Husband guilty of staged car crash murder

Malcolm Webster, 52, murdered Claire Morris, 32, in a staged car crash in 1994 and fraudulently claimed more than £200,000 from insurance policies following her death.

Webster, from Guildford in Surrey, drugged her, drove the car off the road and started fire while she was unconscious in the vehicle.

He was also convicted at the High Court in Glasgow yesterday of attempting to murder Felicity Drumm in a deliberate car crash in New Zealand in February 1999, in a bid to claim more than £750,000 of insurance money.

Webster claimed his first wife’s death was a tragic accident and denied the charges against him, but the jury of nine women and six men found him unanimously guilty of the murder.

Described in court as a “cruel, practised deceiver”, Webster obtained more than £200,000 in insurance payouts after killing Ms Morris.

Defence QC Edgar Prais argued that Webster was a liar, a philanderer and a thief, but not a killer. But the jury did not believe Webster’s version of events.

Webster sat still and showed little emotion in court as the guilty verdicts were announced.

On the day he killed his first wife, Webster coldly told people who stopped to help at the crash scene that no one was inside the vehicle before it was engulfed in flames.

Petrol cans were also stacked in the back of Webster’s vehicle and he told police at the time that he swerved to avoid a motorcyclist and crashed.

But after the investigation into Ms Morris’s death was re-opened in 2008, forensic tests on a tissue sample from her liver revealed she had been given a sedative before the crash.

Webster decided not to spend the insurance money on paying off his mortgage.

Instead he lavished gifts on women he was involved with soon after Ms Morris’s death. He also splashed out on a Range Rover and yacht.

Mr Chapman said Webster then had to “try and reconcile money from somewhere” through selling the vehicle and boat at a loss, but the money was then “frittered away very quickly”.

Police started investigating Webster’s past when one of his second wife’s sisters, while on a business trip to England, contacted British police in June 2006 to report her suspicions about him.

Webster tried to kill Ms Drumm, 50, to gain more than £750,000-worth of insurance money.

Webster told the court he feigned a heart attack and deliberately drove the car off the road because they were on their way to their bank, and he knew there were no funds in a joint account but denied he wanted to hurt or kill her.

Chief Insp Phil Chapman, the senior investigating officer in the case, said: “The thing that struck me was he was an individual who has, and will continue to have, 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.

“He literally spent over £200,000 in a six-month period (after the death of Ms Morris), so that basically took him back to being almost insolvent again. Seventeen years ago that amount of money was a huge, huge amount of money to spend in six months.”

Speaking outside court the brother of Ms Morris said he felt “elated” and that there was “justice for Claire”.