The taxi driver Chris Halliwell has been given a full life term for the sexually motivated murder of Becky Godden, almost four years after being jailed for killing Sian O’Callaghan.
Halliwell joins notorious killers such as the Moors murderer Ian Brady and Rose West who will never be released.
Attention will now turn to whether Halliwell, 52, from Swindon, may have killed other women along with Godden, 20, and O’Callaghan, 22.
Following the sentence police repeated they believed he had killed other women and revealed that they were pursuing other lines of inquiry on other possible offences after calls had come in making further allegations.
Wiltshire detectives will work with other forces and the National Crime Agency to try to find other victims. As a chauffeur and a ground worker, Halliwell travelled the UK so it is feasible there could be victims across the country.
Sentencing Halliwell to a full life term, high court judge Sir John Griffith Williams said he was a “self-centred and domineering individual”.
Halliwell had smiled at Godden’s family as he was convicted earlier this week. He simply said “thank you” to the judge when he was told yesterday he would never be released and left the dock with his eyes down.
During the sentencing hearing, Godden’s parents, Karen Edwards, and John Godden, paid tribute to their “little girl” who went missing in 2003. Both described how during the eight years before her body was found they continued to search for her and buy her presents in the hope she would turn up. Outside court Godden said he still now expected her to walk through the door.
Halliwell was already in the high-security Long Lartin prison in Worcestershire serving life for the murder of O’Callaghan. He picked up the office worker in his taxi after she left a nightclub alone in Swindon, Wiltshire, in 2011, stabbed her in the head, strangled her and left her partially clothed body next to a road in Oxfordshire.
On Monday a jury at Bristol crown court took less than three hours to find him guilty of the murder of sex worker Godden. In January 2003, he had sex with her, strangled her and buried her body in a field in Gloucestershire.
Godden’s murder only came to light after Halliwell was arrested over O’Callaghan’s disappearance. He led police to where he had left O’Callaghan’s body, and to where he had buried Godden’s remains eight years before.
But because senior investigating officer, Steve Fulcher, did not follow the rules over how suspects should be treated, Halliwell initially escaped justice.
Fulcher, who has left the police and now works in Somalia, was not in court to watch Halliwell being sentenced but his wife, Yvonne Fulcher, sat in the public gallery. Passing sentence, the judge said he did not believe that Fulcher had been oppressive in how he interviewed Halliwell.
