NO ESCAPE COSTA KILLER
DAVID Baxendale was a seriously desperate man.
He’d murdered a woman 24 hours earlier and knew the police would be on his tail.
His face was all over the media. He was one of Britain’s most wanted men.
So Baxendale bought a razor and slipped into the public toilets at the Gunwharf Quays shopping centre.
He shaved his head and took another look at the photo in his brother’s passport, which he’d stolen.
Likeness
Maybe the likeness was good enough.
It was. Later that day, David Baxendale booked a one-way ferry ticket from Portsmouth to St Malo in France.
He took a last look back at Britain as the ship sailed into the Channel. He knew he’d never be able to go back. Once in France, he fled south and crossed the Pyrenees into Spain. He knew the country well. In 2001 he was jailed there for murdering a man whom he’d stabbed 14 times while under the influence of drink and drugs.
He was deported back to the UK in June 2008 and released from prison in September 2009, to be placed under the care of the Surrey Probation Service.
Just eight months later, the 40-year-old killed again.
This time his victim was Sarah Thomas, 38 – a woman he’d met only hours before.
Baxendale brutally stabbed the mother-ofthree to death in her flat in Nutfield, Surrey.
He subjected her to a ferocious attack which left her with multiple injuries, including a fatal knife wound to the neck.
He knew that if the authorities caught him, he’d be locked up for good. So he started running. Baxendale’s luck ran out after just a few weeks, in Fuengirola near Marbella.
He’d been drinking with a holidaymaker who later saw a media report about Sarah’s murder and the hunt for her killer.
Convict
Horrified, the tourist realised that he’d been drinking with him and called the cops.
Spanish cops arrested Baxendale and quickly extradited him back to Britain.
At the end of a three-week trial at Guildford Crown Court in March 2011, jurors took just three hours to unanimously convict Baxendale of murder.
Judge Christopher Critchlow immediately handed down a whole life jail term, meaning the killer will never be eligible for parole.
Sentencing Baxendale, Judge Critchlow said: “This was a particularly horrifying murder.
“She was punched repeatedly by your fists. Then you hit her with a bottle before finally stabbing her in the neck.
“She was completely defenceless at your hands.
“You have shown no remorse during this trial, during which you sought to pin the blame on her boyfriend.
“You are a violent and dangerous person.”
The court heard that, at the time of her death, unemployed Sarah – who struggled with substance abuse issues
– was living in at the ‘Spinning Wheel’ flats.
On the afternoon of May 10, 2010, she met Baxendale at a mutual friend’s flat in Redhill. The pair got a taxi back to hers at around 5pm.
Sarah’s boyfriend, David Bowden, told the court he tried to call her as he was concerned for her safety.
By the time he got to the flat he found her on the living room floor covered in blood.
Spotted
Although emergency services arrived shortly after, they were unable to revive her and Sarah died at the scene.
Baxendale, who had been drinking with friends in Memorial Park, Redhill, during the day was spotted running from the building.
Witnesses saw him in the Nutfield area over the next hour-and-a-half.
A knife, which was found to have both
Baxendale’s and Sarah’s blood on it, was later discovered near a tree, while a plastic bag containing his bloodstained jacket was found under a bench in a garden.
Baxendale ran through a number of fields and paths before eventually catching a taxi to his home in Walton-on-theHill.
A bag hidden in a hedge in a nearby lane was later found to contain a T-shirt and jeans with Baxendale’s DNA on them, along with a pair of trainers stained with Sarah’s blood.
His fingerprints were also found in Sarah’s blood by the window of her flat and on the neck of a bottle.
The day after the murder, with the help of his brother’s passport, he fled the country.
The court heard that he had a number of previous convictions for violence involving knives and were told about the murder he’d committed in Spain in 2001.
They also heard that, just five days before Sarah Thomas’s murder, Baxendale had threatened to kill another woman who he had met while attending probation requirements and who had stopped returning his calls.
Det Ch Insp Steve Hayes, who led the investigation, said: “This was a truly tragic case.
Ferocity
“Sarah Thomas was the victim of a sustained and savage attack in her own home at the hands of a man she’d only met that afternoon.
“The number of injuries she suffered and the ferocity used was truly shocking.
“David Baxendale already had a history of offences involving knives spanning the last 20 years, including a previous conviction for murder.
“He is clearly an extremely dangerous and callous man whose propensity for violence knows no bounds.
“He has not shown a shred of remorse for this horrific crime and instead tried to flee the country in a bid to evade capture.
“Our thoughts and sympathies remain with the family and friends of Sarah Thomas, particularly her two eldest sons.
“I hope today has brought them some justice and closure for what happened to her.”
But, even though bang to rights with two murders under his bloodstained belt, Baxendale still tried to wriggle off the hook.
In 2012, he launched appeals against his conviction and sentence.
His lawyers argued that the way the trial judge dealt with the evidence of Baxendale’s previous convictions rendered his latest guilty verdict unsafe.
But three senior Court of Appeals judges upheld both conviction and sentence.
Giving the appeal judgment, Lord Justice Gross said the trial judge could have dealt with the evidence in a better way, but that it didn’t mean the conviction was unsafe.
He also rejected Baxendale’s plea for a less severe sentence.
Rejected
Two years later he was back at the appeal court, arguing that his 2001 conviction for the killing in Spain should not have been brought up at his trial for murdering Sarah.
His barrister this time argued that Baxendale’s legal team had been wrong not to fight the prosecution application to include the previous conviction.
Again, the appeal was rejected and Baxendale’s full-life term confirmed, leaving him rotting in the jail cell he still sits.