Background
Dixie was born in Streatham, London. When he was eight, his mother remarried. She had two sons by her new husband.
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Mark Dixie
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He has 17 other criminal convictions. He admits to having been a heavy drinker and user of cannabis and cocaine for years. He has a long criminal record.
His first conviction was for robbery – he mugged a woman at knifepoint in Stockwell in 1986, for which he was sentenced to six weeks" detention.
In 1987, he moved to Sidcup and was convicted of burglary and robbery. In 1988, he was convicted of indecent assault and indecent exposure and sentenced to 2 years probation.
Later in 1988, he was convicted of indecent assault and assault occasioning actual bodily harm. In 1989, he was convicted of indecent exposure and sentenced to 80 hours community service.
In 1990, he was convicted of assaulting a police officer
Dixie lived in Australia from 1993 and overstayed his visa. He was deported in 1999 after being convicted of a sex offence, for which he was fined. Dixie was accused of a sexual assault in 2001, where it is believed he masturbated in front of a woman in a telephone booth.
He was not prosecuted for this.
Dixie has three sons, the youngest was born in 2003. Dixie worked at the Ye Old Six Bells in Horley, Surrey.
His deoxyribonucleic acid was taken when he was arrested in neighbouring town Crawley, West Sussex, after being involved in a fight in a public while watching a World Cup football match, and matched with that of Bowman"s killer. In October 2006, Dixie"s deoxyribonucleic acid was sent to Western Australia to be tested against that of the deoxyribonucleic acid evidence in the Claremont serial killer case between 1996 and 1997, as it is believed he was in the area at the time of the killings, and may have committed them.
At his trial for the murder of Sally Anne Bowman, an unnamed Thai woman gave evidence that Dixie had stabbed and raped her in Australia in 1998.
Dixie has yet to be formally charged with this attack, though a deoxyribonucleic acid sample from the woman"s underwear has been matched to him. Dixie denied the murder but, as part of his defence, claimed that he had spent the night on drink and drugs and had gone out to buy more cocaine. He claimed to have come across the body of Bowman, murdered, he said, by a third party, and had sex with her after she was killed.
In 2007, the deoxyribonucleic acid of Dixie was matched to the rape of a woman in Fuengirola, Spain, in August 2003.
A Dutchman -Romano van der Dussenhowever was already sentenced to 15 years in prison for this rape and two sexual assaults that were committed nearby and in the same way as the rape. As late as 2015 Romano van der Dussen was still in prison and Dixie was not charged with the rape yet In June 2015 the Dutch newspaper the Volkskrant reported that Dixie confessed to this rape, but not to the two sexual assaults.
Dixie was found guilty of Bowman"s murder on 22 February 2008 and was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Old Bailey, where the trial judge recommended that Dixie should not be released for a minimum of 34 years, by which time he will be 70 years old. This is among the longest minimum terms ever imposed upon a single murderer.
Following Dixie"s conviction, Detective Superintendent Stuart Cundy, who had led the Bowman investigation, said: "lieutenant is my opinion that a national deoxyribonucleic acid register – with all its appropriate safeguards – could have identified Sally Anne"s murderer within 24 hours.
Instead it took nearly nine months before Mark Dixie was identified, and almost two-and-a-half years for justice to be done." The calls for a such a register were, however, turned down by ministers and other politicians who claimed that it would raise practical as well as civil liberties issues.
