Double-killer likely to die behind bars after wheelie bin murder

A DOUBLE-KILLER faces dying in jail, after he was ordered to serve at least 23 years of a life sentence for the "depraved" murder of a woman whose naked body was left to rot in a wheelie bin.

Robert Chalmers, 59, was told by a judge yesterday that he would have to survive into his 80s before he could be considered for parole.

The parents of his victim, Samantha Wright, 24, welcomed the sentence, but said capital punishment should be reinstated, especially as Chalmers had murdered before.

"We hope he never gets out. He has done it twice and we would not want any other family to go through this. They should bring back hanging. If it is 100 per cent, a closed case, they did it, then their life should be taken," said Ms Wright's mother, Catherine Gibson, 48.

Her former partner, Jeremy Wright, 48, said Chalmers treated his daughter "like a piece of garbage" and was not worthy of any sympathy.

"I have feelings against capital punishment, but what he did to Samantha, he deserves it. The past three years, it has been like somebody has taken over our lives. It is not like a nightmare, it is beyond that."

Ms Gibson added: "We have to try to get on with our lives as normally as possible now. I still do not feel like it is real. It will hit me one day."

Ms Wright, from Stevenage, Hertfordshire, decided to stay in Edinburgh after a holiday to the city. She had a drink problem and disappeared in June 2008.

It was not unusual for her to lose contact with her family, but when they heard nothing from her over Christmas, and then on her birthday on 5 January, 2009, she was reported missing.

Dogged police work, coupled with a slice of luck in finding closed circuit televison footage which would normally have been destroyed after so long, established that Ms Wright had been with Chalmers in the city centre on 12 June, 2008.

His home in Magdalene Drive, Duddingston, was searched, 16 months after she vanished. Her naked body was found in a wheelie bin, hidden in bushes in the overgrown back garden.

Pathologists were unable to say how she died because of the state of decomposition. An attempt had been made to cut off her head, and one of her breasts had been removed.

At his trial Chalmers, nicknamed Santa Claus, Papa Smurf and Captain Bird's Eye because of his beard, blamed someone else for Ms Wright's murder, but he was found guilty by the jury.

In 1974, Chalmers was jailed for life for murdering a workmate in a drunken fight in a house in Johnstone, Renfrewshire.He served nine years before being released on licence.

Sentencing him yesterday for Ms Wright's murder, Lord Malcolm said: "Unless and until you give a detailed account, we will never know exactly what happened that night. However, your conduct after Samantha's death satisfied the jury that you are guilty of murder, and it satisfies me that this was a depraved and dreadful crime.

"Your previous conviction for murder weighs heavily against you. While I am conscious that next year you will be 60, I fix the minimum period at 23 years."