Judge says he accepts intention of chef, who murdered four men, was to cause serious harm rather than death 
 
 The serial killer Stephen Port has been sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for the murder of four young gay men he drugged and raped before dumping their bodies near his east London flat. The 41-year-old chef, who had a fetish for sex with unconscious boyish-looking men, was convicted on Wednesday of the murders of Anthony Walgate, a 23-year-old fashion student from Hull, Gabriel Kovari, 22, originally from Slovakia, Daniel Whitworth, 21, a chef from Kent, and Jack Taylor, 25, a forklift driver from Dagenham. Sentencing Port to a whole-life order, Mr Justice Openshaw said: “I accept his intention was only to cause really serious harm rather than cause death but he must have known and foreseen there was a high risk of death, the more so after the death of Anthony Walgate, the first victim.” 
 
 
 
 He said: “The murders were committed as part of a persistent course of conduct of the defendant surreptitiously drugging these young men so that he could penetrate them while they were unconscious. “A significant degree of planning went into obtaining the drugs in advance and in luring the victims to his flat. Port was given a second life sentence for the rape charges and another ten years for administering drugs. The result is a whole-life sentence and the defendant will die in prison.” 
 
 There were loud cheers and applause from family members in court, while someone in the public gallery shouted out: “I hope you die a long, slow death, you piece of shit.” 
 
 DCI Tim Duffield, senior investigating officer from the Met’s homicide and major crime command, said: “These evil crimes have left entire families, a community and a nation in shock.” 
 
 He said Port was one of the most dangerous individuals he had encountered in almost 28 years of policing and that a full-life term in prison was the only appropriate punishment in the circumstances. Photo 
 
 The relative, Donna Taylor, the sister of 25-year-old Jack Taylor, Mr. Port’s last known victim, said she believed her brother’s sexuality had played a role in the police’s having overlooked important details. A sick and twisted scumbag will never be able to hurt or destroy any other family’s life. Jack can finally rest in peace." We will always be completely heartbroken.” 
 
 The judge highlighted Port’s attempt to cover up two of his murders with a fake suicide note as “wicked and monstrous”. Port was convicted of 22 offences against 11 men, including drugging and sex offences against seven men who survived their encounters with him. Despite striking similarities between the four murders, which were carried out over 15 months, the Metropolitan police failed to link them until the family of Taylor, his final victim, forced them to re-examine all the deaths. The Taylor family are planning to sue the force, and believe Port would not have been stopped if they had not fought for a full investigation. The Independent Police Complaints Commission has begun a formal investigation into the actions of 17 officers, including whether “discrimination played any part in actions and decisions.” 
 
 So far, the police have rejected the suggestion that the victims suffered discrimination because they were gay, saying in a statement that crimes against people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, or L.G.B.T., are “taken extremely seriously.” 
 
 “I hope Port’s conviction today offers reassurance to the L.G.B.T. The judge referred to the police investigation in his sentencing remarks, saying: “It is not to me to say whether the seeming bizarre coincidence of these three gay young men being found dead so close together might have given rise to suspicions that these deaths were not the result of ordinary self-administered drug overdoses but that is how their deaths, including Jack Taylor’s death, were treated at the time; the competence and adequacy of the investigation will later be examined by others.” 
 
 He said police had accepted the death of Port’s first victim, Walgate, “at face value”, adding: “Whether the police were right to do so, in the light of what they knew or ought to have found out, is for others to decide having thoroughly inquired into the matter, which it has not been appropriate for us to do in the course of the criminal trial.” 
 
 The public gallery at the Old Bailey court was packed, and all the members of the jury had returned to court to hear the sentencing. Kovari's brother Adam spoke of the difficulty in telling their mother of his death, saying: "There is no pain greater than losing a child," and the Taylor family said they had "truly fallen apart" as a result of Jack's murder. Prior to the sentencing, in victim impact statements, Walgate's mother said her son's death had "devastated and broken the family," while Daniel Whitworth's father Adam said he had been given "a life sentence of grief." “But all these bodies appearing is not normal, is it?” 
 
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 “We were just told that Jack was found up against a church wall and that he died of taking a drug overdose,” she said. “Appallingly, even after the third murder, the police were still maintaining that the deaths were ‘unusual’ but ‘not suspicious,’” Mr. Tatchell said. ‘I didn’t murder anyone’ - that’s what he told me last Sunday on the telephone.” 
 
 David Etheridge QC, for Port, said in mitigation that at that period in Port’s life, he had descended into a “vortex” of drug-taking, where “gratification of his sexual life was central”. Cases dismissed as overdoses 
 
 In mitigation, Port's counsel said he had "descended into a vortex ... he graduated from a fetish to a fixation from a fixation to a compulsion." As Port was convicted, Stuart Cundy, a police commander who leads the Met’s specialist crime and operations unit, offered personal letters of apology to the victims’ families for the missed opportunities to catch Port sooner. We knew instantly that that wasn’t Jack — we knew there was more to this.” 
 
 The body of Anthony Walgate, a 23-year-old fashion student from Hull, Mr. Port’s first known victim, was discovered in June 2014 just outside the communal entrance to Mr. Port’s apartment building. All of Mr. Port’s victims were found slumped against walls in identical positions with their cellphones missing — a woman walking her dog found two of the bodies, in the same spot in a churchyard near Mr. Port’s home, three weeks apart. The note, which was taken at “face value” by investigating officers, included the line: “BTW, please do not blame the guy I was with last night, we only had sex, then I left. Port was briefly jailed in March 2015 for perverting the course of justice in lying to police about Walgate’s death. In June 2015, the coroner at Mr. Whitworth’s inquest said that she was not convinced that Mr. Whitworth had overdosed and that she suspected foul play; even then, however, nothing happened. Three months later, in September, he murdered Taylor. Seventeen police officers are facing investigation for possible misconduct over the catalogue of failures in catching Port. The Met is now re-examining 58 unexplained deaths involving the drug GHB from a four-year period, across London, in case signs of suspicious death were missed. He met his victims via apps such as Grindr, expressing a sexual preference for young, boyish-looking men he called “twinks”.
– A serial killer who raped and murdered at least four young gay men in London was sentenced to life in prison on Friday. Now it's the police who find themselves in the crosshairs, the New York Times reports. In 2014 and 2015, Stephen Port used dating apps to lure his victims to his apartment, where he drugged, raped, and killed them. According to the Guardian, Port "had a fetish for sex with unconscious boyish-looking men." Despite the bodies of all four victims turning up near Port's apartment—including three in the same churchyard—in a 15-month span and dying from the same drug, police chalked the deaths up to unconnected suicides and overdoses. Police only started looking into the possibility of connected murders after pressure from one of the victim's families. Police have now admitted they maybe could have caught Port sooner, and 17 officers are being investigated. Port left the first body outside his apartment building and called police. Despite changing his story and admitting the victim was in his apartment and he dragged the body outside, police didn't view him as a suspect, CNN reports. Port left a fake suicide note on one of the bodies that read "BTW, please do not blame the guy I was with last night." Police didn't bother trying to find the "guy." And there was more. The family of one of Port's victims is suing the police, accusing them of not looking into the deaths too hard because the victims were all gay. A formal investigation is attempting to determine if "discrimination played any part" in what happened. (He was an NFL draft pick—and a brazen serial killer.)