Baby serial killer Lucy Letby, Milly Dowler’s murderer Levi Bellfield and now triple murderer and rapist Kyle Clifford are among more than 70 people serving whole-life sentences.
Judges reserve the penalty for only the most serious crimes – mostly murder – where the level of planning, vulnerability of victims and scale of killing is particularly high.
Other criminals serving whole-life terms are Rose West, Fusilier Lee Rigby’s killer Michael Adebolajo, and Mark Bridger – who murdered April Jones in 2012.
Here are some of the most notorious.
Kyle Clifford
Clifford was given a whole-life sentence for murdering his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt, 25, her mother Carol Hunt, 61, and her sister Hannah Hunt, 28.
He also pleaded guilty to false imprisonment of his former partner Louise, as well as possession of the crossbow used to kill her and her sister, and the 10-inch butcher’s knife he stabbed their mother to death with.
The victims were the family of BBC racing commentator John Hunt.
The court heard the 26-year-old, from Enfield, north London, began planning the murders after Louise ended their 18-month relationship in a message a few weeks before.
He tricked his way into the Hunt family home before stabbing her mother to death in what prosecutors said was a “brutal knife attack”, then lay in wait for an hour for Louise to enter the house.
Clifford held her for more than two hours, as he restrained her with duct tape and raped her, then shot her through the chest with a crossbow moments before her sister Hannah got home and was also killed by him.
He fled the scene and shot himself with the weapon as armed police descended and is now paralysed from the chest down.
Rose West
West was given a whole-life sentence in 1995 for 10 murders, which she carried out with her husband Fred in Gloucester between 1973 and 1987.
The married couple abducted, tortured and murdered young women, including Rose’s eight-year-old stepdaughter Charmaine in 1971.
Police found many of their mutilated bodies in the garden and under the floorboards of their house.
Fred would have also been given a whole-life order, but he killed himself in prison while still awaiting trial.
Rose is still an inmate at HMP New Hall in West Yorkshire and was given her tariff by the then home secretary under the old system – as opposed to a judge.
Robert Maudsley
Maudsley was originally sentenced for murdering John Farrell – who allegedly picked him up for sex and showed him pictures of children he had sexually abused.
He surrendered himself to police and was deemed unfit to stand trial, so was sent to Broadmoor Hospital instead of prison.
While he was there, he and another patient – David Cheeseman – took another, David Francis – a convicted child abuser – hostage and tortured him to death.
That saw him convicted of manslaughter and sent to Wakefield prison where he killed two more of his fellow inmates – Salney Darwood and William Roberts.
He was re-sentenced for double murder in 1979 and was told he would never be released.
Maudsley, who claims he is only a threat to sex offenders, is alleged to have eaten the brain of one of his victims, earning him the nickname “Hannibal the Cannibal”.
He has served most of his sentence in solitary confinement due to the risk he poses to other inmates.
Levi Bellfield
Bellfield abducted and killed 13-year-old schoolgirl Milly Dowler on her way home from school in Surrey in 2002.
A year later he attacked 19-year-old Marsha Louise McDonnell by hitting her over the head with a hammer after she got off a bus in nearby Hampton.
After trying to kill Kate Sheedy, 18, by hitting her with his car, he killed again. This time the victim was 22-year-old Amelie Delagrange in Twickenham.
He was given a whole-life sentence for the murders of Marsha and Amelie in 2008.
In prison, he confessed to the then unsolved murder of Milly Dowler, which saw him become the first prisoner to be handed a second whole-life tariff.
Bellfield, who has fathered 11 children by three different women, has admitted to further murders and rapes from his cell at HMP Wakefield.
Police have since suggested he may have lied to manipulate and cause further pain to their families.
Mark Bridger
Bridger was convicted of abducting and murdering five-year-old April Jones in Machynlleth, Wales, in October 2012.
He was arrested the day after she was reported missing when police matched his description with the man she was seen getting into a vehicle with.
Bridger claimed he accidentally ran over her body with his car while drunk and couldn’t remember where it was.
He has never revealed where her body is hidden but police managed to find her DNA in blood and bone fragments inside his home.
Bridger planned to appeal against his sentence but dropped the appeal just before it was due to be heard in early 2014.
Dale Cregan
Cregan’s criminal career began with burglary and drug dealing in Greater Manchester in the 1990s and early 2000s.
After going to live with his sister in Tenerife he returned to the UK and began collecting guns.
In September 2012 he made a fake 999 call to police. Greater Manchester Police officers Fiona Bone, 32, and Nicola Hughes, 23, attended what they believed was the scene of a burglary.
Cregan, nicknamed “one eye”, killed them both by firing 32 shots of a Glock pistol and throwing an M75 grenade towards them.
After police arrested him they were also able to link him to the murders of Mark Short, 23, and his father David, 46, as part of a gangland feud in 2012.
Initially, he denied the murders, but eventually confessed, admitting he regretted killing the two policewomen.
He was given a whole-life term in June 2013.
Michael Adebolajo
Before Adebolajo killed Fusilier Lee Rigby, he had been arrested for various terror-related offences, having converted to Islam in 2003.
In 2006 he was arrested outside the Old Bailey during a protest over the trial of Islamic activist Mizanur Rahman. Then, in 2010, he was arrested in Kenya and accused of being part of the Al Shabaab terrorist group.
On the afternoon of 22 May 2013, Adebolajo and his friend Michael Adebowale, who he had met at the University of Greenwich, spotted Mr Rigby walking home to Woolwich barracks in southeast London after a shift at the Tower of London.
Seeing his Help 4 Heroes hoodie – in support of British veterans – they ran him over with their car before getting out and attacking him so fiercely with knives and a meat cleaver that he was almost decapitated.
They urged horrified witnesses to call the police and ranted at them to film them while still covered in the victim’s blood.
When police arrived they charged at the car, hoping to be martyred, but survived being shot at by officers.
They were convicted in late 2013. Adebolajo was given a whole-life sentence, while Adebowale got a minimum of 45 years.
Joanna Dennehy
Dennehy is among the few women in the UK to be serving a whole-life sentence and has been described as one of the “most dangerous female prisoners in custody”.
She went on a 10-day murder spree in 2013, killing three men and severely injuring two more.
Dennehy is known as the “ditch” killer having dumped her victims’ bodies in ditches near to where she lived in Peterborough.
Her first victim was her housemate Lukasz Slaboszewski, 31.
The following week she stabbed John Chapman, 56, to death hours before murdering her 48-year-old lover and landlord Kevin Lee.
Before she was caught she knifed another two men at random, later describing the killings as “moreish and fun”.
Pictures on her social media showed her posing with knives.
The judge in her case said she was “cruel, calculating, selfish and manipulative”.
Dennehy, who is behind bars at HMP Low Newton in County Durham, said she specifically targeted men and would never kill women – particularly those with children.
Thomas Mair
Mair stabbed Labour MP Jo Cox to death at a weekly surgery for constituents in Birstall, West Yorkshire.
The murder took place a week before the referendum on the UK leaving the EU in June 2016, with both sides temporarily suspending their campaigns as a mark of respect.
Mair was a white supremacist, who the judge said committed the murder with the sole purpose of furthering his political, racial and ideological cause.
He was given a whole-life sentence at the Old Bailey in November that year.
Mrs Cox’s murder was the first of a sitting MP since Conservative Ian Gow was assassinated by the Provisional IRA in 1990.
Stephen Port
Known as the ‘Grindr killer’ after meeting his victims on gay dating apps, Port used the party drug GHB to render them unconscious before raping them and leaving them for dead.
The body of his first victim Anthony Walgate, 23, was found slumped metres from Port’s flat in Barking, east London.
He was jailed for four months for perverting the course of justice having lied to police about finding him there by accident.
Port wasn’t investigated for Mr Walgate’s murder, which was originally put down to a fatal GHB overdose.
Police had Port’s laptop, which would have revealed what he had done, but they failed to search it.
This allowed him to go on to kill three other young men – Gabriel Kovari, 22, Daniel Whitworth, 21, and Jack Taylor, 25, in a similar fashion.
Police failed to link the four deaths, with their families forced to make their own enquiries. Port was arrested after they presented them with the evidence they had found themselves.
The judge accepted he didn’t intend to kill his victims – but he had to have known that his actions posed a high risk of death.
The victims’ families have since called for an inquiry into the Metropolitan Police’s failings, which they attribute to homophobia within the force.
Khairi Saadallah
On 20 June 2020, Saadallah stabbed six people in a park in Reading city centre.
The attack saw him murder James Furlong, 36, David Wails, 49, and Joe Ritchie-Bennett, 39, in just 10 seconds.
The three men who died were all members of the LGBT+ community.
As he killed them he was heard shouting “God is the greatest” and “God accept my jihad” in Arabic.
He was found guilty of three counts of murder and three of attempted murder.
The judge sentenced him to a whole-life order having concluded he was “seeking to advance a political, religious or ideological cause”.
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Wayne Couzens
Couzens used his position as a Metropolitan Police officer to falsely arrest 33-year-old Sarah Everard as she walked home from a friend’s house in south London during COVID lockdown restrictions in March 2021.
Despite being off duty at the time, he put her in his car and drove her to Kent where he raped and strangled her.
He initially denied any involvement but later pleaded guilty to her kidnap, rape and murder.
When the case came to light in court, it sparked national outrage over the lack of safety for women and girls.
Couzens has been convicted of three counts of exposing himself in the run-up to Ms Everard’s murder since he was first jailed.
Messages from his WhatsApp group with other officers have also been published revealing regular use of sexist and racist language and jokes about sexually assaulting women.
David Fuller
Fuller was caught decades after he murdered Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pearce, 20, in Tunbridge Wells, Kent in 1987 after his DNA came up as a match in a cold case review.
Before his arrest in December 2020, he worked as an electrician at two hospitals.
Over a period of 12 years, he raped and sexually assaulted the bodies of at least 78 women and girls in the hospitals’ mortuaries.
His victims included a nine-year-old girl and a 100-year-old woman. He filmed many of the offences.
There were shouts of “scum” from the public gallery when he was sentenced at the Old Bailey.
The judge gave him a whole-life order and told him he had “no regard for the dignity of the dead”.
Ali Harbi Ali
Ali stabbed Conservative MP Sir David Amess at a constituency surgery in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex in October 2021.
Sir David, who had long campaigned on issues including animal welfare and endometriosis, received 20 stab wounds and was pronounced dead shortly after.
Ali aligned himself with Islamic State and said he killed the MP because he had voted for air strikes on Syria.
Giving him a whole-life order, the judge said the murder “struck at the heart of our democracy”.
It was the second time an MP was murdered in just five years following the death of Jo Cox in 2016.
Southend-on-Sea was named a city, something Sir David had long called for, in his honour.
Damien Bendall
Bendall murdered his pregnant partner Terri Harris, 35, and her children Lacey, 11, and John Paul, 13 in Killamarsh, Derbyshire, in September 2021.
He also murdered Lacey’s friend Connie Gent who had been at the family home for a sleepover.
Bendall went to the house looking for his victims and murdered them in different rooms with a claw hammer, his trial was told.
The 32-year-old killer raped Lacey before killing her, evidence also showed.
When police arrived at the scene he met them outside, saying: “I’m going back to prison again, I’ve murdered four people,” before asking officers for a cigarette.
Louis De Zoysa
De Zoysa was handcuffed at Croydon custody suite having been arrested for possession of seven rounds of ammunition in September 2020 when he shot Metropolitan Police Sergeant Matt Ratana.
He hid an antique gun inside his jacket, which meant he was able to shoot Sergeant Ratana in the chest and neck – fatally wounding his heart and lung.
Originally he claimed diminished responsibility, alleging he had suffered an autistic meltdown – but a jury found him guilty of murder.
It was the first time a whole-life sentencing was allowed to be filmed – following a campaign by Sky News to allow cameras in court.
Lucy Letby
Letby, 34, was given 14 whole-life orders for murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six others while working as a nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital. This makes her the most prolific child killer in the UK in modern times.
She faced seven murder charges and seven counts of attempted murder because she tried to kill one of the babies twice.
Letby carried out her crimes between June 2015 and June 2016 in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care ward, often during night shifts or when there were no – or very few – other staff.
An investigation was launched and Letby arrested after doctors noticed an above-average increase in premature babies falling seriously ill and dying on the unit.
The victims and their families were given anonymity in the case, and were referred to only as babies A to Q during the trial.
Marcus Osborne
Osborne stabbed 27-year-old Katie Higton to death at her house, leaving his ex-partner with 99 injuries, and then lured Steven Harnett, 25, who she was dating to the property and killed him too.
He raped another woman at the house and held her at knifepoint overnight. Four children were in the property in Huddersfield at the time.
Osborne, 35, had a history of domestic violence and had been released on bail a few fays before – after Ms Higton had told police about his threats to kill.
