A quadruple murderer who killed a family and raped a woman at a country house dinner party has died behind bars.
George Stephenson was jailed for life in October 1987 aged 36 after being convicted alongside two others of murdering four people, raping a woman and robbery a year earlier in what became known as the Fordingbridge massacre.
The judge recommended a minimum term of 25 years but his tariff was later raised by the then home secretary to 35 years.
He died aged 73 on April 20 at HMP Full Sutton, a high security prison near York.
‘HMP Full Sutton prisoner George Stephenson died in hospital on 20 April 2025,’ a Prison Service spokesperson told The Sun.
‘As with all deaths in custody, the Prison and Probation Ombudsman will investigate.’
According to media reports of the case, Winchester Crown Court heard how handyman Stephenson killed husband and wife Joseph and Hilda Cleaver, their son Tom and family nurse Margaret Murphy at Burgate House in Hampshire.
He and accomplices, brothers John and George Daly, had gone to the wealthy New Forest estate where he used to work to steal shotguns.
John Daly was also convicted of murdering Tom Cleaver’s 46-year-old wife Wendy and recieved a life sentence.
George was cleared of murder but sentenced to 22 years for rape, robbery and manslaughter.
Sentencing Stephenson, the judge reportedly told him the murders were of ‘indescribable brutality, you showed no mercy and deserve none’.
By the time of the killings, he already had a string of convictions for violence, drugs, deception, burglaries and motoring offences after spending the previous 20 years committing around 70 crimes.
Stephenson’s death comes less that two years after he made a Parole Board bid to be freed from jail.
Speaking after the attempt was rejected, Melissa Cleaver said: ‘We cannot express how relieved we are to learn that George Stephenson’s bid for parole has been refused.
‘My mother endured a sadistic, brutal gang rape and indescribable torture before finally being strangled to death.
‘My father, grandparents and Maggie were bound, gagged, doused in petrol and set alight, still alive and conscious.
‘They lived for several minutes.
‘My father, his charred flesh peeling from his body, had dragged himself into an adjacent bathroom in a vain attempt to escape.
‘Our beautiful dog was clubbed with a pickaxe so violently that she had to be put down.’
In a summary of its decision, published on Thursday, the body said: ‘After considering the circumstances of his offending, the progress made while in custody and the evidence presented at the hearing, the panel was not satisfied that release at this point would be safe for the protection of the public.
‘Nor did the panel recommend to the Secretary of State that Mr Stephenson should be transferred to an open prison.
‘He will be eligible for another parole review in due course.’
Ms Cleaver previously called for Stephenson to be denied freedom, telling the Daily Mirror he should die in jail.
Describing him as ringleader in one of the most heinous crimes in history’ and branding him a ‘psychopath’, Ms Cleaver said in her statement that Stephenson ‘smirked remorselessly in the dock and his time in prison won’t have resulted in a changed man’.
‘If he is ever released we feel it inevitable that something or someone will eventually trigger the violence we’ve seen him capable of,’ she added.