John Straffen

John Thomas Straffen (27 February 1930 – 19 November 2007) was an English serial killer who was the longest-serving prisoner in British legal history. Straffen killed two young girls in the summer of 1951. He was found to be unfit to plead and committed to Broadmoor Hospital; during a brief escape in 1952, he killed again. This time, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Reprieved because of his mental state, he had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, and he remained in prison until his death more than 55 years later.

Straffen's father, John Straffen senior, was a soldier in the British Army. He was the third child in the family; his older sister was regarded as a "high grade mental defective" who died in 1952. Straffen was born at Bordon Camp in Hampshire where his father was then based, but at the age of two his father was posted abroad, and the family spent six years in India. Returning to Britain in March 1938, Straffen's father took a discharge from the Army, and the family settled in Bath, Somerset.

In October 1938, Straffen was referred to a child guidance clinic for stealing and truancy. In June 1939, he first came before a juvenile court for stealing a purse from a girl and was given two years probation. His probation officer found that Straffen did not understand the difference between right and wrong, or the meaning of probation. The family was living in crowded lodgings at the time, and Straffen's mother had no time to help, so the probation officer took the boy to a psychiatrist. As a result, Straffen was certified as a mental defective under the Mental Deficiency Act 1927. A report was compiled on him in 1940 which gave his Intelligence Quotient as 58 and placed his mental age at six. From June 1940, the local authority sent him to a residential school for mentally defective children, St Joseph's School in Sambourne.