The mother of Sally Anne Bowman has said her daughter’s murderer should not have been free to kill after it emerged he was arrested in Australia eight years earlier.
Former pub chef Mark Dixie got life for the murder of Sally Anne, 18, outside her home in Croydon, South London in September 2005.
It has now been reported that Dixie was questioned by Australian police in 1997 after a woman was savagely assaulted while walking home in Victoria Park, Perth, Western Australia.
The lone victim was shoved to the ground by a man who held her down and only fled after she screamed for help.
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Dixie was arrested nearby but never charged after the woman was unable to identify her attacker.
He emigrated to Australia in 1993 but was deported in 1999 when he was convicted of exposing himself.
But Dixie, who already had a string of convictions in the UK dating back to 1986, was not placed on the sex offenders register which had been created two years earlier.
He went on to attack more women before killing Sally Anne.
Her mother Linda said: “We now know he was arrested at least three times in Australia but he was deported without any warnings being issued by the authorities.
“They didn’t do their job properly and that’s the reason my daughter’s dead.
“He should have been returned with a police escort and documentation that explained why they had suspicions about him but instead they just stuck him on a plane and said see you later.
“He was a known sex attacker when he was deported from Australia but he wasn’t put on any register.
“We could have had his DNA at that time which would have meant he would have been caught before he killed Sally Anne.”
Dixie’s DNA was not on the national database when he murdered Sally-Anne and he was only convicted after it was taken following his arrest for a pub brawl.
The six-foot-three sexual predator, who had a tattoo of a panther on his arm, was jailed for a minimum of 34 years in 2008 for raping and stabbing Sally Anne, 18, seven times. He was aged 37.
Stuart Cundy, who led the probe, said at the time: “I can’t believe Sally Anne’s murder was Dixie’s first because of the way in which it was carried out.”
In 2017 Dixie was given a minimum of 28 years for the two sex attacks in the UK, one in 1987 when he was 16 and the other in 2002 when he fractured a woman’s skull with a chef’s steel.
A Thai student, 19, had been made to strip by a masked knifeman who then repeatedly stabbed her during a 1998 attack in Australia. DNA found at the scene was later matched to Dixie.
Criminologist Dr David Keatley, from Murdoch University, told the West Australian newspaper it was likely Dixie had committed other crimes in the state and called for a review of DNA evidence.
“If time and resources permit, the police should be setting up a task force to see if he is responsible for other unsolved or unknown crimes,” Dr Keatley said.
“I agree that based on the pattern of evidence and cases that I have looked at it is highly likely that Mark Dixie is responsible for more crimes, almost certainly crimes of a sexual nature.”
Dixie also raped a woman in Spain in 2003, for which Dutch national Romano van der Dussen was wrongly jailed.
