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Perhaps the first high profile murder case which sparked widespread calls for a return of the death penalty was the Moors Murders trial in 1966, the year after the death penalty's abolition, in which Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders of two children and a teenager in the Manchester area ( they later confessed to a further two murders ).

Later in 1966, the murder of three policemen in West London also attracted widespread public support for the death penalty's return.

Other subsequent high profile cases to have sparked widespread media and public calls for the death penalty's return include " Yorkshire Ripper " Peter Sutcliffe, convicted in 1981 of murdering 13 women and attacking seven others in the north of England, Roy Whiting, who murdered a seven-year-old girl in West Sussex in 2000, and Ian Huntley, a Cambridgeshire school caretaker who killed two 10-year-old girls in 2002.