MURDERER Malcolm Webster may have killed a young woman in Australia while on the run after being exposed as a thief and fraudster.
The former nurse has been linked to the death of student chef Deborah Anderson, who was found dead in her burned-out car in 2000.
Webster is serving 30 years for killing his first wife, Claire Morris, in 1994 by deliberately crashing their car off an Aberdeenshire road and setting fire to it while she was unconscious inside. Five years later, he tried to kill his second wife, Felicity Drumm, by swerving off a busy New Zealand motorway to stop her finding out he had emptied her bank account.
After being confronted by Ms Drumm’s family, Webster fled and is understood to have spent some time in Australia before eventually returning to Scotland in 2004, when he settled in Oban.
Now it has emerged that police in Australia are looking into the 54-year-old’s time in the country, and if he targeted any women while he was there.
One victim may have been Miss Anderson – who bears a striking resemblance to Ms Morris.
The 24-year-old’s body was found in a burned-out Ford in a supermarket car park in January 2000.
The hospitality student had been seeing an older mystery man, and went on a 540-mile road trip before she died – despite telling her father she was going to Perth Zoo.
Her family believe she was murdered and have called for Western Australia Police to step up their “suspicious-death” inquiry.
And in a TV documentary shown in Australia, Derek Ogg QC – who led the Crown’s case against Webster during his 2011 trial, and again during his recent failed appeal – said there was no reason to believe the nurse would not behave in a similar way as he had done in the north-east.
He said: “There’s no rational basis for thinking that Webster completely changed his personality during his visits to Australia.”
Last night, Ms Morris’s brother, Peter, 50, who also appeared in the programme, said he would not be shocked to hear of Webster’s involvement in other criminal activity.
“He tried to repeat his crimes against Claire on Felicity, so to think that nothing happened in Australia would not fit his character or his MO,” he said.
“If another crime was committed, I wouldn’t be surprised. It fits with the nature of the man.”
He warned against speculating about Webster’s past in case he thought it gave him “credence” to up his fight against his murder conviction.
On Friday, appeal judges threw out the nurse’s claims that he had suffered a miscarriage of justice.
He argued that the Crown had not proved the car fire that killed Ms Morris had not started accidentally and the prosecution should not have relied on a theory of corroboration to prove the murder and attempted-murder charges as the crashes were “wholly different”.
Both those grounds were dismissed, but judges did quash two charges relating to two house fires in New Zealand.
Mr Morris said he was concerned too much speculation about unsolved crimes would undermine the appeal process.
He said: “I know there’s a lot of speculation, but if you throw all the suspicions about various crimes on him, does that give him credence to fight these convictions some more?
“I don’t want to give him ammunition to try and say he didn’t kill Claire again.”
Miss Anderson was born in Perth but moved to the UK to live with her mother, Maureen Morris, when she was 14.
Six months before she died, she returned to Australia, where she met an older man.
On the day of her death, she borrowed a car and told her father she was going to the zoo, but instead she drove for nine hours to Geraldton. Her body was discovered in her burned-out car the next day, just a few miles from her home in Perth.
The find sparked a murder inquiry, but nobody has been brought to justice.