Nurse killed first wife in blazing car then tried again with his second in bid to pocket £1m insurance cash

By TOM KELLY

Last updated at 7:59 AM on 20th May 2011

Guilty: Malcolm Webster was convicted of murdering his first wife and trying to kill his second by staging car crashes

A nurse murdered his first wife and tried to kill his second in two staged car crashes to claim nearly £1million in insurance money.

Just eight months into their marriage, Malcolm Webster set his Daihatsu 4x4 alight with Claire Morris trapped in the passenger seat after deliberately careering off the road.

He had drugged her before the fatal journey and started the blaze while she was unconscious in the wreckage.

Webster, 52, from Guildford, Surrey, managed to convince police the crash on a remote Scottish road in May 1994 was an accident. 

Detectives said it was the perfect murder.

He received a £200,000 insurance payout which he squandered in six months by buying a yacht and a Range Rover and lavishing gifts on a string of girlfriends.

Five years later he attempted to kill his second wife, Felicity Drumm, in a copycat car crash in New Zealand after spiking her food with sedatives in an attempt to claim £750,000 from insurance policies. 

 

Webster returned to Britain in 2004, where he tried to bigamously marry a third woman to gain access to her estate.

He told Simone Banarjee that he had leukaemia and even shaved his hair and eyebrows to gain her sympathy. 

But four years later, a tip-off led police to reopen the investigation into the death of his first wife. 

Claire Morris, Webster's first wife, during her hen party. She died after he set his Daihatsu 4X4 alight with her trapped in the passenger seat

Burnt out: The car in which Miss Morris was killed

The 1993 wedding day of Webster and Ms Morris. She was killed by him a year later on a remote road in Scotland

Yesterday, following one of the longest trials in Scottish legal history, he was convicted of murder, attempted murder, theft, fraud and attempted bigamy.

The jury had been told that Webster was a cold blooded killer hidden beneath a veneer of charm.

He met his first wife at a nurses’ party while she was working at London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital.

The couple moved to Aberdeen where they married in 1993 and set up home in a remote cottage.

Webster killed her the following year after persuading her to take out a dozen life assurance policies worth tens of thousands of pounds, the 16-week trial at the High Court in Glasgow was told.

After staging the crash on a minor road in Aberdeenshire and starting the fire, he told drivers who stopped to help that no one was inside the car. 

He told police he crashed trying to avoid a motorcyclist.

Lucky escapes: Felicity Drumm, left, and Simone Banarjee, right, outside the High Court in Glasgow during Webster's trial

Claire Morris on her wedding day to Webster with her brother Peter, left, and adopted mother Betty, right

Miss Morris’s brother, Peter, told the Mail that Webster excelled as a ‘grieving’ husband at his wife’s funeral: ‘I was standing with a rope in one hand lowering Claire’s coffin into the ground and with the other hand I was holding on to Malcolm, who appeared racked with emotion. 

‘I was in floods of tears and so was he. We were two men united in grief, both weeping for my sister, or so I thought.’

Webster later moved to Saudi Arabia to work and met Miss Drumm, a midwife. The couple married in her native New Zealand in April 1997. After convincing her to add his name to her bank accounts, he plundered her life savings.

When she was about to rumble him, he drugged her and then feigned a heart attack and deliberately drove their car across two motorway lanes at 60mph.

After the car came to a halt at the edge of the carriageway, he screamed at her to stay inside the vehicle. But Miss Drumm, 50, leapt to safety.

She later reported him to New Zealand police for stealing her money and accused him of spiking her food with sedatives that had caused her blackouts.

Convicted: Malcolm Webster was found guilty of murdering his first wife and trying to kill his second in staged car crashed

Officers alerted prosecutors in Scotland, but they decided not to reinvestigate Miss Morris’s death and no further action was taken.

They reopened the case in 2008 after Miss Drumm’s sister contacted British police directly to report her suspicions. Advances in forensic testing revealed that Miss Morris, 32, had been sedated.

Witnesses also reported seeing Webster in a field examining the area of the crime. 

Petrol cans were stacked in the back of his car when it crashed. Prosecutors here were able to try Webster for crimes in New Zealand because his bank accounts linked to the insurance policies were in Scotland. The jury took four hours to convict him of crimes stretching from 1994 to 2008.

Outside court, Chief Inspector Phil Chapman of Grampian Police said: ‘He had an insatiable appetite for wealth and the trappings of wealth which knew literally no bounds.

‘He basically has used his wife as a vehicle to obtain money. For 17 years it was the perfect murder.’

The case was adjourned until July 5 for reports.

(source:dailymail.co.uk)

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