous offenders who are expected to die behind bars after he was given a whole-life order for the murders of Katie Higton and Steven Harnett.

Osborne, 35, lay in wait for his ex-partner Ms Higton, 27, at the house they once shared in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, before carrying a “ferocious and merciless” knife attack on May 15 last year.

He then used her phone to pretend to be her and lure Mr Harnett, 25, to the house.

The brutal double killing left Ms Higton with 99 injuries and Mr Harnett with 24 wounds, including mutilated genitals.

He then raped another woman, who he had held captive in the house overnight, at knifepoint.

Sentencing Osborne to a whole-life order at Leeds Crown Court on Friday, judge Mrs Justice Lambert told him: “There are no mitigating factors in your case other than your guilty plea. There is no psychiatric or other evidence placed before me to explain or help me understand your actions.

“This is a case of such exceptional seriousness that even a very long minimum term would not be a just punishment. What you did that night was horrific.”

Other criminals who have been sentenced to whole-life orders in recent years include child serial killer Lucy Letby, Sarah Everard’s killer Wayne Couzens, necrophiliac David Fuller, and homegrown terrorist Ali Harbi Ali, who murdered MP Sir David Amess.

More than 60 criminals are serving a whole-life order, four of whom are being held in secure hospitals.

They will never be considered for release unless there are exceptional compassionate grounds to warrant it.

Only four women have faced such a punishment: Letby, the girlfriend of Moors murderer Ian Brady, Myra Hindley – who died in 2002, and serial killers Rose West and Joanna Dennehy.

Killer nurse Lucy Letby is serving 14 whole life orders (Cheshire Constabulary/PA) (PA Media)

Letby was jailed in August last year for what a judge described as a “cruel, calculated and cynical campaign” of baby murder in the hospital where she worked as a nurse.

Gun fanatic Louis De Zoysa was handed a whole-life order last July after shooting Metropolitan Police custody sergeant Matt Ratana while handcuffed in a police cell in 2020.

In December 2022, Damien Bendall began serving a whole-life order for murdering his partner Terri Harris, 35, her daughter Lacey Bennett, 11, her son John Paul Bennett, 13, and Lacey’s friend Connie Gent, also 11, who was staying for a sleepover.

A year earlier, Fuller was handed the same sentence for the murders of Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce in 1987 and the sexual abuse of more than 100 dead women and girls in hospital mortuaries.

Milly Dowler’s killer, Levi Bellfield, is serving two whole-life orders – for her murder, the killings of Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange, and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy.

Harold Shipman was found to have killed 250 of his patients (Greater Manchester Police/PA) (PA Media)

Other notorious criminals serving whole-life orders include Michael Adebolajo, one of Fusilier Lee Rigby’s killers; Mark Bridger, who murdered five-year-old April Jones in Wales; neo-Nazi Thomas Mair, who killed MP Jo Cox; serial killer Stephen Port; and Reading terror attacker Khairi Saadallah, who murdered three men in a park.

In the past, home secretaries could issue whole-life tariffs, as they were previously known, and these are now determined by judges.

Before they died, Brady, Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe and doctor Harold Shipman – thought to be one of Britain’s most prolific serial killers – were also among those handed such a punishment.

Under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which became law last year, the Government expanded the use of whole-life orders for the premeditated murder of a child.

The reforms also allow judges to hand out the maximum sentence to 18 to 20-year-olds in exceptional cases, such as for acts of terrorism leading to mass loss of life, and the discretion to impose the sentence on offenders aged 18 or over but under 21 in exceptional circumstances.

Manchester Arena bomb plotter Hashem Abedi, who was convicted of conspiring with his suicide-bomber brother Salman Abedi over the 2017 atrocity, avoided a whole-life order because he was 21 at the time.