Who Is Theodore Johnson? Serial Killer Previously Released Sentenced For Killing Again

A man who was previously convicted for killing two of his partners was sentenced again for killing another woman. Theodore Johnson, 64, killed Angela Best, 51, in 2016 after they ended their relationship, according to The Guardian.

Johnson was sentenced in the United Kingdom to a minimum of 26 years in prison for the Best’s murder after he was found guilty of beating her with a hammer and strangling her with a dressing gown cord.

“The attack by you on Angela Best was sustained, vicious and utterly brutal,” Judge Richard Marks said during sentencing, according to BBC News. “She suffered an unimaginably brutal death. Such repeated offending, resulting in three separate court cases, must be almost unprecedented.”

Johnson had been convicted twice before of murdering his romantic partners. Johnson pushed his wife Yvonne Johnson off the balcony of their apartment in 1981 and was convicted but ultimately released. Eleven years later, he strangled another partner.

After his two convictions, Johnson met Best during an unescorted leave from a psychiatric hospital, BBC News reported. He did not disclose his relationship with Best to doctors or social workers, despite being released on the specific condition of “self-reporting.” Johnson apparently also did not tell Best about his past convictions. The pair had ended their relationship and Best had a new partner when Johnson killed her.

“The attack was brutal and merciless,” said prosecutor Mark Heywood, according to Sky News.“He struck her repeatedly around the head even as she tried to protect her head with her hands. He then tied a dressing gown cord around her head and knotted it. He did it, the prosecution says, for a simple reason — because after all that time that had gone before she was no longer prepared to stay with him.”

Johnson’s repeated offenses have led many to criticize a system that allowed him to be released two separate times and commit three brutal murders.

“What is the context in which he has been able to kill, especially after being incarcerated on two separate occasions?” serial killer criminologist David Wilson told The Guardian. “That context is misogyny. Women being killed by men who are in a relationship with them is seen as a thing that happens, something that just occurs. Last year, two women a week died at the hands of their partners or ex-partners. That is an extraordinary figure that begins to reveal something not about serial murder but about the phenomenon of every day murder. There is this unreflective acceptance that violence towards women is normalized.”