Mark Fellows is one of a small number of people in England and Wales serving more than one whole life order, the most severe sentence the courts there can pass. In January 2019, at Liverpool Crown Court, a jury found him guilty of the murders of two men connected to the criminal underworld of the north-west of England: Paul Massey, who died in Clifton, Salford, on July 26, 2015, and John Kinsella, who died in Rainhill, St Helens, on May 5, 2018. The trial judge, Mr Justice William Davis, imposed a whole life order, which means Fellows will never be considered for release. More than seven years later, in June 2026, a second jury, at Leeds Crown Court, convicted him of a third murder, that of a fellow prisoner, and a second whole life order followed. Between the two cases he was also convicted of a serious conspiracy offense. In court the prosecution presented him as a contract killer.
Fellows was born on September 5, 1980, and came originally from Salford, in Greater Manchester. By the time he was charged he was in his late thirties and living in Warrington, Cheshire.
The killings for which he was first convicted had their roots in a violent dispute between rival criminal groups in Salford. At his trial the prosecution, led by Paul Greaney QC, told the jury that serious violence had broken out in the area in 2015 between two factions. Fellows and his co-defendant, Steven Boyle, were associated with one of them; Paul Massey and John Kinsella were associated with the other. The prosecution said Kinsella was strongly associated with Massey. The two deceased men, Greaney told the jury, had been "friends and associates", each well known within the criminal world of the region. It was against that background of feuding between the two camps that the prosecution placed both deaths. The violence of 2015 had drawn in associates on both sides, and the two killings, though almost three years apart, were presented as belonging to the same long-running conflict.
Paul Massey was 55 and from Salford. He was a well-known figure in the city, both for his standing in its criminal world and for a public profile unusual for a man with his history. He was often linked in public to organized crime, which he always denied. In 1999 he was sentenced to 14 years in prison for a violent offense. By the end of his life some in the city regarded him as having stepped back from that world.
Massey also sought a public role. In 2012 he stood for election as mayor of Salford, offering to do the job without pay. He finished seventh in that contest, with 1,995 votes, about 4.45 percent of those cast. After his death, Detective Chief Inspector Carl Jones of Greater Manchester Police described him as "a father and a grandfather who was callously murdered". Massey was a father of five. He died on July 26, 2015, in Clifton, Salford.
The inquiry into his death was run by Greater Manchester Police as a major incident. Four months on, with no one charged, the force offered a reward of 50,000 pounds for information, the second time it had offered a sum of that size in the case. Detective Chief Inspector Howard Millington, the senior investigating officer, said: "Four months after Paul Massey was murdered and our detectives are still working hard to catch the person responsible." He added: "The key to this murder lies in the community and I believe someone out there knows who did it." For nearly three years the case produced no charge.
John Kinsella was 53 and from Liverpool. He died on May 5, 2018, in Rainhill, St Helens, Merseyside. His partner was with him and later gave evidence at the trial.
After Kinsella's death, Detective Chief Inspector Mark Baker of Merseyside Police spoke of the effect on the family. "No human being, regardless of their past, should lose their lives through such a brutal and premeditated attack," he said. He praised the bravery of Kinsella's partner in helping the investigation and in giving evidence. The second death, coming after a long period in which the first had gone unsolved, altered the course of both inquiries and brought two police forces together.
Greater Manchester Police had led the inquiry into Massey's death for nearly three years before Kinsella died. When the second death followed, detectives there shared information with Merseyside Police, and the two forces, with the assistance of Cheshire Police, pursued joint inquiries. Investigators came to see clear parallels between the two deaths and linked them through the evidence they had gathered over many months of work. Detective Chief Inspector Carl Jones said that the inquiries "revealed a meticulous plan put together in the preparation and execution of the murder". The prosecution would later describe those "clear parallels" between the two cases as a central feature of the evidence it put before the jury.
On May 30, 2018, Fellows was arrested on suspicion of both murders. A second man, Steven Boyle, was arrested two days later. Fellows was charged with two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, the last relating to Kinsella's partner. He appeared before magistrates at Bootle on Saturday, June 2, 2018, was remanded in custody and sent to Liverpool Crown Court. Boyle, who was 35 and from Heywood, was charged with two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, and was also remanded.
The trial opened at Liverpool Crown Court on November 26, 2018, before Mr Justice William Davis, with Paul Greaney QC leading the prosecution. The prosecution alleged that Fellows had carried out the killings and that Boyle had played a supporting role in the second of them. Both men denied the two murders and the attempted murder. The jury heard that the two deaths, almost three years apart, shared clear parallels, and that one hand lay behind each.
Fellows did not give evidence in his own defense. Boyle did, and in his account he placed responsibility on Fellows; at one point the judge told him, "That was a lie." The jury heard the prosecution case over several weeks before retiring to consider its verdicts.
The jury deliberated for 31 hours and three minutes. On January 16, 2019, it found Fellows, who was 38, guilty of the murders of Paul Massey and John Kinsella. It found him not guilty of the attempted murder of Kinsella's partner. Boyle, who was 36, was found guilty of the murder of John Kinsella, but cleared of the murder of Paul Massey and of the attempted murder. Fellows was therefore the only person convicted of Massey's murder.
Relatives of the two men sat in the public gallery, and some wept as the convictions were returned. Members of the families shook hands and embraced the detectives who had worked on the case. Both defendants faced the mandatory life sentence for murder, and the judge adjourned to pass sentence the following morning.
On January 17, 2019, Mr Justice Davis passed sentence. He imposed on Fellows a life sentence with a whole life order, the most severe penalty the law allows and one that means the prisoner will never become eligible for release. Boyle was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 33 years.
He described the killings as deliberate and planned, telling Fellows: "Just punishment in your case requires you to be kept in prison for the rest of your life." He added that he had never before had to deal with a contract killer of that kind. He told the court that the effect of the two murders on the families had been devastating. Detective Chief Inspector Baker, speaking afterwards, said he was "pleased with the sentence both men have received" and described the outcome as bringing "two very dangerous men to justice". He said the Kinsella family had "also been handed a lifelong sentence" of their own.
While Fellows was serving his whole life order, a separate prosecution reached court. It arose from an earlier episode in the same Salford dispute, an incident in 2015. After a jury trial at Manchester Crown Court, Fellows was found guilty of conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm. On November 13, 2020, he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of nine years, to run alongside the sentence he was already serving.
A co-defendant, Aaron Parkin, who had pleaded guilty to two counts of the same conspiracy offense arising from two separate incidents, was sentenced to 14 years. The investigation that led to the charges was known as Operation Leopard, and it reached across several linked episodes in the feud. Detective Chief Inspector Carl Jones, its senior investigating officer, summarized the message of the case in a single line: "no one is untouchable".
On November 4, 2025, a fellow prisoner, Kyle Bevan, who was 33 and himself serving a life sentence, died in custody in Wakefield. Fellows was charged with his murder, together with two other serving prisoners, David Taylor and Lee Newell.
The case was tried at Leeds Crown Court. On June 18, 2026, the jury, after deliberating for less than three hours, found all three men guilty of murder. The prosecution, led by Jason Pitter KC, told the jury that none of the defendants had given an account of what had happened. The following day, June 19, 2026, Mrs Justice McGowan passed sentence. She imposed on Fellows a new and separate whole life order, and Fellows attended court in person to hear it.
In her remarks the judge set out Fellows's record. She said that all three men had killed before, and that Fellows had been convicted of two earlier murders, committed on July 26, 2015, and May 5, 2018, for which he had been sentenced to a whole life term on January 17, 2019; he had, she noted, other serious previous convictions. Those two earlier murders, she said, "each was connected to gang membership". Turning to the meaning of the sentence for those left behind, she said that "the bereaved should know that their loss and grief is very much at the centre of this sentencing exercise".
Fellows is serving two whole life orders, imposed on January 17, 2019, and June 19, 2026, together with the life sentence passed on November 13, 2020. Under each whole life order he will never be considered for release. He is held in the high-security prison estate in England.
A whole life order is the most severe sentence available to the courts of England and Wales. Where it is imposed, the offender spends the rest of their life in prison and is never considered for parole. It is distinct from an ordinary life sentence, under which the court fixes a minimum term that a prisoner must serve before becoming eligible to apply for release; a whole life order fixes no such term, because release is not in contemplation.
The framework for these decisions is set by Schedule 21 of the Sentencing Act 2020, which tells a judge where to begin when fixing the punishment for murder. The schedule sets out a series of starting points according to the seriousness of the case. The highest of them applies where the seriousness of the offense is "exceptionally high" and the offender was aged 21 or over; for such cases the appropriate starting point is a whole life order. The examples the statute gives for that category include the murder of two or more people where each involved a substantial degree of premeditation or planning, and a murder committed by someone previously convicted of murder. From that starting point the judge then weighs the aggravating and mitigating features of the particular case before settling the sentence.
Both of the statutory examples fit Fellows. He was convicted in 2019 of two planned murders, which fell within the first, and his 2026 conviction made him a person already convicted of murder who had killed again, which fell within the second. At the time of the 2019 sentencing, Greater Manchester Police noted that around 70 people in the United Kingdom were then serving whole life sentences, an indication of how rarely the order is used. Murder trials of this kind are heard in the Crown Court before a judge and jury, with the trial judge drawn from the High Court bench. Mr Justice Davis and Mrs Justice McGowan both sat in that capacity, in Liverpool and in Leeds, and in each case the whole life order was imposed by the trial judge as the sentence fixed for the gravity of the offenses once the jury had returned its verdicts. A whole life order, like any sentence, may in principle be challenged in the Court of Appeal, which hears such an appeal only where it grants leave to bring it.
The prosecution presented the 2015 and 2018 killings as the work of a contract killer acting within a gang dispute. Who, if anyone, paid for them was not established at the trial; the case was put and decided on the fact of the killings and Fellows's part in them rather than on any proven transaction. Fellows did not give evidence, and he was acquitted of the attempted murder of Kinsella's partner.
September 5, 1980: Mark Fellows born; he is originally from Salford.
July 26, 2015: Paul Massey, 55, dies in Clifton, Salford.
November 2015: Greater Manchester Police offer a reward of 50,000 pounds for information about the Massey murder.
May 5, 2018: John Kinsella, 53, dies in Rainhill, St Helens, Merseyside.
May 30, 2018: Fellows arrested on suspicion of both murders; a second man arrested two days later.
June 2, 2018: Fellows appears before magistrates at Bootle and is remanded to Liverpool Crown Court.
November 26, 2018: trial opens at Liverpool Crown Court before Mr Justice William Davis.
January 16, 2019: after 31 hours and three minutes, the jury finds Fellows guilty of both murders and not guilty of the attempted murder.
January 17, 2019: Fellows sentenced to life with a whole life order; Steven Boyle given life with a minimum term of 33 years.
November 13, 2020: Fellows convicted of conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm at Manchester Crown Court and sentenced to life with a minimum term of nine years.
November 4, 2025: Kyle Bevan, 33, a prisoner serving a life sentence, dies at Wakefield.
June 18, 2026: a jury at Leeds Crown Court convicts Fellows and two other prisoners of Bevan's murder.
June 19, 2026: Mrs Justice McGowan imposes a new and separate whole life order on Fellows.