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Every murderer knows they face life behind bars if they are caught and convicted.

But only in a few rare cases does that really mean they will never taste freedom again – there are fewer than 50 people who have been told they will die in jail.

But sometimes, the crime is so horrific that the law says that the killer can never be released.

These are the real lifers.

In May, paedophile Mark Bridger became the 46th killer on the list after he murdered five-year-old April Jones in Wales. And less than a month later gangland brute Dale Cregan became number 47 when he was convicted of the cold-blooded murder of four people, including two female police officers.

Today, 47 of Britain’s most dangerous killers are on a whole-life tariff.

They include Moors Murderer Ian Brady, who tortured and murdered children with accomplice Myra Hindley, club bouncer Levi Bellfield, who murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, and Steve Wright, who killed five prostitutes in Ipswich.

The only woman on a whole-life tariff is evil Rose West, convicted in 1995 of a killing spree with husband Fred. She murdered at least 10 young women.

Many of the monsters committed murders so shocking their names remain etched on people’s minds decades later – but some have faded from our memories.

Here the Sunday Mirror catalogues the hideous crimes of the true lifers...

Stephen Griffiths: Crossbow Cannibal cooked and ate parts of his victims

(Image: PA)

Age: 43

Victims: 3

Jailed: 2010

On a Monday morning in May 2010 the caretaker at Stephen Griffiths’ block of flats checked CCTV footage from the weekend.

To his horror he saw Suzanne Blamires running terrified from Griffiths’ flat before he appeared and knocked her unconscious.

Griffiths disappeared from view, returning moments later with a crossbow.

The PhD student lined up his weapon and fired a bolt through the unconscious woman’s head before dragging her lifeless body down a corridor. Then, holding the bow above his head in triumph, he ­raised a bottle of drink to the camera.

The caretaker phoned 999 and Griffiths was arrested within hours, after he had dumped Suzanne’s body in the nearby river Aire.

The monster ­admitted killing ­Suzanne, 36, Shelley Armitage, 31, and Susan ­Rushworth, 43, after luring them to his flat on the edge of the red-light district in Bradford, West ­Yorkshire.

In his flat were hundreds of horror films, books about serial killers and blood-stained crossbows, samurai swords and 30 knives.

When Griffiths’ mobile was handed in to police they found a video on it showing one victim naked in a bath, then tied up on a bed with the words “My Sex Slave” spray-painted on her back.

A rucksack holding Suzanne’s remains was found on the bank of the River Aire. She had been hacked into 81 pieces. A crossbow bolt and a knife fragment were embedded in her skull.

Police divers also found parts of Shelley Armitage and a black flight bag holding knives and hacksaws.

Griffiths told police he dismembered the women using power tools and a hammer, an assortment of knives and a samurai sword. He bragged to detectives that he cooked parts of the first two victims but when his oven broke he ate pieces of the third victim raw.

When he appeared at a magistrates court in May 2010 Griffiths gave his name as the Crossbow Cannibal.

Dennis Nilsen: Kindly Killer blocked toilet with body parts

Age: 67

Victims: 16

Jailed: 1983

It was the challenge of disposing of his victims’ bodies that led to the downfall of former policeman Dennis Nilsen.

In his poky upstairs flat in Muswell Hill, North London – once the ­wardrobe was packed with bloody remains and the area under the ­floorboards was full to bursting – he started to flush body parts down the toilet. It got blocked.

Nilsen, known as the Muswell Hill Murderer and the Kindly Killer, is a serial killer and ­necrophiliac who murdered 16 men in London between 1978 and 1983. All his victims were students or homeless men he picked up in bars and took home for sex.

He was called the Kindly Killer because he murdered by strangulation and drowning, which he believed was humane.

His disposal of the bodies was less thoughtful and he used ­butchery skills he learnt when he was in the army.

His later murders, committed at a flat in 23 Cranley Gardens, led to his ­arrest.

Nilsen tried to strangle one victim, John Howlett, with a loose upholstery strap from an armchair. The men fought and Nilsen ­struggled to kill his victim before dragging him into the bathroom to drown him. He left the body there for the rest of the night before butchering it the following day.

Covering his tracks before a friend came to visit, Nilsen ­hurriedly flushed parts down the toilet. When flushing became ­problematic, he boiled some of the flesh in his kitchen, along with the head, hands and feet, before putting the bones in a dustbin.

He threw body parts over the garden fence into a waste area. He placed others in a bag with salt and stored them in a tea chest.

Nilsen’s last victim was drug addict Stephen Sinclair, who he met in Oxford Street. He took him home and after Sinclair drank and used heroin he was strangled and his body dismembered. The discovery of his rotting remains in the drain outside Nilsen’s home finally alerted police to the ­murders.

Steven Wright: Suffolk Strangler laid out bodies of prostitutes he killed like a cross

(Image: PA)

Age: 55

Victims: 5

Jailed: 2008

To this day nobody knows why two of Steven Wright’s victims, Anneli Alderton and Annette Nicholls, had their bodies placed in a crucifix pose.

Wright, known as the Suffolk Strangler, killed five prostitutes between October and December 2006.

Forklift driver Wright picked up his victims – Tania Nicol, 19, Gemma Adams, 25, Anneli, 24, Paula Clenell, 24, and ­Annette, 29 – while his girlfriend was working night shifts.

The women were knocked out with massive doses of heroin before Wright strangled them. Their bodies were stripped and dumped in remote ­countryside near Ipswich.

Like many of the women, Wright’s first victim, Tania, was alienated from her family by her drug addiction.

He picked her up on October 30, 2006, but although she was reported missing the next day her body wasn’t found until December 8.

Before his arrest on December 19 the police investigation involved 600 officers and the inquiry team received more than 12,000 calls from the ­public.

Almost 11,000 hours of CCTV footage were scrutinised and other prostitutes in Ipswich were interviewed about their clients and told to stay off the street.

Wright was convicted largely on the strength of forensic evidence.

The crucial breakthrough came when Wright’s DNA – on the police computer database after he was ­convicted of ­stealing £80 from his employers in 2002 – linked him to the killings. There was also CCTV footage of him cruising the red-light district by car.

At his trial in 2008 Wright admitted ­having sex with four of the five victims but denied killing any of them.

But prosecutors said Wright ­“systematically selected and murdered” the prostitutes over a six week period.

They said he stalked the red-light district near his home when partner Pam Wright was working nights at a call centre.

After stripping his victims’ bodies Wright would then dump them in the countryside around Ipswich and, in two cases, arranged the bodies in the shape of a cross, before going home, changing his clothes and going to work as if ­nothing had happened.

The bodies were discovered naked, but there was no sign of sexual assault.

During the trial Wright was repeatedly asked whether his numerous links to the women were a coincidence.

More than 50 times, he replied: “It would seem so, yes”.

Rahan Arshad: Rounders Bat Killer beat wife and kids to death in jealous rage

(Image: PA)

Age: 43

Victims: 4

Jailed: 2007

As he stepped off a plane to face justice, Rahan Arshad told officers: “I confess to the murder. My beautiful kids – I don’t regret killing that bitch, but my kids...”

Arshad had used a rounders bat to beat to death his 32-year-old wife Uzma and their three children, Adam, 11, Abbas, eight, and Henna, six, at their home in Cheadle Hulme, Greater Manchester in 2006.

Motivated by jealousy, the taxi driver killed his wife in their bedroom before taking his children downstairs, where they met the same fate.

He had planned the murder, buying a plane ticket to Thailand two weeks before. He fled there shortly after the killings.

Uzma, who married Arshad in 1992, had moved back in with her husband after she had an affair. Arshad attacked her in a bedroom and covered her body with a towel.

He then carried each of his sleeping children downstairs, battering first Abbas, then Henna and finally Adam. He covered their bodies after each attack. After the murders, late on July 28 or July 29, 2006, he drove to Heathrow airport in his BMW, caught a plane to Bangkok and travelled to the resort of Phuket.

The bodies were found more than three weeks later after a neighbour reported a terrible smell coming from their home. They were so badly decomposed they had to be identified using dental records.

Arshad insisted throughout his trial that he had not killed his children.

He said when he found the bodies lying in a downstairs room he went upstairs to confront his wife, who he claimed had said: “Are you satisfied?”

He said he then blanked out. “I found myself in the shower, in the bath,” he told the court. “I mean in the bath. I found myself in the bath with the bat.”

He said he did not know exactly what had happened to Uzma, who suffered 23 blows to her head and body from the bat, which he had bought the previous day and later hid in his garden shed.

Rose West: Ran house of horror where victims were buried in cellar

(Image: PA)

Age: 59

Victims: 10

Jailed: 1995

Charmaine West didn’t get along with her stepmother Rose, but when she was eight years old her dad was jailed and someone had to look after her.

More than two decades later, the little girl’s skeleton was found in the coal cellar of the family’s Gloucester home.

For evil Rose West, taking care of someone meant killing them... with or without her husband Fred’s help.

Following Myra Hindley’s death in 2002, West became the only woman serving a whole-life tariff after she was convicted in 1995 of killing a string of young women.

Together with her husband Fred West, who committed suicide while on remand, they sexually molested, murdered and dismembered young girls they found on the street.

The couple’s typical pattern was to pick up girls from bus stops around Gloucester and imprison them in their home for several days before killing them.

Bodies were found buried in the gardens of the couple’s homes or in the cellar.

Rose, who sometimes worked as a ­prostitute, had eight children – five by Fred, who she met while still a teenager, and three by ­clients.

In June 1971 she murdered Charmaine, the daughter of Fred’s former wife Rena, and buried her in their previous home at 25 Midland Road, while Fred West was serving a prison sentence for petty theft.

One of the bodies found at the now infamous 25 Cromwell Street was her own daughter ­Heather, 16, who was murdered by Fred in June 1987 after being abused by Rosemary while Fred raped her.

The Wests had told friends Heather had gone away to work at a holiday village.

Another victim was Shirley Robinson, who was eight months pregnant by Fred when she disappeared in April 1978.

She had written to her father Baden ­Robinson, 61, a former RAF man who runs an English pub in Cologne, Germany, saying: “I am expecting a child from Freddy. We are in love.” Her unborn child was found by her remains which were discovered in the back garden at Cromwell Street.

Lynda Gough vanished in April 1973 from Gloucester, where she had a rented flat and worked as a seamstress.

Hers was the eighth set of remains found, excavated from six feet below the ground-floor bathroom.

West, who has never confessed to her heinous crimes, has made a life for herself in prison, playing monopoly, browsing mail order catalogues and buying clothes, according to reports.

In 2010 another prisoner revealed West had struck up a sickening relationship with Baby P’s mother Tracey Connelly – even making her breakfast in bed.

Another report suggested West had become a skilled chef and on Sundays is allowed to cook for the five other women in her unit, with her meat-and-potato pie said to be one of their favourites.

Ken Regan and William Horncy: Stonehenge Killers wiped out whole family to steal business

(Image: PA)

Age: Regan 43, Horncy 59

Victims: 5

Jailed 2005

AS he buried his victims – all from one family – with a mechanical digger, Ken Regan couldn’t resist a sick joke about his landscaping experience and told a neighbouring farmer: “I’ve done a lot of ­driveways for Pakistanis.”

Kenneth Regan and his accomplice William Horncy had wiped out three generations of an Asian family in Hounslow in 2003.

The pair brutally murdered 38-year-old Indian Amarjit Chohan, his wife Nancy, 25, their two sons, 18-month-old Devinder and Ravinder, eight weeks, as well as Amarjit’s mother Charanjit Kaur, 51.

They had planned to take over Chohan’s haulage company and use it to smuggle drugs.

The bodies of Mr ­Chohan, his wife and mother were found washed up on the south coast. The two young boys have never been found.

In the 1980s Regan had made a fortune and set himself up as a country gent.

He invested in a freight company which he used as a front for drug smuggling and ­money laundering.

But it all went wrong in 1998 when police caught him with 25kg of top-grade heroin and wads of cash in the boot of his car.

He was jailed for eight years. But after his ­release in the summer of 2002, Regan wanted to start operations again.

The only problem was, he had no money to ­invest in a freight firm... so he decided to steal one instead.

Regan targeted millionaire Anil Chohan who ran Heathrow-based company CIBA Freight, and recruited two ­accomplices he’d known for many years: Bill ­Horncy and another man.

On Thursday, February 13, 2003, Mr Chohan was invited to a business meeting at Stonehenge and told his staff: “I’m off to do a deal.” He was never seen alive again.

Mr Chohan was taken to a house in Salisbury, where he was held for three days, drugged, tortured and made to sign away his livelihood.

He was forced to record messages telling his family not to worry, write letters explaining his disappearance and sign 23 blank pieces of paper which would be used by the gang to write different letters after he was dead.

Later the rest of the Chohan family were kidnapped from their home, murdered and taken to a farm in Tiverton to share Mr Chohan’s grave, ­entombed under 48 tons of stone and gravel.

The killers later dug up the bodies and dumped them at sea.

But when Chohan’s body was found floating near Bournemouth pier in April 2003, scientists found a piece of paper inside one of his socks.

It was a letter addressed to Regan and dated February 12, 2003... the day before his ­disappearance.

And here are the rest...