Criminals that commit the most heinous of crimes face spending their whole life behind bars. The most recent of which is Kyle Clifford, dubbed the cross-bow killer.
Triple killer Clifford was handed a whole-life order at Cambridge Crown Court on Tuesday, March 11, for the crossbow and knife murders of his ex-partner Louise Hunt, her sister Hannah Hunt and her mother Carol Hunt, the sentencing judge said.
He joins dozens of others that have been handed the UK’s harshest punishment since its introduction in 1983 – including serial killers Harold Shipman, Ian Brady, Lucy Letby and Peter Sutcliffe.
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In the past, it was up to home secretaries to issue whole-life tariffs – but they are now determined by judges. These are some of the most notorious killers who have served, or are serving, a full-life prison sentence.
Kyle Clifford
Triple killer Kyle Clifford has been handed a whole-life order for murdering his ex-partner, her sister and her mother. The 26-year-old was sentenced at Cambridge Crown Court on Tuesday, March 11.
As well as pleading guilty to murdering his former girlfriend Louise Hunt, her mother Carol Hunt and her sister Hannah Hunt, he was also convicted of raping Louise in a ‘violent, sexual act of spite’.
Prosecutors said Clifford became ‘enraged’ when 25-year-old Louise ended their 18-month relationship, which led to him ‘carefully’ planning the murders on July 9, 2024.
He gained access to the family home and stabbed Carol to death with a butcher’s knife.
He then waited for an hour for Louise to enter the house, before restraining, raping and ultimately murdering her with a crossbow, before going on to fatally shoot 28-year-old Hannah with the same weapon.
Sentencing Clifford to a whole-life order, judge Mr Justice Bennathan said of Clifford: “The evidence I have heard shows you to be a jealous man soaked in self-pity – a man who holds women in utter contempt.
“This is no occasion to subject family and friends of your victims to any delay or suspense.
“I therefore make clear at once that for each of these three murders, the sentence will be one of life imprisonment with a whole-life order.
“That means a sentence from which you will never be released.”
Steve Sansom
A double murderer who carried out the “bloodthirsty” killing of a woman and dumped her dismembered body in a park will spend the rest of his life in jail.
Builder Steve Sansom was out of prison on life licence for another murder when he killed Sarah Mayhew, 38, and dumped her remains in Rowdown Fields, New Addington, south London, in spring 2024. The 45-year-old and his partner Gemma Watts, 49, both admitted murder and perverting the course of justice by dismembering Ms Mayhew’s body, distributing the parts at “various locations” and cleaning up the scene, the Old Bailey heard.
Sansom, of Sutton, south-west London, and Watts, of New Addington, sat quietly in the dock as details of their sexual relationship – including a stream of messages between them about bestiality, humiliation and causing hurt – were outlined at their sentencing hearing. They indulged in “depraved conversation about sexual activity” and the graphic messages between them soon evolved into becoming more than fantasy.
Mrs Justice Cutts sentenced Sansom to life imprisonment for murder with a whole life order. He was also sentenced to five years for perverting the course of justice to run concurrently. Watts was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 30 years along with five years for perverting the course of justice to run concurrently.
The judge said both defendants were “equally involved” in the plan to lure Ms Mayhew to Sansom’s flat, adding: “You had lured Sarah to the flat for depraved and violent sexual activity during which she was to be killed. Her fear and suffering must have been acute as she realised why she was there and what was happening.”
Marcus Osborne
Killer Marcus Osborne was given a whole life order at Leeds Crown Court in March 2024.
Osborne brutally murdered Steven Harnett, 25, and his girlfriend, Katie Higton, 27, in May 2023 in an act of jealousy. He had been reported to police just days before the sadistic killing after he told her: “If you ever get a new boyfriend, I’ll kill you both.”
Osborne lured them to her Huddersfield home upon discovering they had been on a cinema date, Osborne ‘hacked’ Katie and Steven to death, disfiguring and mutilating their bodies before washing them, laying them in poses together and showing them off to neighbours who he invited round after the bloodshed.
All the while, another terrified woman was held captive in the house, who he then raped at knifepoint.
The judge, Mrs Justice Lambert, said Ms Higton’s murder was a “merciless and sustained attack on a woman who was completely defenceless”.
Lawrence Bierton
A convicted double-killer who committed his third murder less than two years after being released from prison will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Lawrence Bierton, 63, was on a life licence for two murders committed in 1995 when he was moved into a property in Rayton Spur, a Nottinghamshire complex for elderly and vulnerable people, in November 2020. A year later, he bludgeoned his 73-year-old neighbour Pauline Quinn to death with a coffee table.
Bierton was given his first life sentence in 1996 for the murders of two elderly sisters – 79-year-old Aileen Dudill and 73-year-old Elsie Gregory – at their home in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. He was first released in December 2017, but was recalled to prison in July 2018 due to behaviour concerns. He was released again in May 2020, moving to Rayton Spur six months later.
On the day of the killing, Bierton, an alcoholic, had asked Ms Quinn for money for alcohol, having drunk vodka and rum and taken crack cocaine and Subutex, an opioid, that morning. After she refused, he pushed her to the floor, beginning the fatal attack which prosecutors said was sparked by a fear of returning to prison over his substance misuse.
Lucy Letby
Lucy Letby is a child murderer and serial killer who will die in prison after being handed a whole life order. The former nurse is the most prolific baby killer in modern history.
Letby murdered seven babies, and attempted to kill six others, on the neonatal unit where she worked at the Countess of Chester Hospital between 2015 and 2016.
She used various ways to harm the babies including injecting air into the bloodstream, injecting air into the stomach, overfeeding with milk, physical assaults and poisoning with insulin.
She was first arrested over the crimes in July 2018 and charged in November 2020. Her trial started in October 2022 and lasted 10 months.
She was sentenced, aged 33, to whole life in prison at Manchester Crown Court on August 21, 2023. Prosecutors said Letby was a ‘calculated opportunist’ who used the vulnerabilities of premature and sick infants to camouflage her acts.
She joins only three other women have ever been given a whole life term in the UK – Moors Murderer Myra Hindley and murderers Rose West and Joanne Dennehy.
Louis De Zoysa
A cannabis user shot dead a custody sergeant while handcuffed in a police cell. Gun fanatic Louis De Zoysa will spend his whole life in prison for the murder of Matt Ratana.
At his trial, jurors were shown distressing CCTV footage of the 26-year-old using a legally-bought revolver to gun down the sergeant. Sgt Ratana died in hospital despite the efforts of medical staff, after being struck by two bullets in the holding cell in Croydon, south London, in September 2020.
The jury which convicted De Zoysa, a former tax office data analyst, was not told that a shortened infantry rifle, numerous types of ammunition, a pipe gun and a dummy launcher were found at his rented property after the killing.
Sentencing De Zoysa at Northampton Crown Court, High Court judge Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson told him: “You acted in cold blood. You intended to kill Sergeant Ratana. You aimed the gun at his chest at near point-blank range. Even as he fell you re-aimed and fired a second shot at him.”
Ali Harbi Ali
Ali Harbi Ali, 26, is a terrorist who stabbed an MP to death at a constituency surgery in October 2021.
The Islamic State fanatic, from Kentish Town in north London, was convicted of murdering Sir David Amess and preparing terrorist acts by a jury at the Old Bailey.
The cold and callous killer told his trial that he had no regrets about the murder, defending his actions by saying Sir David deserved to die because he had voted in Parliament for air strikes on Syria.
He will never be considered for release, unless there are exceptional compassionate grounds to warrant it.
Anthony Russell
Triple-killer Anthony Russell was handed a whole-life prison tariff in March 2022 for the brutal murders of a mother and son and a pregnant woman. He pleaded guilty to the murders and was also unanimously convicted of raping pregnant Nicole McGregor, 31, before killing her.
The murders happened in October 2020.
Russell, who was described as a “rather sad and pathetic individual” by his own barrister, assaulted Ms McGregor hours after she had shown him a picture of her baby scan. The killer also told Ms McGregor’s partner “I bet you can’t wait for it to be born”, in the hours after she disappeared – knowing he had raped and killed her, a court heard.
Ruling that Russell was exceptionally dangerous and manipulative, the judge at his sentencing hearing said: “You are a man prepared to use very significant violence on anyone. You are exceptionally dangerous to those who know you, and those who do not. This is one of those cases deserving of a whole-life order.”
The killer was eventually the subject of a national manhunt and was arrested nine days after his first murder, after police spotted the stolen Ford C-Max he had used to escape Leamington Spa. While being booked into custody, he told officers: “I admit it, I did it.”
David Fuller
Double murderer David Fuller was sent down for life after it emerged that he had sexually abused more than 100 dead women and girls in hospital mortuaries.
In 1987, the 67-year-old beat and strangled Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20, to death before sexually assaulting them in two separate attacks in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Fuller was arrested for what have been dubbed the “Bedsit Murders” on December 3 in 2020 following new analysis of decades-old DNA evidence, which linked him to the killings.
When officers searched his three-bedroom semi-detached home in the town of Heathfield, East Sussex, where he lived with his family, they uncovered shocking images of him attacking corpses. Over 12 years, before his arrest in December 2020, he had filmed himself abusing at least 102 corpses, including a nine-year-old girl, two 16-year-olds, and a 100-year-old woman.
Fuller was handed a whole life sentence for the murders with a concurrent 12-year term for his other crimes. The government has announced an independent inquiry into how Fuller went undetected for so many years and promised to look at the maximum sentence for necrophilia, which is currently two years in jail.
Wayne Couzens
Wayne Couzens was handed a whole life order for the killing of 33-year-old marketing executive Sarah Everard, in a case which shocked and outraged the nation.
The Old Bailey heard how Couzens used his Metropolitan Police-issue warrant card and handcuffs to snatch Ms Everard as she walked home from a friend’s house in Clapham, south London, on the evening of March 3, 2021.
The firearms officer, who had clocked off from a 12-hour shift at the American embassy that morning, drove to a secluded rural area near Dover in Kent, where he parked up and raped Ms Everard.
Ms Everard, who lived in Brixton, south London, had been strangled with Couzens’ police issue belt by 2.30am the following morning.
Married Couzens then burned her body in a refrigerator in an area of woodland he owned in Hoads Wood, near Ashford, before dumping the remains in a nearby pond.
He was arrested at his home in Deal, Kent, after police connected him to a hire car he used to abduct Ms Everard, whose remains were found by police dogs on March 10.
Lord Justice Fulford said the seriousness of the case was so “exceptionally high” that it warranted a whole life order.
He said: “The misuse of a police officer’s role such as occurred in this case in order to kidnap, rape and murder a lone victim is of equal seriousness as a murder for the purpose of advancing a political, religious ideological cause.”
He paid tribute to the dignity of Ms Everard’s family, whose statements in court revealed the human impact of Couzens’ “warped, selfish and brutal offending which was both sexual and homicidal”.
Harold Shipman
Harold a Shipman, also known as ‘Dr Death’, is the UK’s most prolific convicted serial killer.
The GP was jailed for life in January 2000 for murdering 15 patients while working in Hyde, Greater Manchester.
The official predictions are that he killed between 215 and 260 people over a 23-year period in Hyde and Todmorden, West Yorkshire.
Shipman murdered his victims with injections of diamorphine – the clinical name for heroin – after stockpiling vast amounts of the drug by falsely prescribing it as a painkiller for dying patients.
The GP would usually call on his mainly elderly victims at their homes, often on a pretext, and dispense the deadly injections.
Back at his surgery, he would falsify computer records to create bogus symptoms that would explain his victims’ deaths.
Despite being handed a full life sentence, he only served around four years in jail. Shipman hanged himself in his cell at Wakefield Prison in 2004 at the age of 57.
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley
During the 1960s, Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley lured children and teenagers to their deaths, torturing and sexually assaulting them before burying their bodies on Saddleworth Moor in the south Pennines.
Pauline Reade, 16, disappeared on her way to a disco on July 12 1963, and 12-year-old John Kilbride was snatched in November the same year.
Keith Bennett was taken on June 16 1964 after he left home to visit his grandmother, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, was lured away from a funfair on Boxing Day 1964, and Edward Evans, 17, was killed in October 1965.
Lesley Ann was stripped, sexually abused and tortured, with her last moments captured on a harrowing audio recording which reduced the judge, jury, courtroom spectators and even hardened police officers to tears during the trial.
The body of Keith Bennett has never been found.
Brady died in 2017 aged 79, while Hindley died in prison in 2002 at the age of 60.
Peter Sutcliffe
Peter Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, was serving a whole life sentence for the murders of 13 women in Yorkshire and Greater Manchester in the 1970s.
Before he was caught in 1980, his spree terrified much of northern England.
He began his killing spree in 1975, battering 28-year-old sex worker Wilma McCann to death on October 30, 1975, which followed three non-fatal attacks on women earlier in the year.
Sutcliffe avoided detection for years due to a series of missed opportunities by police to snare him, and eventually confessed in 1981 when he was brought in due to a police check discovering stolen number plates on his car.
Despite his 24-hour-long confession to the killings, Sutcliffe denied the murders when indicted at court.
The 74-year-old died from Covid-19 in November 2020, having fallen ill in prison.
Levi Bellfield
Levi Bellfield is the only serial killer in the UK to be handed two whole life orders.
He was jailed in 2008 for the murder of 22-year-old Amelie Delagrange in 2004 and the 2003 murder of Marsha McDonnell, 19, after the two were linked.
Three years later, he was convicted of murdering 13-year-old Milly Dowler in 2002.
Milly was snatched from the street while on her way from school to her home in Walton-on-Thames and was found dead in Yateley Heath Woods six months later.
Rosemary West
Fred and Rosemary West tortured, raped and murdered an unknown number of women between 1967 and 1987, most at their Gloucester home, which became known as the ‘House of Horrors’.
Police found nine sets of bones under the patio and cellar of the house.
Fred West, a builder, killed himself in prison while awaiting trial on 12 murder charges, while mother-of-eight Rose was convicted in 1995 of murdering 10 young girls and women, including her eldest daughter Heather, 16, and her stepdaughter Charmaine, eight.
The Wests began their killing spree at another house, close to the centre of the town. Under the floorboards police found the body of Charmaine, Fred’s eight-year-old daughter by his first wife.
At least two other women were killed in the flat.
Rose West is now 71 and is serving her life sentence in HMP New Hall, Flockton, West Yorkshire.
Michael Adebolajo
Fusilier Lee Rigby was brutally murdered on the streets of Woolwich, south-east London, in May 2013.
Muslim converts Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo ran over the 25-year-old soldier close to Woolwich Barracks before stabbing him to death in broad daylight.
The father-of-one died as a result of multiple cut and stab wounds after the attack fuelled by Adebowale and Adebolajo’s extremist beliefs, described as a “betrayal of Islam” at their murder trial in 2014.
Adebolajo was sentenced to a whole life term, while Adebowale received a 45-year minimum term.
John Straffen
Child killer John Straffen spent 55 years behind bars until his death in prison in 2007.
Straffen killed two young girls in the summer of 1951.
When he appeared in court he was found to be unfit to plead and was committed to Broadmoor Hospital.
He escaped the facility in 1952, and killed five-year-old Linda Bowyer during the few hours he was out.
Straffen was convicted of murder and sentenced to death – but later handed a whole life sentence instead due to his mental state.
Dale Cregan
Police constables Fiona Bone, 32, and Nicola Hughes, 23, were killed in the line of duty in September 2012.
Dale Cregan murdered the officers in a gun and grenade attack as they responded to a report of a burglary in Tameside.
Cregan was arrested by police when he walked into a police station in Hyde, around an hour after Hughes and Bone were killed.
He also pleaded guilty to the murders of Mark Short and David Short in 2012, as part of a gangland feud in Manchester.
He was handed a whole life tariff for the four murders in June 2013.
Trevor Hardy
Trevor Joseph Hardy, who murdered three teenage girls between December 1974 and March 1976, was nicknamed ‘the Beast of Manchester’.
Janet Lesley Stewart, 15, was stabbed to death and buried in a shallow grave; Wanda Skala, 17, was hit with a brick and sexually assaulted in Moston while walking home from work and Sharon Mosoph, 17, was stabbed and strangled with a pair of tights before her body was dumped in a canal.
During his trial, he attempted to confess to manslaughter. However, the plea was rejected and he was found guilty of three counts of murder.
He remained in prison until his death 36 years later, by which time he was one of the longest-serving prisoners in Britain.
Dennis Nilsen
Dennis Nilsen, the so-called Muswell Hill Murderer, killed boys and young men in his flat from 1978 to 1983.
He is said to have befriended the men, who were often homeless, before offering them food or lodgings for the evening back at his North London flat.
When DCI Peter Jay was called to there on February 9 in 1983, to investigate human fragments of flesh and bone clogging the drains, police realised they had a serial killer on their hands.
Nilsen was convicted at the Old Bailey of six counts of murder and two of attempted murder.
Only eight of his victims have ever been named and even to this day, not all the bodies have been recovered.
Nilsen died in May 2018 at the age of 72 at HMP Full Sutton, where he was 34 years into his life sentence.
Steve Wright
Steven Wright was dubbed the Suffolk Strangler, or Ipswich Ripper, for his crimes.
He is serving life imprisonment for murdering a total of five women who worked in the sex trade during the final months of 2006.
Forensic evidence led to his arrest in December after tiny flecks of blood were found on the back seat of his Ford Mondeo.
He was found guilty of all five murders in February 2008, and handed a whole life sentence.
Thomas Mair
Labour MP Jo Cox was stabbed 15 times and shot three times outside her constituency surgery in Birstall, near Leeds, a week before the EU referendum on June 16, 2016.
Neo-Nazi Thomas Mair, who shouted “Britain first” in the attack, was given a whole life sentence for the murder.
In November 2016, Mair was found guilty of several charges – the murder of Cox; the stabbing of Bernard Kenny, a bystander who tried to help the MP; possession of a firearm with intent to commit an indictable offence and possession of an offensive weapon.
Mark Fellows
Salford Hitman Mark Fellows, known as ‘the Iceman”, was responsible for the murders of John Kinsella and Paul Massey.
Massey, 55, who was branded Salford’s ‘Mr Big’, was murdered by Fellows outside his home in July 2015.
Judge Mr Justice William Davis sentenced him to a whole life term following a murder trial.
He was later handed another life sentence, after a jury found him guilty of conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm with intent for his involvement in a brutal knife attack on Aaron Williams, an A Team associate.
Stephen Griffiths
Stephen Griffiths was nicknamed the Crossbow Cannibal.
He was convicted of murdering three sex workers in Bradford in 2009 and 2010, including one who he killed with a crossbow.
He dismembered his victims before dumping the remains in the River Aire.
The killer claimed to have eaten parts of his victims, though this has never been definitively proven.
Khairi Saadallah
Reading terror attacker Khairi Saadallah murdered three men in a park in a brutal knife attack in June 2020.
The 26-year-old shouted “Allahu akhbar” as he fatally stabbed friends James Furlong, 36, Dr David Wails, 49, and Joseph Ritchie-Bennett, 39.
Three other people – Stephen Young, 51, Patrick Edwards, 29, and Nishit Nisudan, 34 – were also injured before Saadallah threw away the eight-inch knife and ran off, pursued by an off-duty police officer.
Saadallah, of Basingstoke Road, Reading, pleaded guilty to three murders and three attempted murders.
Mr Justice Sweeney sentenced him at the Old Bailey to a whole-life order, saying it was a “rare and exceptional” case.
