THERE are crimes for which life in prison should mean the entire life of the offender, and that is true for David McGreavy.

He committed the most despicable murders in Worcester’s history when he killed three young siblings in April 1973.

McCreavy, then 21, murdered nine-month-old Samantha Ralph, her two-year-old sister Dawn and four-year-old brother Paul before impaling their bodies on railings, after he’d been asked to sit in at their Gillam Street home while they slept and their dad collected their mum from work.

Police officers who found the bodies were traumatised for life and, of course, the family of the children will never heal from such an ordeal.

What possessed McCreavy to carry out such an appalling crime is still unclear 45 years on, but the fact he was capable of such an act means that, in my view and that of many others, he does not deserve to be freed even almost half a century on. Can anyone who has killed the way he did ever be considered no longer a danger to society?

It is unjust to the Ralph family to release him.