The killer of Sally Anne Bowman is a serial sex offender with a 20-year record of violent attacks. Police believe that he murdered before, while living abroad.

Mark Dixie was yesterday found guilty of stabbing Miss Bowman to death outside her home in South London. He was sentenced to life in prison at the Old Bailey and told that he would serve a minimum of 34 years. The 37-year-old chef had insisted that Miss Bowman was already dead when he found her lying on the pavement and decided to abuse her body.

Police in Britain and Australia believe that he is responsible for numerous unsolved attacks and almost certainly another murder. He also lived in Spain and Holland, where other attacks could have been carried out.

Detective Superintendent Stuart Cundy, who led the investigation into Miss Bowman’s murder, said: “I can’t believe that Sally Anne was the first victim of Mark Dixie. There is a strong possibility that he has killed before.

“There is a lot we still don’t know about Mark Dixie. For all of his life he has hidden what he is.”

Dixie, a father of three, stabbed Miss Bowman, who was 18, seven times as she walked up the driveway to her home in Croydon in September 2005. He had just celebrated his 35th birthday with friends. That night he had attacked another woman but was scared off by a taxi driver.

Mr Cundy appealed for woman who may have been attacked by Dixie but not reported the crime to come forward. “There could well be other women who have been attacked in South London and other areas where he has lived,” he said.

Dixie has six previous convictions for sexual offences and had at least five aliases in South London and Australia. The other names he used were Mark Down, Mark James McDonald, Steven McDonald and Shane Turner. He was born in Streatham, South London, and by his early teens was drinking alcohol and using drugs. He was regularly in trouble with the police and in June 1986 was sent to a juvenile detention centre for six weeks for robbing a woman at knifepoint.

However, friends said that he did not have a reputation for violence and said that the drugs made him “the life and soul of the party”. But unknown to them Dixie had been preying on lone women since he was a teenager.

His first conviction for a sex attack was in April 1988, when he was found guilty of indecent assault and two charges of indecent exposure. Six months later he admitted indecently assaulting a Jehovah’s Witness who had called at his flat to see his girlfriend, Sandra Backhaus, who had recently lost her baby. He was sentenced to three months’ youth custody.

In 1993 he followed Ms Backhaus, and their two sons, who had settled in Sydney. The relationship foundered and in the middle of 1995 he left Sydney and travelled to Queensland, Melbourne and Adelaide.

While travelling he met an Irish nurse and the couple moved to Perth, Western Australia, in February 1996.

Soon after Dixie was questioned by police after a woman fought off an attacker who dragged her into a vacant allotment. The next year another woman fought off a man in an almost identical attack. In June 1998 a teenager was raped in the same suburb of Leederville, close to where Dixie had moved after the end of his relationship with the nurse.

Three days later he broke into a house and attacked a 20-year-old student. He stabbed her eight times and, while she was unconscious, sexually assaulted her.

Dixie was deported and returned to South London in April 1999, where he returned to working as a chef in various pubs. In July 2001 he indecently assaulted a woman in a telephone box. In June 2002 he started a relationship with his colleague, Stacey Nivet.

The couple gave up their jobs and moved to Spain, where Ms Nivet became pregnant. Some months later they returned to London and moved to a flat in the road where Miss Bowman would be killed two years later.

Their son was born in November 2003 but on September 1, 2005, the couple separated. Dixie became depressed and the week before his birthday went camping with two women friends, Victoria Chandler and Diana Glassborow. They returned to London and went to a pub to celebrate Dixie’s birthday. The group then went to Ms Chandler’s Croydon flat.

Dixie said that he had left the flat to buy cocaine. After killing Miss Bowman he returned to the flat and the group went drinking the next day.

Within weeks Dixie had moved to Amsterdam, where he worked as a chef in the red light district. He returned to Britain in January 2006 and was arrested six months later after police matched his DNA to that found on Miss Bowman’s body. When officers searched his home they found a home-made video showing him performing a sex act over newspaper coverage of the murder. Dixie’s comment when arrested was: “I must be mental to do something like that, eh?”

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