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LONDON - Australian women who believe they were victims of a convicted British sex attacker are being urged by police to come forward.
Mark Dixie was today sentenced to a minimum of 34 years behind bars after being found guilty of murdering 18-year-old British model Sally Anne Bowman in London.
The 37-year-old chef is believed to have carried out a string of sex attacks in Australia, where he lived and travelled between 1993 to 1999, and could have even killed.
The officer who headed the investigation into Sally Anne's murder, detective superintendent Stuart Cundy, appealed to Australian women who could have been attacked by Dixie to contact police.
"I am still convinced he has done something somewhere in Australia," Det Supt Cundy said outside London's Old Bailey court after Dixie was sentenced to life in jail.
"If he has committed another shocking murder somewhere, it is in Australia.
"I also believe there are other women who have been attacked across south London.
"I would appeal to people to look at Dixie's photograph and if they believe they have been a victim of him to contact the police."
Sally Anne's partially naked body was left in a pool of blood in her driveway. She had been subjected to a gruesome sexual attack when she was dead or dying from seven stab wounds.
Dixie, who was obsessed with violent sex, denied killing her, claiming he found her, thought she had passed out drunk and had sex with her.
He claimed he did not realise she was dead until after he had sex with her in front of her home in Croydon, south London.
But the jury of seven women and five men found him guilty of the September 2005 murder in Blenheim Crescent, Croydon.
Dixie had five previous convictions for sex offences in Britain and one in Western Australia, which led to him being deported.
In that case, he had jumped out of a bush naked and making lewd suggestions to a woman jogger.
Dixie, who worked as a chef in various Australian bars and restaurants, travelled from state to state using different names and evading arrest.
But at the time he was returned to the UK, there was no obligation to say why he had been deported.
It was only after British police made inquiries following Dixie's arrest for Sally Anne's killing that his DNA was matched to an unsolved attempted murder and rape of a student in Perth.
The "bad character" evidence was used against him during the Sally Anne murder trial - the first time a British jury has had to virtually "convict" a defendant of a crime abroad.
A Thai woman, now aged 30, said she was a 19-year-old economics student in Perth in June 1998 when a man with a stocking mask broke in and stabbed and raped her.
The attack, in which she was stabbed eight times and raped whilst unconscious, was identical in many respects to the model's gruesome killing.
The student's knickers were analysed and found to contain Dixie's DNA.
But other states were not as co-operative and evidence of Dixie's other convictions were not able to be produced in court.
Dixie used various aliases including Shane Turner. Although he was convicted under that name in Western Australia, his fingerprints were linked to a conviction in the Sydney area under the name Mark Dixie.
- AAP
