Britain’s most notorious whole life killers as Sunak plans to make UK’s toughest sentence mandatory
Ministry of Justice confirmed 70 criminals are currently serving a whole-life order in UK
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Serial killer nurse Lucy Letby has been handed a rare whole-life order, after being found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six others at the neonatal unit where she worked.
The punishment is the most severe available to judges in Britain, and condemns those who have committed to most heinous crimes to spend the remainder of their lives in prison without being considered for parole unless there are exceptional compassionate grounds to warrant it.
Since her sentencing, Rishi Sunak has announced plans to ensure that judges are required to impose whole-life orders on the most depraved killers, as a guarantee that “life means life”.
For the first time, a whole-life tariff would be the default for any sexually motivated or sadistic murders, meaning it would have applied in the recent cases of Sabina Nessa and Zara Aleena.
The Ministry of Justice said 70 criminals are currently serving a whole-life order in the UK, with 66 in prison and four in secure hospitals.
Letby, aged 33, is only the fourth woman to be handed the sentence since it was created in 1983, alongside Myra Hindley, the long-deceased girlfriend of Moors murderer Ian Brady, and serial killers Rose West and Joanna Dennehy.
Below we look at other cases where a whole life order was given.
Wayne Couzens
Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens was handed a full-life order in September 2021 over the kidnap, rape and murder of 33-year-old Sarah Everard.
The firearms officer, who had clocked off from a 12-hour shift at the American Embassy that morning, used his Metropolitan Police-issue warrant card and handcuffs to abduct Ms Everard as she walked home from a friend’s house in Clapham, south London, on the evening of 3 March 2021.
Couzens raped and murdered Everard at a secluded rural area near Dover in Kent, before burning her body in a refrigerator and dumping the remains in a nearby pond.
Lord Justice Fulford told Couzens, a married father-of-two, that he had shown “no genuine contrition” for his “grotesque” crimes, the seriousness of which were so “exceptionally high” they warranted a whole life order.
Couzens was later handed further convictions for indecently exposing himself to multiple women, including in the days prior to abducting Everard.
Rose West
The partner of notorious serial killer and rapist Fred West was jailed for life in 1995 for 10 murders, including that of her stepdaughter Charmaine.
The couple were arrested the previous year and were accused of murdering 12 people over a period spanning more than 20 years.
Their crimes remain among the most shocking in recent British history, with his own children among those they tortured, raped and murdered.
While Fred escaped justice by suicide prior to his trial, Rose is still incarcerated at HMP New Hall in West Yorkshire.
Stephen Port
Port was handed a whole-life order in November 2016 after being found guilty of a total of 22 offences against 11 men, including four murders, four rapes, 10 counts of administering a substance and four sex assaults.
He became known as the “Grindr serial killer” after targeting men using online dating apps, whom he would spike with fatal amounts of the drug GHB before raping them while unconscious.
After killing the four men and dumping their bodies near his flat in east London, he sought to cover up his crimes by disposing of their mobile phones, repeatedly lying to police and planting a fake suicide note in the hand of one of his victims, which took the blame for the death of another.
An inquest jury concluded in December 2021 that mistakes by the Metropolitan Police “probably” contributed to the deaths of Port’s victims, but Scotland Yard insisted that it did not recognise allegations by victims’ families of “institutional homophobia” within its force.
A report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary triggered by the Scotland Yard failings which let Port go free found in April that, eight years later, there was still a risk that police would miss links between deaths.
Ali Harbi Ali
The terrorist who murdered Sir David Amess at the Conservative MP’s constituency surgery in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, was also handed a full-life order in April 2022.
Ali Harbi Ali, a 26-year-old Isis supporter, tricked his way into a meeting with Sir David by pretending to be an NHS employee who was moving to the area, before stabbing the father-of-five more than 20 times.
Ali told police that the murder was a terror attack, and said in court that he regretted “nothing”, adding: “I wouldn’t use the word shameless but I don’t feel any shame.” A jury took just 18 minutes to convict him of murder and preparing acts of terrorism against other MPs, including Michael Gove.
In sentencing, Judge Sweeney called Sir David’s death a “loss of national significance”, and said he had “no doubt” that Ali should be sentenced to a “whole-life order” over the murder which “struck at the heart of our democracy”.
Thomas Mair
The far-right terrorist who killed Labour MP Jo Cox was also handed a full-life order in November 2016, after murdering the 41-year-old mother-of-two outside her West Yorkshire constituency surgery.
Jurors heard how the 53-year-old shouted “Britain first, this is for Britain” over her body after shooting her three times and inflicting 15 stab wounds.
The court heard Mair had been in possession of news articles referencing Ms Cox’s support for the Remain campaign, a Third Reich eagle with a swastika, German military history books and news cuttings reporting on Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.
Myra Hindley and Ian Brady
Five children were murdered by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between 1963 and 1965 in what became known as the Moors murders.
The pair were both jailed for life in 1966 after they were found to have snatched and sexually tortured their victims before burying them on Saddleworth Moor in the Pennines above Manchester.
The five killed were Pauline Reade, 16, John Kilbride, 12, Keith Bennett, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17, all from the Manchester area.
Pauline disappeared on her way to a disco on 12 July 1963 and John was snatched in November the same year.
Keith was lured into Hindley’s car on 16 June 1964 after he left home to visit his grandmother, while Lesley Ann was snatched at a funfair on Boxing Day 1964, and Edward was killed in October 1965.
The pair were caught after the final murder was witnessed by the partner of Hindley’s sister – who phoned police after he had helped bury the body.
Hindley died in 2002, while Brady died 15 years later - both of poor health.
Harold Shipman
Dubbed “Doctor Death” by the media, Harold Shipman was one Britain’s most prolific serial killers and is thought to have murdered hundreds of patients.
As a general practitioner in Greater Manchester, Shipman targeted elderly people after winning their trust.
His modus operandi, which consisted of injecting his victims with a fatal dose of drugs and then claiming they had died of natural causes, meant that he evaded capture throughout the 1990s. He was finally convicted of 15 counts of murder in 2000.
He began to attract suspicion after one of his patients, an 81-year-old woman, was discovered dead in her home only hours after Shipman had visited her in 1998.
After killing himself in prison in 2004, an official inquiry established that the extent of Shipman’s crimes was far greater than initially thought, estimating that he had killed 250 people.
Other killers recently given whole-life orders:
- Louis De Zoysa - The prolific cannabis user will die behind bars after shooting and killing Sgt Matt Ratana in the chest at a custody block in Croydon. De Zoysa smuggled in a gun and shot the Metropolitan Police officer at point-blank range after he had been arrested.
- Damien Bendall - The depraved multi-murderer was caught after he calmly admitted to Derbyshire Police officers that he had “murdered four people” at a house in Killamarsh in September 2021. His victims were three children and a woman, with Bendall later admitting to raping one of the young girls before her death.
- David Fuller - The “Morgue Monster” sexually abused more than 100 female corpses in two hospital mortuaries in Kent while working for 12 years as a hospital electrician. Fuller was also identified as the killer behind the Bedsit murders, where two women had been strangled and sexually assaulted in Royal Tunbridge Wells in 1987.
- Khairi Saadallah - The Islamist terrorist carried out a “completely random” attack on members of the public who had been socialising in a park in Reading in June 2020. The knife attack resulted in the deaths of four men while three others were seriously injured.
- Arthur Simpson-Kent - The hairdresser beat and stabbed his partner, former Eastenders actress Sian Blake, and their two young children to death with an axe. Simpson-Kent buried their bodies in the garden of their home in Erith before escaping to Ghana where he was caught and extradited.