n The Black Widower, award-winning journalist Charles Lavery examines the life and crimes of Malcolm Webster, the nurse who killed for money and attempted to cover his tracks with drugs and fire.
Webster drugged his first wife and staged a car crash before setting the vehicle alight with her body still inside, obtaining a £200,000 insurance payout as a result. The fatal crash in 1994 was treated as an accident until a second incident in New Zealand in 1999, involving Webster and his new wife, prompted police to spend several years gathering enough evidence to convict him of murder and attempted murder as part of a million-pound insurance scam.
Webster left his second wife destitute after failing to secure £750,000 in life assurance and returned to Scotland, where he duped a woman into thinking he had cancer to win her affections, before planning a bigamous marriage and plotting to kill her for insurance money. However, police alerted his third wife-to-be that she was in imminent danger and, after 17 years of deception and brutality, Webster was finally jailed for 30 years in July 2011 in what was one of the longest trials in Scottish legal history.
In The Black Widower, Lavery documents Webster's shocking life of crime and investigates horrifying new claims that he killed several infants while experimenting with dosage levels of sedatives as he prepared to kill his second wife.
