Over 30 mentally ill offenders secretly freed from high security hospitals have gone on to kill in recent years

There are around 250 each year, and many are told their conditions are so acute they are unlikely to ever be freed as a result.

But new figures, gathered by the Telegraph, show that 55 per cent of those sent to secure hospitals are quietly freed within five years, almost 90 per cent within 10 years and 99 per cent within 20 years.

From 1993 to 2019, 30 dangerous mental health inmates freed from these facilities have gone on to kill.

If a patient responds well to treatment while being held in a secure space, they can apply to be considered for release.

Around 500 patients are quietly released from high or medium security mental health institutions each year.

Patients applying for release will go before an independent mental health tribunal which are headed up by a panel of three people.

This panel typically consists of a judge, a psychiatrist and a mental health worker.

The hearings are different to parole board assessments in that they are completely closed, with no public or press allowed.

Families of victims are not even allowed to attend.

Some of those who are successful in their applications will have carried out the most serious crimes, including murder.

Around 300 people deemed suitable for release by a tribunal panel have to be recalled each year because of breaches of their conditions or concerns about their behaviour.

At least 33 murders have been carried out by patients previously released since 1993.

Lee Sowerby, who was twice sentenced to indefinite hospital orders and twice released, fatally stabbed his mother in 2017.

Theodore Johnson, who killed his first two wives only to spend two years in a secure hospital before being released, went onto kill again.

Emma Webber, the mother of Nottingham University student Barnaby, who was stabbed to death in June 2023 alongside fellow student Grace O’Malley-Kumar and school caretaker Ian Coates, has called for urgent reforms to improve transparency about the tribunal process.

Valdo Calocane, who carried out the crazed attack, admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

He was handed an indefinite hospital order and told it was unlikely that he would ever be released.

Mrs Webber told The Telegraph that the suggestion he will be detained for the rest of his life is “patently and demonstrably not true”.

She said: “I found the way that it was presented publicly in the sentencing hearing as ‘he’s going to be away for the rest of his life, so that’s him off the streets’ to be misleading.

“If the judge, Mr Justice Turner, had said, ‘In reality you are going to the hospital system, which is the care system, and you will not be released until it is deemed appropriate that you can be released.

“However, that may be within five years, 10 years, 20 years, or indefinitely’, I think the public would be horrified.”

She added: “Valdo Calocane has gone to hospital and is very likely to be out because we already know he’s responding to treatment. This is a triple murderer who tried to murder three other people and could have gone on to do more.

“The very people that are going to be allowed to make the decision on whether to release the murderer of my son are from the very professions that failed on countless opportunities to treat him, manage him, cope with him and to section him.

“So how can there be any faith that they can be relied upon to do their jobs properly when countless others didn’t do theirs?

“Unless we make him the next Ian Brady and make it so that he is in the one per cent that does not get released, he could be out within 10 years.”