Notorious wife-killer Malcolm Webster will make a bid to have his 30-year prison sentence reduced next month.
The former north-east nurse was found guilty of murdering his first wife Claire Morris, attempting to kill his second wife Felicity Drumm and a string of fraud and fireraising charges in a landmark trial three years ago. The 54-year-old, who has always declared his innocence, murdered Ms Morris by deliberately crashing their car off an Aberdeenshire road and setting fire to it while she was unconscious inside.
She had been working as a nurse alongside her husband at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary at the time of her murder.
In the first months of their marriage, after the couple settled near Tarves, Webster repeatedly drugged his wife as he made plans to kill her.
Ms Morris was 32 when her husband of nine months, crashed their 4×4 vehicle down an embankment on the Auchenhuive to Tarves road on May 27, 1994.
At the time, police investigators concluded it had been an accident. Webster claimed she had been asleep when it happened.
The case was reopened 14 years later after new tests showed Ms Morris had a sedative in her system at the time.
Five years later, Webster tried to kill his second wife, Felicity Drumm, by swerving off a busy New Zealand motorway.
He also set fire to properties at Lyne of Skene and in New Zealand, emptied Ms Drumm’s bank account and forged her signature.
The 54-year-old even faked having cancer to ingratiate himself with Oban woman Simone Banarjee, whom he attempted to bigamously marry. He was arrested in 2009.
Webster appeared at the Court of Criminal Appeal in December last year in an attempt to overturn his murder and attempted murder convictions, but his case was thrown out.
The latest hearing will begin at the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh on March 14.