Malcolm John Webster (born 18 April 1959) is an Englishman convicted of the murder of his first wife in Scotland in 1994 and the attempted murder of his second wife in New Zealand. Both cases involved staged car crashes and were carried out for the life insurance money. He was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder by a consultant forensic clinical psychologist, Dr Gary Macpherson, who prepared a report prior to his trial. A police profiler labelled him a sociopath. His crimes were portrayed in the three-part ITV miniseries The Widower (2014).
Early life
Webster's father, Alexander Robertson Webster of Kincardine, Fife, had been the head of the Fraud Squad in the Metropolitan Police, holding the rank of Detective Chief Superintendent. Malcolm's mother was Odette Blewett, a former nurse.
As a child, Webster was prone to pretending to faint, grew up largely sheltered, and his penchant for fires earned him the nickname 'Pyro'. He left school at 15, with no qualifications.
Webster worked as a nurse, a bin man, a driver and an office clerk. In his teens he lied about having cancer.
Suspicious deaths
When he was 30, Webster worked in Tawam Hospital, on the children's ward in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Within six months he was forced to resign, following an investigation into the deaths of three children under his care. All three children had been under six years old and died of cardiac failure (which is unusual for children that age). Due to Islamic culture forbidding post-mortems, and favouring quick burials, there was insufficient evidence for a police investigation.
His former co-worker and girlfriend, Beth Brown, has stated that Webster's supervisors had discovered that he had been injecting himself with insulin and formed the opinion that he had killed the children with insulin injections. It is reputed that his father (a senior police officer) used his influence to get his son out of the country. Webster later denied the allegations.
Relationships
Webster has been described as a "thief, liar and philanderer". He habitually pursued relationships with women (usually wealthy ones) and relied on them to supplement his income. Reportedly his favourite saying was "Why work hard yourself when someone could be doing it for you?"
Claire Morris
Malcolm Webster married Claire Morris from Oldmeldrum, Aberdeenshire, on 3 September 1993. During the course of their marriage he drugged her with Temazepam. On 27 May 1994, he drugged Morris, 32, and deliberately crashed their car on the Auchenhuive to Tarves Road in Mill of Kingoodie, Bourtie, Aberdeenshire, and then set it on fire, with her in the passenger seat. He twice informed an off-duty policeman who stopped to help that there was no one else in the car before it exploded.
Webster, who claimed he had swerved to avoid a motorcyclist coming at him in the wrong lane, received a £200,000 life insurance payout from his wife's death. Webster spent a week in hospital after the crash. After extensive testing, the hospital was satisfied that he was uninjured (even his pulse and heart beat were normal). Webster, however, claimed he had been injured in the car and even wore a neck-brace at the funeral.
Webster's brother-in-law, Peter Morris, later recalled Claire's funeral: "I had a very firm grip of his hand. He was actually squeezing my hand. Most people had their heads down and I glanced at him and he was full of tears, as I was. And that convinced me up until three years ago that he had lost his wife in an accident ... in reality I was holding the hand of her murderer."
A police officer later revealed that he investigated Claire Webster's death on his own in his spare time as he had the following concerns: Claire had not been able to escape, the car had been travelling slowly and there was an absence of skid marks. A fireman shared similar concerns; at the trial he said: "I still think why didn't the person who was there not pull the person out the vehicle?"
Former firefighter Derek McDonald suspected foul play. He informed the BBC: "We all thought it was a bit hooky, there was no sign of violence to the vehicle. For a car to be stopped or parked and burst into flames does not occur — not unless it's in the movies."
After Claire's death, a friend (a nurse named Sarah Dawidek) said both she and her husband had written to the procurator fiscal that Claire had told her she had been in a similar accident some months earlier; Webster had been driving while Claire was a passenger and their car ended up in a ditch.