UK serial killers whose crimes shocked and appalled the country - from Jack the Ripper to Harold Shipman

The horror of their crimes has endured throughout the decades - and in some cases centuries. From one of the UK’s most notorious serial killers, Jack the Ripper in the late 1800s, to the murders carried out by Dr Harold Shipman from the mid 1970s to late 1990s, and the shocking murders by Fred and Rose West.

In the case of killers such the Suffolk Strangler, Steve Wright, the true number of the victims could be much higher than is known - with unsoved cases still being investigated for links to him.

While the death toll attributed to Harold Shipman - the UK’s most prolific serial killer, could be more than 200 more than what he was convicted of.

The appalling crimes of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in the 1960s were highlighted once more after police carried out searches on Saddleworth Moor in a bid to find the body of Keith Bennett. The murdered boy’s remains have never been found, and a fresh search was prompted after reports of human remains being found on the moor - where the other victims were buried.

The actions of prolific killers in the past century have become well known and covered in the media, and more latterly even the feature of crime podcasts, the actions of Jack the Ripper and Jonathan Balls in the 1800s caused outrage and horror in their communities. But who are the UK’s most notorious serial killers? NationalWorld has taken a look ar some infamous cases from the 1800s to more recent times.

Jack the Ripper

The identity of the serial killer has never been identified. Murders attributed to Jack the Ripper involved female prostitutes in the Whitechapel area of London in the late 1880s, their throats were cut prior to abdominal mutilations - three of the women had internal organs removed. The true number of the murderer’s victims is not known. A police investigation into 11 murders committed in Whitechapel and Spittalfields between 1888 and 1891 was unable to connect all the killings to those of the autumn in 1888.

But five victims, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly, who were murdered between 31 August and 9 November 1888 are often considered the most likely to be linked.

The name Jack the Ripper came from a letter sent to the media claiming to be from the murderer, however it was a hoax. But the name has becomed infamously linked with the unsolved killings.

Beverley Allitt

Allitt, who became known as the ‘Angel of Death’, was convicted of murdering four children, attempting to murder three other children and causing grievous bodily harm to a further six. Her crimes were committed over a period of 59 days from February to April 1991 in the children’s ward at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, Lincolnshire, where she worked as a State Enrolled Nurse.

It was thought she administered insulin to at least two of the victims, but police were unable to establish how the attacks were carried out. Allitt was sentenced to 13 life sentences, with a minimum term of 30 years. She has been held at a secure hospital for the majority of her sentence, and the minimum term of her sentence has now expired.

Jonathan Balls

Balls who died in 1846, was posthumously accused of poisoning at least 22 people, almost all of them close family members, in the village of Happisburgh from 1824 to 1845. He was never tried for these crimes, as he committed suicide before an official investigation could begin.

Little is known about his life other than he had served prison time for petty crimes. Balls started buying large quantities of arsenic from nearby towns, claiming that the family home was infested with rats. The first recorded suspicious death was of one of his daughters, 24-year-old Maria Lacey. Over the years several other family members died, including his wife Elizabeth.

Neighbours had asked for inquests to be held due to the number of deaths, but nothing happened. The final victim died on 17 April, 1846 - Balls’ grandaughter Elizabeth Pestle. Balls died three days later. The community again asked the coroner to investigate and the bodies of Balls and his grandaughter were exhumed - with large quanties of arsenic found in them.

An investigation into the other deaths began, and a maid who had been employed at the proerty said she saw Balls put white powder into his wife’s tea when she was ill, only for her condition to worsen.

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley

The pair kidnapped, tortured and murdered children in and around Manchester, England, between July 1963 and October 1965. They buried the bodies of the children on bleak Saddleworth Moor in the south Pennines in the 1960s. Together, they killed five children, Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans all aged between 10 and 17. Four of them were said to have been sexually assaulted.

The bodies of two victims were discovered in 1965 in graves dug on the moor, and a third was found in 1987. Keith Bennett’s body is thought to be buried there but it remains undiscovered. Brady who refused to reveal where Keith Bennett’s body was buried, died in 2017 aged 79, while Hindley, who was the first woman to be given a whole life tariff, died in prison in 2002 at the age of 60.

Peter Bryan

Bryan, who is from London, killed three people - one of which he cannabalised. Bryan, suffers from schizophrenia, and had spoken on several occasions about wanting to eat people.

In 1993 he murdered shop-owner’s daughter Nisha Sheth, beating her to death. He was sent to a secure hospital facility after admitting her murder. By 2004 he was thought to have made good progress and was transferred to an open psychiatric ward.

But just hours after his release on 17 February, 2004, Bryan killed, dismembered, and cooked his friend Brian Cherry, 43. While on remand at Broadmoor he killed fellow patient Richard Loudwell, 59.

He later admitted two counts of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility on March 15, 2005. Bryan was given a whole life order, but it was overturned and a new sentence of at least 15 years set - though it’s thought to be unlikely he will ever be released.

John Childs

Known as the most prolific hit man in the UK, he carried out a series of contract killings between 1974 to October 1978. Childs, who was given a whole life tarriff, was convicted of six murders, though the bodies were never found.

He was arrested in September 1978 for a series of bank and security van robberies in Hertfordshire and confessed to the murders. He later implicated Essex businessmen and former prisoners Terry Pinfold and Harry “Big H” MacKenney.

The pair later had their convictions overturned on appeal after it was ruled that Childs evidence was unreliable as he was a “pathological liar”.

John Christie

Christie murdered at least eight people, including his wife, Ethel - by strangling them in his flat at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill. The bodies of three of Christie’s victims were found in a wallpaper-covered kitchen alcove soon after he had moved out during March 1953.

The remains of two more victims were discovered in the garden, and his wife’s body was found beneath the floorboards. Christie was arrested and convicted of his wife’s murder, for which he was hanged in 1953. However, an innocent man had been hanged for the murders of two of Christie’s victims - Beryl Evans and her baby daughter Geraldine. They had been tenants at 10 Rillington Place along with Beryl’s husband Timothy Evans in 1948-9.

Evans was charged with murder and hanged in 1950, Christie had been a witness for the prosecution. Doubts were raised over Evans conviction after Christie’s crimes came to light, and he himself admitted to killing Beryl, though not Geraldine - though it was generally accepted he had. Evans conviction was quashed in 2004.

John Haigh

Haigh was convicted of killing six people, though he said the total was nine. He became known as the ‘Acid Bath Murderer’, due to how he disposed of the bodies of those he killed by using sulphuric acid. From 1944 to 1949 Haigh beat or shot the victims to death.

Haigh would forge the victims signatures so he could sell their possessions and get large amounts of cash. After being jailed for fraud in the 1930s he became fascinated by French murderer Georges-Alexandre Sarret, who had disposed of bodies using sulphuric acid. On his release in 1943 he became an accountant with an engineering firm.

His first victim was William McSwan, an amusement arcade owner, who had been a chauffeur for in the 1930s. Haigh was envious of his lifestyle and bumping into him in a pub proved to be a deadly twist of fate. Ultimately Haigh ended up luring him into a basement where he killed him. When McSwan’s parents began to question Haigh’s story about their son being in hiding in Scotland to avoid military service, he killed them too.

He was caught after he killed his final victim, wealthy widow Olive Durand-Deacon. When police searched a workshop rented by Haigh they found human body fat and remains in a rubble pile at the back of the property. Haigh was hanged in 1949.

Dennis Nilsen

Nilsen carried out a murder spree during the late 1970s and early 1980s and is believed to have killed as many as 15 people, many of them homeless young gay men. Nilsen would befriend his subjects in pubs and bars in London before luring them into his flat, where he would kill them and sit with their corpses before dismembering them. His crimes were discovered when a drain outside his home on Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, became blocked by human remains that he had tried to flush away.

He was jailed for life in 1983, with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of 25 years, for six counts of murder and two of attempted murder. His sentence was later converted to a whole life tariff. Nilsen, who became known as the Muswell Hill murderer, was born in Fraserburgh, Scotland, and died in 2018 at HMP Full Sutton.

Harold Shipman

The GP - dubbed Dr Death, is considered one of the most prolific serial killers in recent history. Shipman is to date the only British doctor convicted of murdering his patients. Shipman whose crimes took place between 1975 and 1998 was convicted of killing 15 people while working in Hyde, Greater Manchester. However the Shipman Inquiry identified 218 victims, and estimated the tally could actually be as many as 260.

The GP would usually call on his victims at their homes, often on a pretext, before dispensing deadly injections of diamorphine and then falsifying their medical records.

A large number of those Shipman killed were elderly women - though his youngest identified victim was a 41 year old man. Shipman was jailed for life in 2000, four years later at the age of 57 years old he committed suicide in his cell.

Peter Sutcliffe

Sutcliffe is known to have killed 13 women, and attacked another 10, while he worked as an HGV driver. His attacks were between 1975 and 1981, mainly focusing on the Leeds area, while he also committed crimes in Bradford, Manchester, Halifax, Huddersfield, Keighley and Silsden.

He was caught by police in 1981 with a prostitute in his car, with officers finding fake licence places and weapons including a screwdriver and hammer in his boot.

Speaking to psychiatrists, he said that while working as a gravedigger in 1967, he heard a voice which told him that it was his mission to kill sex workers. However, not all of his victims were in this line of work. He was sentenced to 20 life sentences, which was later combined into a whole life order. There are a number of unsolved murders which have been linked to him.

Fred and Rose West

The Wests’ home at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester was dubbed the “house of horrors” after the bodies of nine women were discovered there. Fred West took his own life in his remand cell at Winston Green jail, Birmingham, on New Year’s Day 1995 before facing trial.

He was accused jointly with his wife on the 10 counts and alone faced further charges alleging the murder of his first wife, Catherine Costello, 26, and girlfriend Anne McFall, 18. A jury found Rose West guilty of murdering her eldest daughter Heather, 16, stepdaughter Charmaine, eight, - whose body was found buried elsewhere, her husband Fred’s pregnant lover Shirley Anne Robinson, 18, Lynda Gough, 19, Carol Ann Cooper, 15, Lucy Partington, 21, Therese Siegenthaler, 21, Shirley Hubbard, 15, Juanita Mott, 18, and Alison Chambers, 17. Rose West was given a life sentence, which was later changed to a whole life tariff, meaning she will die in jail.

Steve Wright

Known as the Suffolk Strangler and the Ipswich Ripper, Wright is serving a whole life order for the murders of five sex workers in Ipswich. The killings took place from October to December 2006, and it is thought he may have committed more murders.

The former pub landlord was arrested on suspicion of murder in December 2006, his DNA was found on three of the victims and fibres from his car, home and clothing were found on all five.

He has been linked with other unsolved murders and disappearances including Jeanette Kempton, Vicky Glass, Natalie Pearman and Michelle Bettles.