Britain's longest serving prisoner, who spent 55 years in prison until his death. Straffen was convicted of murdering two pre-teen girls in July 1951. The following year, he escaped for a four-hour period and was convicted of murdering another girl during this short spell at large, although he long proclaimed his innocence. Straffen was reprieved from a death sentence owing to learning difficulties, and instead remained in prison for the rest of his life. He died, aged 77, at Frankland prison in November 2007.[3] For the final five years of his life, he was the oldest prisoner known to be serving a whole life-tariff, following the death of Archibald Hall

One of the Moors Murderers who was convicted, in May 1966, of murdering three children between 1963 and 1965. He was convicted just six months after the abolition of the death penalty, and less than two years after final executions in Britain. His trial judge said it was unlikely that Brady could ever be rehabilitated and considered for parole.
With accomplice Myra Hindley, he buried the children in shallow graves on Saddleworth Moor. From 1985 until his death he was held in a mental hospital and was on long-term hunger strike, which led to him being force-fed through a tube. In 2001, he published a book on serial killing. The body of one of his victims, 12-year-old Keith Bennett, remains undiscovered on the Moor, despite Brady's and Hindley's own heavily guarded efforts to locate the remains themselves after they admitted two further murders in 1986; they did, however, guide police to the buried body of 16-year-old Pauline Reade in 1987.

In 2006, Brady wrote to Keith Bennett's mother to claim he remembered enough to be taken to within 20 yards of the grave, but was not permitted to do so.[4]

Brady died, aged 79, at Ashworth Hospital in May 2017.

The other of the Moors Murderers, Ian Brady's girlfriend and accomplice who was involved in all five murders with Brady. She was convicted of two of three murders which were detected in 1965, and of being an accessory in the third murder, as she was not present when Brady committed the murder. The convictions of Brady and Hindley came just six months after the abolition of the death penalty, and less than two years after the last execution in Britain - although more than 10 years had passed since the last execution of a woman in Britain. In 1986, she and Brady confessed to two more murders and returned to the moors to help police find the body of one of the victims, although the final body has still not been found.
Hindley's trial judge recommended she should serve at least 25 years in prison, which was endorsed in 1982 by the Lord Chief Justice. Reports suggested that Hindley was rehabilitating in prison and had found religion and rejected Brady and her past, but her tariff was increased to 30 years in 1988 and, finally, to a whole-life tariff two years later, although she was not informed of the whole-life tariff until 1994. Hindley's supporters, including penal reformer Lord Longford, journalist David Astor and prison governor Peter Timms, claimed that the increase in Hindley's sentence was the response of a succession of Home Secretaries to public opinion, as there was widespread public opposition to Hindley ever being released. Relatives of the Moors Murders victims were at the centre of a campaign to keep Hindley imprisoned and several of them vowed to kill her[6] if she was ever paroled.

Hindley subsequently made three appeals against the whole life tariff, but each appeal was unsuccessful she died in jail at the age of 60 in November 2002, less than two weeks before a law lords' ruling which could potentially have secured her freedom.[7] Her case prompted more debate than that of any other prisoner of notoriety, with some high-profile backing from the House of Lords, but vitriol from the press and the public, as well as the families of her victims. Lord Longford, who died just over a year before Hindley, regularly condemned the media for their "exploitation" of Ann West, mother of one of the victims, who gave regular newspaper and television interviews to argue against any suggestion of release from prison, and vowed to kill Hindley if she ever was released.

Her death left only Rosemary West (jailed for life for 10 murders in 1995) as a confirmed female prisoner serving a whole-life tariff, until the addition of Joanne Dennehy, in 2014

The Black Panther, nicknamed for wearing a black balaclava, shot dead three postmasters during robberies in various areas of the country, then abducted a 17-year-old heiress from her Shropshire home. He attempted to ransom the heiress, but her body was found two months later in a drain in Staffordshire, being convicted in July 1976 after being caught when two police officers he took hostage overpowered him in December 1975. In 2008, Neilson lost an appeal to have his tariff reduced to 30 years. He remained in prison until his death three years later, having served 35 years.

Trevor Joseph Hardy murdered three teenage girls between December 1974 and March 1976. Janet Lesley Stewart, 15, was murdered on New Year's Eve 1974 and buried in a shallow grave in Newton Heath, North Manchester. She had been stabbed. Wanda Skala, 17, was murdered in July 1975 on Lightbowne Road, Moston. She was hit over the head with a paving stone and sexually assaulted. Sharon Mosoph, 17, was murdered in March 1976, and dumped in the Rochdale Canal at Failsworth, Oldham. She had been strangled and mutilated after walking by when Hardy was attempting to burgle a shopping centre at night. He was suspected of committing other murders. At the height of the hunt for the serial killer, 23,000 people were stopped and searched. The case is not widely known and only one independent publication exists which covers the case. Trevor Hardy was arrested for the murders of Wanda Skala and Sharon Mosoph during 1976. In August 1976 he confessed to both murders and also to that of Janet Lesley Stewart – who until then had been a missing person. Despite the alibis provided by his girlfriend Sheilagh Farrow, Hardy was found guilty of the murders and sentenced to life imprisonment in May 1978. He remained in prison until his death 36 years later, by which time he was one of the longest serving prisoners in Britain.

Robert John Maudsley (born June 1953) is a serial killer who killed four people. He committed three of these murders in prison after receiving a life sentence for a single murder in the mid 1970s. He was alleged to have eaten part of the brain of one of three men he killed in prison, which earned him the nickname "Hannibal the Cannibal" among the British press. He committed his first murder by strangling labourer John Farrell after he allegedly showed him pictures of children he abused and was declared not fit to stand trial and sent to Broadmoor in 1973. In 1977 he and David Chessman took fellow patient David Francis hostage and tortured him to death and as a result was convicted of manslaughter and sent to Wakefield prison. At Wakefield in July 1978 he killed two fellow prisoners, luring Salney Darwood into his cell and slitting his throat and then smashing Bill Roberts head against a wall at a later time, this time being convicted of double murder at his trial in 1979.
He has served much of his sentence in solitary confinement to prevent him from attacking or killing any more inmates, some of it at Parkhurst prison, but mostly at Wakefield prison in a cell said to resemble Hannibal Lecter's in the film The Silence of the Lambs with cardboard furniture. He became Britain's longest-serving prisoner after the death of Ian Brady in May 2017

The Killer Butler or Monster Butler, so named as he committed his murders while working in service to members of the British aristocracy as a butler. Hall, also known as Roy Fontaine, was a Glaswegian thief and confidence trickster with numerous convictions and prison sentences by the time he committed his first murder, of an ex-cellmate, whom he shot and buried after an argument over some jewellery stolen from Hall's employer. Hall moved to London and began serving an elderly ex-MP and his wife, and with accomplice Michael Kitto, he killed and buried them both after late-night plans to rob them were disturbed. They then killed a female acquaintance and dumped her body in a barn after she refused to destroy a fur coat which was potentially incriminating evidence, and lastly Hall murdered his half-brother, a convicted child molester who was asking too many questions, before beginning a journey to Scotland with the intention of again burying the body. Having stopped at a hotel for the night when the weather became too hazardous for driving, Hall and Kitto were caught when the hotelier, concerned that the two suspicious-looking guests might not pay their bill, called the police. They found the body in Hall's car boot, and Hall later showed them the three gruesome burial sites. After trials in London and Edinburgh, Hall received four life sentences and Kitto three at their trial in May 1978, with one judge recommending that Hall should never be freed. This recommendation was upheld when the list of confirmed whole-life tariff prisoners was published, and Hall was the oldest prisoner on the list. He publicly requested the right to die in 1995, and did so of a stroke in 2002, while still in prison. At 78, he was one of the oldest prisoners in Britain. Three years earlier, he had published his autobiography.

John Childs was convicted of the murder of six people in contract killings which were committed between 1974 and 1978; he implicated two others and they were convicted in 1980, but they were released on appeal in 2003 after his evidence was called into question.[13][15] He murdered Terence Eve in 1974, Robert Brown in 1975, George Brett and his 10-year-old son Terry Brett later on in 1975, Fred Sherwood in 1978 and Ronald Andrews later on in 1978 and was jailed in December 1979, with the murders being committed by shooting and stabbing. He confessed to a journalist in 1998 of five more murders while in prison, he appealed against his conviction in 2014 and his whole life sentence in 2016 but was rejected each time on account of his crimes being "exceptionally serious".

A civil servant and former policeman who murdered and dismembered 15 young men at his homes in North London, storing the body parts inside and around the residences. Nilsen was arrested after workmen investigating a blocked and odorous drain found human flesh. Nilsen's trial judge originally recommended a 25-year minimum sentence in November 1983, but successive Home Secretaries decided that he should never be released from prison. The November 2002 law lords' ruling meant that Nilsen could have been released from prison as early as 2008; however, this did not transpire and he remained imprisoned until his death. Nilsen was also denied the right to publish his autobiography in addition to music and poetry from prison.

A fugitive who in 1983 gatecrashed a wedding reception at a house in Sheffield shortly after the bride and groom had left and stabbed to death the bride's father, mother and brother, before raping her sister at knifepoint. Police quickly labelled him as the killer after identifying a handprint on a champagne bottle and a bitemark in a piece of cheese. He was already on the run from answering a charge of violent rape and had previous convictions for offences of violence, indecent assault and dishonesty. He was convicted in 1984 and sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommended minimum term of 18 years in September 1984. However, he remains in prison more than 30 years on, having been issued with a whole-life tariff by the Home Secretary, Leon Brittan. Hutchinson has since appealed against this ruling twice through the High Court, but the court upheld the decision of the Home Secretary on both occasions, meaning he is likely to die in prison. Appeals to the European Court of Human Rights in February 2015 and January 2017 were also unsuccessful, with the court's Grand Chamber ruling that whole life sentences could still be issued provided they were reviewed within 25 years.

In October 1986, he was found guilty of shooting dead his adoptive parents, sister and six-year-old twin nephews at the family farmhouse in Essex 14 months earlier, in order to claim a six-figure inheritance while also laying evidence to suggest his sister, a schizophrenic, had committed the murders before killing herself. This was the police's original line of inquiry and the media reported the deaths as a murder-suicide, but within weeks of the murders being committed the line of the police investigation had changed and Bamber was charged with five murders.
His trial judge said in sentencing him that he found the idea of ever seeing Bamber free again "difficult to foresee", and advised that he should serve at least 25 years behind bars before release could even be considered. Before the law lords' ruling in November 2002, Bamber was told by at least one Home Secretary that his life sentence would mean life.