Arlene’s family now brace themselves for Nat Fraser’s next appeal

• Nat Fraser has twice been convicted of murdering his estranged wife Arlene

• Jury in 2003 and in May 2012 returned guilty verdicts

• Lord Bracadale handed down life sentence last month and ordered Fraser to serve minimum 17 years

Fraser, 53, was found guilty last month of arranging the murder of his estranged wife, Arlene, 33, who vanished from her home in New Elgin, Moray, in 1998, on the day she was to have seen a solicitor about a divorce.

A jury in 2003 had also returned a guilty verdict and although Fraser lost an appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh, a retrial was allowed when the Supreme Court in London held that his trial had been unfair because evidence was not disclosed to the defence lawyers.

Mrs Fraser’s family had said at the end of the second trial that they fully expected Fraser to pursue another appeal, and yesterday his lawyers lodged a formal intimation of an intention to appeal his conviction and sentence of a life term with a minimum of 17 years in jail.

“The family are not particularly surprised, we’ve got to say,” said Stephen Gillies, Mrs Fraser’s brother-in-law.

“The system seems to be set up in that way, a perpetual appeal system, at least that’s how it appears to us. Obviously, we have been here before and it’s like going round in circles. We will just have to wait and see how it pans out, but from our understanding, an intention to appeal does not mean for certain there will be an appeal because grounds of appeal will have to be put in and allowed to go to a hearing.

“In the past, this has never been about money as far as we were concerned, but I imagine many people in Scotland at this stage will look at how much this is all costing and I can sympathise with that.”

One of Fraser’s likely grounds of appeal on this occasion will be that information alluding to a previous conviction for attacking his wife was revealed during evidence at the High Court in Edinburgh.

No attempt had been made to keep secret the fact that it was a second trial for murder, and that Fraser had been convicted on the first occasion and won an appeal.

However, it was not intended that the jury should know anything of the incident, about a month before Mrs Fraser disappeared, when her husband grabbed her by the throat and caused deep bruising to her neck and haemorrhaging to the eyelids. He was jailed for 18 months.

A witness made reference to Fraser’s personality changing “after he had been imprisoned for a previous incident”, and other comments had also been made which prompted the defence QC, John Scott, to argue for the trial to be aborted and started again.

However, the judge, Lord Bracadale, decided that it was sufficient that he should direct the jury to ignore what had been said.

Another ground could centre on Lord Bracadale’s ruling that one of the jurors should be allowed to continue to sit on the jury.

A concerned member of the public phoned the court during the trial to complain that she had overheard two women discussing the case on a bus, saying that a man on the jury was adamant that he was going to find Fraser guilty.