Lucy Letby will go down as one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers after her conviction for the murder of seven babies. She joins a grim list of mass murderers, from a Victorian mass poisoner to the Yorkshire Ripper. Here we take a look at some of the most shocking killers.
Beverley Allitt
Allitt’s case has many striking similarities to Letby’s. She was convicted of murdering three babies and one 11-year-old, attempting to murder three other children, and causing grievous bodily harm to a further six at Grantham and Kesteven hospital in Lincolnshire between February and April 1991. She committed the murders as a nurse in her 20s on the children’s ward of the hospital.
Allitt administered large doses of insulin to her victims. In May 1993, she received 13 life sentences at Nottingham crown court.
Harold Shipman
Like Letby, Shipman was a medical professional. The GP was jailed for life in January 2000 for murdering 15 patients while working in Hyde, Greater Manchester.
He is believed to have killed at least 250 people over a 23-year period in Hyde and in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. The full extent of his crimes only became clear during Dame Janet Smith’s independent inquiry. Shipman hanged himself in his cell at Wakefield prison in 2004 at the age of 57.
Fred and Rose West
The Wests 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”.
Rose, a mother of eight children, was convicted in 1995 of murdering 10 young girls and women, including her eldest daughter, Heather, 16, and her stepdaughter Charmaine, eight. Her husband, a builder, killed himself in prison while awaiting trial on 12 murder charges. Rose, now 69, is serving a life sentence in HMP New Hall, West Yorkshire.
Peter Sutcliffe
Peter Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, was perhaps the most notorious killer of the 20th century. He died aged 74 while serving a whole-life tariff for murdering 13 women across Yorkshire and north-west England between 1975 and 1980. He brutally attacked at least seven more who survived.
Once the most feared man in the UK, he began his killing spree in 1975 and avoided detection for years because of a series of missed opportunities by police. He confessed in 1981 after he was caught in Sheffield.
Despite his 24-hour-long confession to the killings, Sutcliffe denied the murders when he appeared in court. In May 1981 he was jailed for 20 life terms at the Old Bailey, with the judge recommending a minimum sentence of 30 years.
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley
Ian Brady and his partner, 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, in the 1960s.
Pauline Reade, 16, disappeared on her way to a disco on 12 July 1963; 12-year-old John Kilbride was snatched in November the same year. Keith Bennett, 12, was taken on 16 June 1964 after he left home to visit his grandmother; Lesley Ann Downey, aged 10, was lured away from a funfair on Boxing Day 1964; and Edward Evans, 17, was killed in October 1965.
Hindley died in prison in 2002 at the age of 60 and Brady died in 2017, aged 79. Keith’s body has never been found.
Mary Ann Cotton
Mary Ann Cotton, frequently called Britain’s first serial killer, was found guilty in the late 19th century of the murder of her stepson, Charles, and responsible for the deaths by poisoning of 11 of her children, three husbands, one lover and her mother.
Cotton was ultimately linked to as many as 21 suspected murders. She was sentenced to death by hanging and executed at Durham jail on 24 March 1873, in front of 50 observers.
