Finally; British Cheff, Stephen Port, who murdered at least four young men has been Sentenced..

Stephen Port, who murdered at least four young men over 15 months and raped many more, was sentenced at the Central Criminal Court in London on Friday to life in prison, in a case that has appalled the country with its grisly details and raised serious questions about the quality of policing. All of Mr. Port’s victims were gay and in their 20s. They all died from overdoses of the date-rape drug GHB, also known as G or liquid ecstasy.

Mr. Port, who came out as gay when he was 26, trawled social media sites like Grindr and Fitlads to find his victims. He lured them to his one-bedroom apartment, where he either spiked their drinks with the drug, or injected them with it. The police have admitted that they might have missed opportunities to catch Mr. Port sooner and have refocused attention on the use of GHB as a possible weapon. Investigators are now looking into 58 other unexplained deaths in London involving the drug.

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. None were from that part of London. But the police treated the deaths as unrelated cases of drug overdose and suicide, apparently taking at face value the fake suicide notes that Mr. Port, a 41-year-old canteen chef at a bus depot, had planted on two of the bodies.

Even when a relative of one of Mr. Port’s victims pointed out the similarities in a string of local deaths after doing an online search, officers initially refused even to consider the possibility of murder. 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.

“It was seen as gay, drugged men in respect of they’ve just sat there, taken an overdose, and that’s that, as if it’s normal,” Ms. Taylor told the BBC on Thursday. “But all these bodies appearing is not normal, is it?” “We were just told that Jack was found up against a church wall and that he died of taking a drug overdose,” she said. “We knew that wasn’t Jack. 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. The other three victims  Gabriel Kovari, a 22-year-old Slovak national; Daniel Whitworth, a 21-year-old chef; and Mr. Taylor, a forklift truck driver  were found in the churchyard near Mr. Port’s home. Members of Mr. Taylor’s family, who say they believe Mr. Port would still be at large had officers not been pressed to re-examine the evidence, said they planned to sue the police.

London’s Metropolitan Police Service has acknowledged that it might have missed opportunities to identify the killer sooner. 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 from discrimination because they were gay, saying in a statement that crimes against members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, or L.G.B.T., community were “taken extremely seriously.”

“I hope Port’s conviction today offers reassurance to the L.G.B.T. community that if you have been a victim of crime our officers will take you seriously, treat your situation with the utmost sensitivity and do their very best to bring offenders before the courts,” Cmdr. Stuart Cundy, of the specialist crime and operations command at the London police, said in a statement on Wednesday.

Commander Cundy has offered personal letters of apology to the victims’ families for the missed opportunities to catch Mr. Port sooner. On Friday morning at the Old Bailey, as the Central Criminal Court is commonly known, Justice Peter Openshaw said that Mr. Port had committed murder to “satisfy his lust” for sex with young men in an unconscious state. He called Mr. Port’s attempts to cover up his crimes with forged suicide notes as “wicked and monstrous.”

Mr. Port had placed a fake suicide note in a plastic sheet in the hand of his third victim, Mr. Whitworth, in which Mr. Whitworth appeared to acknowledge his role in the “accidental” overdose of Mr. Kovari, in that way attempting to frame one of his victims for the death of another.  In the note, Mr. Port even made a reference to himself: “Please do not blame the guy I was with last night, we only had sex, then I left. He knows nothing of what I have done.”

Peter Tatchell, a gay-rights campaigner, said in a statement that the police had let Mr. Port “slip through their fingers,” noting that they had failed to check the handwriting on the apparent suicide notes. “Appallingly, even after the third murder, the police were still maintaining that the deaths were ‘unusual’ but ‘not suspicious,’ ” Mr. Tatchell said. “They did not issue a public alert to the gay community that a serial killer could be on the loose.”

Alarm bells might have gone off when Mr. Walgate’s body was found outside Mr. Port’s apartment block. Mr. Port himself called the police. He claimed he had not seen Mr. Walgate before, but the police quickly learned that Mr. Port had hired Mr. Walgate through an escort service. Mr. Port then said that Mr. Walgate had overdosed at his apartment, and that he had been too scared to report it. Mr. Port was eventually jailed for lying to the authorities, but by then he had killed two more men, Mr. Whitworth and Mr. Taylor.

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, Mr. Port killed Mr. Taylor.