Kyle Clifford has joined the list of Britain’s worst killers whose crimes are so heinous that justice can only be served by condemning them to die behind bars.
Whole life orders are the most severe punishment available in the UK criminal justice system for those who commit the most serious crimes.
Cowardly Clifford refused to attend his trial or sentencing as he was handed the whole life order for murdering his former girlfriend Louise Hunt, her sister Hannah Hunt, and her mother Carol Hunt.
He plotted to kill Louise and her family after she ended their relationship – and turned to ‘poster boy for misogynists’ Andrew Tate following the break-up.
He shot Louise and Hannah with a crossbow, and used a butcher’s knife to stab Carol Hunt to death. He then shot himself with the crossbow and has been left paralysed from the chest down.
BBC racing commentator John Hunt, Carol’s husband and father to Louise and Hannah, bravely read out his victim impact statement in court as if Clifford was there to hear him, despite being unable to address him ‘eye to eye’.
He said: ‘Whatever sentence you’re about to receive, whatever misery lies ahead for you in the next 60 years, remain that after your days on earth are done, on your dying day there will be no release for you Kyle.
‘The screams of hell, Kyle. I can hear them faintly now. They’re going to roll the red carpet out for you.’
Whole life orders: The sentence which sees criminals likely to die behind bars
In the UK, the sentence for murder is life imprisonment, with the court setting the minimum term before the defendant can be considered for release.
For particularly serious cases, including those with a sexual motive, that is 30 years.
Judge Lord Justice Fulford explained at Wayne Couzens’ sentencing that ‘cases that have a starting point of a whole life order are those when the seriousness of the offence is exceptionally high’.
Paragraph 2(2) of Schedule 21 of the Sentencing Act 2020 provides a list of cases that would normally fall in this category, namely those:
- first, involving the murder of two or more persons, where each murder involves a substantial degree of premeditation or planning, the abduction of the victim, or sexual or sadistic conduct;
- second, the murder of a child if involving the abduction of the child or sexual or sadistic motivation;
- third, the murder of a police officer or prison officer in the course of his or her duty;
- fourth, a murder done for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause, or;
- fifth, a murder by an offender previously convicted of murder.
According to Government figures to the end of June, there are 60 criminals serving whole life orders.
Those prisoners will never be considered for release, unless there are exceptional compassionate grounds to warrant it.
These are some of the worst.
Wayne Couzens
Former PC Wayne Couzens was still serving when he used his Metropolitan Police-issue warrant card and handcuffs to abduct 33-year-old Sarah Everard as she walked home from a friend’s house in Clapham, south London, on the evening of March 3.
The Old Bailey heard harrowing details of the marketing executive’s final hours sat restrained in the back of Couzens’ hire car as he drove her to Dover where she was raped.
Couzens then used his police belt to strangle her before callously setting fire to her body in an area of woodland in Hoads Wood, near Ashford, and then dumping the remains in a nearby pond.
A firearms-trained parliamentary and diplomatic protection officer, Couzens wiped his phone just minutes before he was arrested at his home in Deal, Kent.
In a police interview, Couzens concocted an elaborate story and claimed to be having financial problems.
He said he had got into trouble with a gang of Eastern Europeans who threatened him and his family.
A gang demanded he deliver ‘another girl’ after underpaying a prostitute a few weeks before, he said.
But police saw through his lies and he eventually pleaded guilty to murdering Sarah.
The killing sparked national outrage and led to protests at the rate of violence against women.
Levi Bellfield
Bellfield, dubbed the Bus Stop Killer, was given a whole life term for murdering Marsha McDonnell, 19, in 2003, and murdering Amelie Delagrange, 22, and attempting to murder Kate Sheedy, 18, in 2004.
He was already serving this sentence when he went on trial accused of killing Milly Dowler, who was snatched from the street while on her way from school to her home in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in March 2002.
Bellfield was found guilty of abducting and killing the 13-year-old following a trial at the Old Bailey in 2011.
Fred and Rose West
The couple tortured, raped and murdered an unknown number of women between 1967 and 1987, most at their home in Cromwell Street, Gloucester, which became known as the ‘House of Horrors’, with nine sets of bones found 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.
Fred escaped trial by killing himself in his prison cell in January 1995.
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, now 66, is serving a life sentence in HMP New Hall, Flockton, West Yorkshire.
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley
The wicked lovers lured children and teenagers to their deaths, torturing and sexually assaulting them before burying their bodies on bleak Saddleworth Moor in the south Pennines in the 1960s.
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.
Brady died in 2017 aged 79, while Hindley died in prison in 2002 at the age of 60.
The body of Keith Bennett has never been found.
Harold Shipman
The GP is the UK’s most prolific convicted serial killer.
He was jailed for life in January 2000 for murdering 15 patients while working in Hyde, Greater Manchester, though official predictions are that he killed between 215 and 260 people over a 23-year period in Hyde and Todmorden, West Yorkshire.
Shipman hanged himself in his cell at Wakefield Prison in 2004 at the age of 57.
In 1998, the doctor was arrested and charged with the murder of 81-year-old Kathleen Grundy after forging her will. Suspicions had been raised previously by another GP about the high death rate among Shipman’s patients.
The full extent of his murderous career only became clear during Dame Janet Smith’s independent inquiry, which found that the GP probably killed up to 260 people.
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.
Stephen Port
Serial killer Stephen Port drugged and raped four young gay men and dumped their bodies near his home in Barking, east London, between 2014 and 2015.
Following a trial at the Old Bailey, he was handed a whole life sentence for the murders of fashion student Anthony Walgate, 23, Gabriel Kovari, 22, Kent chef Daniel Whitworth, 21, and Jack Taylor, 25, a forklift truck driver from Dagenham.
The judge acknowledged Port’s intention to only cause really serious harm and not to kill when he administered GHB, but said he must have known the risk was high, especially after the death of his first victim.
He said Port carried out the murders to ‘satisfy his lust for sex with young men who were rendered unconscious’.
Michael Adebolajo
Michael Adebolajo is serving a whole life sentence for murdering Fusilier Lee Rigby in May 2013 on the streets of Woolwich, south-east London.
Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo ran over the 25-year-old soldier close to Woolwich Barracks in May 2013 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, which were described as a ‘betrayal of Islam’ at their murder trial in 2014.
Thomas Mair
In 2016, right-wing terrorist Thomas Mair was given a whole-life term for murdering Labour MP Jo Cox in Birstall, West Yorkshire in June 2016.
He shot and stabbed the mother-of-two while shouting ‘This is for Britain’ and ‘Britain first’ in an attack carried out during the EU referendum campaign.
The judge said Mair would have to serve a whole-life sentence due to the ‘exceptional seriousness’ of the offence – a murder committed ‘for the purpose of advancing a political, racial and ideological cause namely that of violent white supremacism and exclusive nationalism most associated with Nazism and its modern forms’.
A version of this story was previously published on September 30, 2021
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