From serial killers, psychopaths and rapists to paedophiles, stalkers, spurned partners, gangsters and police killers – during a crime-reporting career spanning more than 30 years, I covered hundreds of murder cases for the Daily Mail.

And I am often asked which are the worst murders I have reported on. It’s a difficult question, but here I have compiled a list of ten of the most depraved killers I have locked eyes with...

Rosemary West

In her black suit and white blouse, she would not have looked out of place in a church congregation. She had a gold crucifix around her neck after supposedly finding God, she wore a Remembrance Day poppy and she cut a figure of matronly blandness, occasionally wiping tears.

It was 1995 and she was standing trial alone following the prison suicide of her husband and co-defendant, serial killer Fred West.

I attended every day of the seven-week trial in Winchester, when some of the most harrowing evidence ever heard in a British courtroom was presented to an appalled jury and the real Rosemary West was clear for all to see. Forget finding God, the crucifix and poppy were designed to elicit sympathy. The tears were for herself, not the victims. I was looking at the personification of evil.

This sex-obsessed psychopath was convicted of murdering ten girls and young women – including her daughter Heather and stepdaughter Charmaine. Some victims were kept alive just for hours, others for days, during which, bound and gagged, they endured repeated sexual assaults at the Wests’ Gloucester ‘House of Horrors’ home. Then they were brutally murdered, their bodies hacked to pieces and crammed into shallow graves under the kitchen and cellar floors or in the garden.

To this day, I wince when I think of a contraption that Fred built to sexually abuse one of the couple’s victims. Nobody who was at the West trial will ever forget it. My firm view is that Rosemary, now 72, was the driving force of the West killing spree. It was her mumsy demeanour which lulled many of their victims into a false sense of security.

The case had a lasting impact on how I brought up my two daughters. As they entered their teens and wanted more freedom, I found myself having to put to one side the irrational fear that they could cross paths with people like the Wests. I am forever haunted by her.

Rurik Jutting

There was a moment early in his trial in Hong Kong when I was so appalled by the evidence that I put down my pencil just to stare intently at the privately educated Cambridge graduate sitting expressionless in the dock.

As I looked into the eyes of the British banker, on trial for murdering two young Indonesian sex workers, I tried to understand how it was possible for one human to be so wicked to another.

Then he closed those dead eyes, and I realised that far from offering repentance for his actions, this one-time heartthrob who’d had a string of glamorous girlfriends in London before moving to the former British colony, looked to be enjoying the moment and reliving his crimes. There was no emotion, no apparent shame from a man who once had the world at his feet.

Worst of all was having to listen to a recording Jutting had made on his iPhone of his gagged first victim in her final moments. A journalist next to me sobbed as it was played to jurors.

As the presiding judge would later remark, there were ‘insufficient superlatives’ to describe what he did to the first woman he murdered, who was tortured in his luxury Hong Kong flat for three days with his belt, sex toys and a pair of pliers.

What he intended to do the second woman whose throat he slashed when she started to scream and shout was arguably more chilling. His murder and torture kit included a hammer, nails, plastic ties, pliers, a Stanley knife, sandpaper, a gag, ropes and a blow torch.

He was convicted in 2016 of murdering both women. One of his legal team later confided to me that Jutting, now 41 – who had a sexual sadism disorder, narcissistic personality disorder and was addicted to violent porn – had even tried to play mind games with him. A monster beyond compare.

Dr Harold Shipman

What struck me was the ordinariness of this small, colourless, brogues-wearing doctor. It made him seem Britain’s most unlikely serial killer.

Yet the family GP dubbed ‘Dr Death’ rewrote the history book on serial killers after he was belatedly brought to justice in 2000 following a decades-long murder spree. He was convicted of murdering 15 of his patients, whom he injected with lethal doses of diamorphine (pharmaceutical heroin) before trying to cover his tracks by falsifying medical records.

His victim toll was later revised to around 250 – mostly elderly women, who he killed in cold blood to feed his addiction to murder. Such was his arrogance, some were even killed in his surgery in Hyde, Greater Manchester.

In court, he tried in vain to portray himself as a caring GP with a detailed weekly routine. Monday, he explained, was when he did admin work before afternoon surgery. Friday was reserved for minor operations such as ‘removing warts or ingrowing toenails’. Given the opportunity, he would have loved to put on his stethoscope in court, I thought.

In the witness box at Preston Crown Court, his performance was sometimes disrupted by his own tears. But, like many arrogant, narcissistic killers I have seen in the dock over the years, his only pity was for himself and maybe for his devoted wife Primrose, who was undying in her support of the bearded monster.

Aged 57, the father-of-four took his secrets to the grave by killing himself in prison in 2004.

Sharon Carr

Sitting in the dock a few feet from me, she looked like a child who had just popped in to court from a youth club. And yet the 17-year-old defendant was set to enter the history books as Britain’s youngest murderess.

At 12, Sharon Carr stabbed 18-year-old hairdresser Katie Rackliff at least 29 times on a Surrey street before mutilating her body. It was not until five years later, in 1997, that justice finally caught up with her – after she had carried out a near-fatal knife attack on another girl.

As the Daily Mail revealed, she had a horrific childhood in Belize in the care of her mother – her father was a violent drunk – who had an explosive temper and practised voodoo. As a child, Sharon, visiting her mother in Belize City, watched a man burned alive in her backyard. 

He was killed in an outside toilet that had been soaked in kerosene. ‘I can’t believe that would not have had an influence on someone, even someone as young as Sharon,’ a relative told the Daily Mail. 

She would herself slaughter local pets – a cat was found decapitated by a spade – after the family moved to Camberley with her mother and a new stepfather. When their marriage ended, her mother poured a saucepan of boiling fat over him.

By 11, Carr was drinking, smoking and taking drugs. Given her background, many believe she was destined to kill.

She would later boast in her diary: ‘I was born to be a murderer. Killing for me is a mass turn-on and it just makes me so high I never want to come down.’ And: ‘Killing is my business, and business is good.’

Sentencing the murderess in 1997, the judge told her it was clear that ‘killing, as you put it, turns you on’.

Ian Huntley

The evidence against Soham killer Ian Huntley was overwhelming, but the psychopath still spun a repulsive web of lies in the Old Bailey witness box for the murders of schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, forcing their poor parents to listen to his self-serving deceit.

The two ten-year-old girls, who were best friends, vanished from a family barbecue at Holly’s house in Soham, Cambridgeshire, in August 2002. Their bodies were found in a ditch nearly two weeks later.

In court, the former school caretaker offered up a ludicrous account of what happened. He claimed Holly died after falling into his bath and that he killed Jessica accidentally when he put his hand over her mouth to stop her screaming.

But, according to the prosecution, Huntley lured Holly and Jessica into his house, possibly with a sexual motivation, and murdered them when his plan went wrong.

As the guilty verdicts came in at the Old Bailey in 2003, it emerged Huntley, 29, has been accused of having sex with underage girls and of rape several times in the past.

Jessica’s father, Leslie Chapman, said he hoped Huntley would one day have ‘the guts’ to publicly explain what happened on the night the girls died.

He never did and died aged 52 in March this year after a ferocious attack in prison. A fellow inmate is awaiting trial for murder.

Victor Farrant

The name may not be familiar to ardent students of criminal history. But as someone who covered his case in detail – and interviewed two survivors of the so-called ‘wine-bar psychopath’ – I can testify to his shocking brutality.

In his late 40s, handsome and with an athletic build, it was easy to see why some women would be attracted to him

With his smooth talk and worldly charm, former Army major Victor Farrant wooed vulnerable middle-class women in pubs and upmarket clubs. He showered them with compliments, chocolates and flowers, and they became easy prey. They were unaware that Farrant, a rapist recently released from prison, was on the prowl for victims.

Farrant attacked Anne Fidler, a former civil servant turned high-class escort, at her home in Hampshire in 1995. He smashed her head with three wine bottles and hit her so hard with an iron that the casing came away. Ms Fidler, who I interviewed, was so badly beaten that she could recall nothing of the attack and doctors described her survival as a ‘medical miracle’.

The following February, former public schoolboy Farrant went to the home of his former girlfriend, glamorous accountant Glenda Hoskins. After demanding sex, he killed her by holding her underwater in her bath. He hid her body in the attic and fled to the continent. After being caught and jailed for life at Winchester Crown Court in 1998, he died in prison in 2024 aged 74.

Levi Bellfield

A psychopathic rapist with a pathological hatred of women, serial killer Levi Bellfield is the epitome of a monster – both in looks and deeds. At the Old Bailey, his menacing aura was there for all to see as he stared intently at one of the female detectives who helped bring him to justice.

For him, control means everything and from jail the self-publicist has continued to toy with the emotions of the families of his victims.

At the Old Bailey in 2011, Bellfield showed no reaction after he was convicted of murdering 13-year-old Milly Dowler in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in 2002. Showing his trademark arrogance, he yawned as he was led back to the cells. He had already been jailed for life for the murders of Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange, whom he bludgeoned to death and whose lives could have been saved but for a woeful initial Surrey Police inquiry into Milly’s disappearance.

Marsha, 19, was killed in February 2003 in Hampton, south-west London, while French student Amelie, 22, was murdered on Twickenham Green in August 2004.

Bellfield continues to be linked to the hammer murders of mother and daughter Lin and Megan Russell in Kent in 1996.

Lawyers representing psychopath Michael Stone, twice convicted of the Russell murders, claim there is ‘compelling’ evidence linking Bellfield to the case. Now 57, Bellfield will die in prison.

Robert Napper

He was an angelic schoolboy who grew into one of Britain’s most notorious sex killers. And it was a signal moment for me at the Old Bailey in 2008 when I finally saw Robert Napper, serial rapist and triple killer, about to face justice over the brutal death of Rachel Nickell, 23, on Wimbledon Common in 1992.

It was a case close to my heart because I had got to know Rachel’s partner Andre Hanscombe and their son Alex, who was not yet three years old when he witnessed his mother’s rape and killing by Napper.

Napper’s trial was a dramatic finale to a slaughter that had haunted Britain for 16 years – one which also exposed a shocking catalogue of police blunders and failures which meant Rachel and a young mother and daughter need not have died.

Police missed a series of chances to arrest him before his four-year spree of sex and rape attacks in south London was brought to a close.

Napper followed Rachel’s killing with the grotesque manslaughter of Scots-born Samantha Bisset and her four-year-old daughter Jazmine in their south London home in November 1993.

He was sent to Broadmoor for that crime in 1995. It was only years later that advances in DNA allowed him to be linked to the Rachel inquiry. Severe mental illness was the reason the Crown accepted a plea of guilty to manslaughter, rather than murder, in both cases.

As he was led down to the cells, it was hard to imagine this unremarkable-looking man had been responsible for such depravity and destruction.

Learco Chindamo

The son of a notorious Italian criminal, Learco Chindamo looked thoroughly bored as he stood trial for the murder of headmaster Philip Lawrence in 1996.

Although only 16, Chindamo had craved a life of violence for more than a decade and, looking back, it was almost inevitable he’d end up at the Old Bailey.

The gang leader beat and stabbed father-of-four Mr Lawrence, 48, to death outside his west London school, then boasted of his crime in an amusement arcade.

I spent months investigating the life and crimes of Chindamo, a prominent member of a notorious gang called Venom. One of his best friends nearly killed director of public prosecutions Barbara Mills’s husband, while eight other teenage thugs linked to Venom carried out the horrifying gang rape of an Austrian tourist thrown naked into a canal near King’s Cross. She became a family friend.

As I covered the Chindamo trial, I knew it was a case of like father, like son. At the time, Learco’s father Massimo Chindamo was serving 15 years in Italy for a series of attacks. In one, the 44-year-old threw a bottle of sulphuric acid over a woman. Chindamo Sr committed murder following his release from prison. His brutish son has long since been a free man and is now approaching the age of the man whose life he so wickedly cut short.

Victorino Chua

Like Harold Shipman, nobody can be sure why NHS nurse Victorino Chua set out to kill patients in his care. The same applies to Lucy Letby, whose convictions I don’t question. Or another nurse turned serial child killer, Beverley Allitt.

I spent years investigating the background of Chua before he finally stood trial in Manchester in 2015 – including making three trips to his native Philippines where I uncovered his sinister past. When I saw him in the dock, he cut a pathetic figure. But be in no doubt, this pocket-sized killer and serial poisoner is as evil as they come. He revelled in the chaos his crimes caused, including seeing a completely innocent colleague falsely accused by police.

The judge handed the ‘sinister and truly wicked’ killer, now 61, a 35-year sentence for murdering two patients and poisoning 19 more at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport.

In most cases, Chua – whose dubious nursing qualifications were not properly checked when he moved to the UK – contaminated saline products with insulin then left them in storage rooms. He denied being responsible – despite once writing a 13-page note about the ‘devil in me’. He must never be freed.

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