UK's Most Notorious Criminals Serving Whole-Life Orders Without Parole
Double murderer Shaine March has recently joined the list of the country's most infamous criminals after receiving a whole-life order this week. This sentencing represents the most severe punishment available within the United Kingdom's legal system, where offenders are ordered to spend their entire natural lives in prison without any possibility of parole.
What Is a Whole-Life Order?
A whole-life order, often referred to as a whole-life tariff, is a sentencing option reserved for the most heinous crimes. Judges impose this punishment when they determine that an offender's actions are so grave that they should never be considered for release, except under exceptional compassionate circumstances. Approximately seventy criminals are currently serving whole-life orders across the UK, with some held in secure hospitals.
Recent Cases and Notorious Offenders
Shaine March, aged forty-eight, admitted to murdering his pregnant girlfriend, Alana Odysseos, thirty-two, who was stabbed twenty-three times at her home in Walthamstow, east London, in July 2024. March was originally sentenced to life with a minimum term of forty-two years in October 2024, but the Court of Appeal ruled this sentence unduly lenient and imposed a whole-life order in March 2026.
This marks the second whole-life order issued this month, following Sharaz Ali's sentencing earlier in March for killing his ex-partner's sister, nieces, and nephew by setting fire to their home in Bradford in 2024.
Other recent cases include:
- Kyle Clifford received a whole-life order in March 2025 for murdering his ex-partner Louise Hunt, twenty-five, her sister Hannah Hunt, twenty-eight, and their mother Carol Hunt, sixty-one.
- Steve Sansom was handed a whole-life order in January 2026 for the bloodthirsty killing of Sarah Mayhew in a Croydon park while on life licence for another murder.
- Lucy Letby was jailed in August 2023 for what a judge described as a cruel, calculated, and cynical campaign of baby murder while working as a nurse.
- Louis De Zoysa received a whole-life order in July 2023 after shooting Metropolitan Police custody sergeant Matt Ratana while handcuffed in a police cell in 2020.
Historical and High-Profile Cases
Only four women have ever faced whole-life orders: Lucy Letby; Myra Hindley, who died in 2002 and was the girlfriend of Moors murderer Ian Brady; and serial killers Rose West and Joanna Dennehy. Joanna Dennehy murdered three men in a series of stabbings around Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, in March 2013.
Other notorious criminals serving whole-life orders include:
- Wayne Couzens, who kidnapped and murdered Sarah Everard.
- Ali Harbi Ali, who murdered MP Sir David Amess.
- David Fuller, sentenced in 2021 for murdering two women in 1987 and sexually abusing over one hundred dead women and girls in hospital mortuaries.
- Damien Bendall, who began a whole-life order in December 2022 for murdering his partner, her two children, and their friend during a sleepover.
- Levi Bellfield, serving two whole-life orders for the murders of Milly Dowler, Marsha McDonnell, and Amelie Delagrange, and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy.
Additional high-profile offenders include Michael Adebolajo, one of the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby; Mark Bridger, who murdered five-year-old April Jones in Wales; neo-Nazi Thomas Mair, who killed MP Jo Cox; serial killer Stephen Port; and Reading terror attacker Khairi Saadallah, who murdered three men in a park.
Legal Framework and Reforms
Historically, home secretaries could issue whole-life tariffs, but this responsibility now lies with judges. Under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which became law in 2023, the government expanded the use of whole-life orders for the premeditated murder of a child. The reforms also allow judges to hand down the maximum sentence to eighteen to twenty-year-olds in exceptional cases, such as for acts of terrorism leading to mass loss of life.
Notable cases affected by age restrictions include Manchester Arena bomb plotter Hashem Abedi, who avoided a whole-life order because he was twenty-one at the time, and Southport killer Axel Rudakubana, who could not receive a whole-life order as he committed the murders nine days before his eighteenth birthday. Rudakubana was instead jailed for a minimum of fifty-two years in January 2025, one of the highest minimum custody terms on record for a killer of his age.
Before their deaths, infamous criminals such as Ian Brady, Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, and doctor Harold Shipman, thought to be one of Britain's most prolific serial killers, were also handed whole-life orders.
