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Not mad, just bad with no shame or humility
Paul Cheston, Evening Standard22 Feb 2008
Sex-obsessed pub chef Mark Dixie astonished police in Crawley when he burst into tears as they took a routine DNA swab.
He had been arrested after a fight among football fans watching England's World Cup game with Trinidad in June 2006.
What they did not know was that Dixie was well aware he had left his DNA and a fingerprint when he murdered Sally Anne Bowman nine months earlier in Croydon.
He was released on bail and thought he had got away with it yet again.
But 12 days after the swab was taken his DNA profile appeared on the national database. At 3pm, Detective Superintendent Stuart Cundy, the officer leading the hunt for Sally Anne's killer, was alerted there was a match and at 8pm Dixie was arrested at his work in Horley, Surrey.
Justice would not have had to wait so long had the Australian authorities warned that Dixie was a convicted sex attacker. He was thrown out of the country for an expired visa in 1999 after being arrested for indecency in Perth.
In Britain he had at least five sex crime convictions against him but under a variety of aliases.
After his arrest, police went back to Australia and uncovered a further attack on a Thai woman, also in Perth in 1998. She was attacked by a masked man who stabbed her, raped her and left her for dead, but crucially with his DNA at the scene. In a landmark move for a British court, this evidence was used against Dixie at the Old Bailey even though it had taken place abroad and he had not been charged.
The injuries 18-year-old Sally Anne received were the worst that experienced detectives and doctors had seen. Mr Cundy said: "I have spoken to a senior pathologist who said he had not seen anything so horrific before. As for me I have never seen anything so horrific and I never want to see that again.
"Nobody has been able to tell us there is any meaning to what he did - I think it was sheer violence.
"Before the trial started I could not understand why he was pleading not guilty, but as the trial went on I believe he wanted to relive what he had done in court. He is not mad, he is bad. He has no shame nor humility.
"Dixie is undoubtedly a very sexually active male and that night he definitely wanted sex. Knowing he could not get it consensually he went out with the purpose of finding somebody."
After her murder police appealed for local men in Croydon to allow their DNA to be taken and 1,770 volunteers came forward.
Mark Dixie started his trail of sex crimes at the age of 16 when he lived in Stockwell.
In May 1986, using the name Mark McDonald, he held a knife to the throat of a girl and sexually assaulted her.
As he moved from Sidcup to Plumstead and on to Croydon, he changed names but his obsession with sex and violence never waned.
In June 1988, a Jehovah's Witness, now in her sixties, called at Dixie's flat in Plumstead to visit his then-girlfriend Sandra Beckhause, who had just lost their first baby.
Sandra was out and Dixie seized his chance for sex, punching her in the face, breaking her jaw and damaging an eye, then indecently assaulted her. But she tricked him into believing he could have sex with her at her parents' house nearby where she raised the alarm. Dixie fled but was caught and sentenced to six months' detention after pleading guilty at the last minute to assault and indecent assault.
In all he ran up convictions for an offence against the person, eight thefts and five sex offences.
In 1990 he carried out his last-known attack - on a police officer who was trying to prevent him escaping - before emigrating in 1993 with Sandra, by now the mother of two of his three children, to Australia.
There he travelled extensively, particularly in the Manly area of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. But his sexual urges continued. Ten years to the day after the attack on a Jehovah's Witness, he raped the Thai woman in Perth.
Then, on New Year's Day in 1999, he attacked a woman on the coast road just south of Perth. Passing her in his car, he pulled over, hid in a bush and removed his clothing, leaping out on her when she reached his hiding place. The woman escaped, raised the alarm and Dixie was arrested. He was deported back to Britain as his visa had run out six years earlier.
In Australia he called himself Shane Mark Turner, but back in Britain he referred to himself as Mark Dixie or Mark Down or Steven McDonald.
He settled in the Croydon area moving from pub to pub, sometimes as a chef, sometimes as the licensee.
In 2002 he moved to Fuengirola on the Costa del Sol with his new girlfriend Stacey Nivet, who gave birth to his third child.
But he was back in Britain by August 2004 when he lived for a few months in Blenheim Crescent in Croydon, just a few doors from where he later murdered Sally Anne Bowman.
