The 26-year-old man received the unusual sentence "whole life order" from the Cambridge court, which means he will be imprisoned for life.
He murdered his former girlfriend, her sister, and mother in a carefully planned attack, according to prosecutors, after the girlfriend broke up with him.
After the three were found dead at the mother's home, the man, a former soldier, was hunted for nearly a day before being found. He had then shot himself in the chest with a crossbow, but only injured himself and is now paralyzed from the waist down.
When Judge Joel Bennathan read out the sentence, he said the murderer is "a jealous man consumed by self-pity, a man with a deep contempt for women".
The "whole life order" is an extra harsh life sentence introduced in the UK in the 1980s. Since then, it has only been used in about a hundred cases, often for the country's worst murderers.
