Innocent man released after spending 12 years in prison for rape committed by a murderer

 

A 41-year-old man has been released after spending 12 years behind bar for rapes carried out by the killer of Sally Anne Bowman.

Dutch national Romano van der Dussen was wrongly jailed for 12 years in Spain for three rapes that the real culprit Mark Dixie was later found to have committed. (Dussen pictured  below walking after leaving the prison of Palma de Mallorca)...

Dixie, 47, was jailed for 34 years in 2008 for stabbing the 18-year-old, before raping her as she lay dying, yards from her front door in Croydon, south London.

On Friday, November 24, Dixie was sentenced to two more life sentences for violent sex attacks on two other women — one when he was just 16 — after confessing during interviews with cops in 2015.

"He ruined my life and if the Spanish police had done their job Sally Anne would be alive today.”

Dussen told The Sun in Friday. Dussen had his conviction quashed last year.

Dixie carried out his first attack in 1987, aged just 16, when he pounced on a lone woman and raped her in an isolated parking lot in Croydon.

The victim was bundled into her car where Dixie raped her before pulling off a silk tie from her blouse and binding her by the wrists to a car handle.

The court heard Dixie then set fire to the car and “seemed delighted at her fear.” She managed to escape the burning vehicle after Dixie fled.

The next evening, Dixie rang her house phone, leaving her “utterly petrified,” before she slammed down the phone. Dixie called her again the following night.
A palm print taken from the car was eventually matched to Dixie in 2009.

Dixie also confessed to another attack in Croydon in 2002. During that attack, he fractured a woman’s skull by repeatedly smashing her over the head with a chef’s knife sharpener before sexually assaulting her.

The victim left a series of messages on her boyfriend’s phone, with the last message ending with the sound of screaming and her dropping the phone.

Dixie answered the phone when her panicked partner heard the messages and rang back, before telling him he’d “had sex with her,” adding: “I have battered her, I have left her by the rail station.”

Sally Anne Bowman was brutally murdered as she returned home from a night out in Croydon, South London, in September 2005.

Bowman was stabbed seven times in the neck and stomach as she bravely tried to fight her killer off.

In a final horror, she was raped as she lay dead or dying. Dixie was arrested by chance the following year after having a fight in a pub and was linked to Sally Anne through his DNA.