18 years on, man is jailed for murder of Briton in 'paradise'

A MAN was jailed for life yesterday, 18 years after murdering a British woman on an island on Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

Wayne Butler, 57, a financial adviser, was first arrested in 1988 for the murder of Natasha Douty but was released because of insufficient evidence. Yesterday a jury took less than two hours to find him guilty.

Mrs Douty, 41, was working as a waitress on Brampton Island resort and had spent the morning of her death sunbathing naked on a secluded beach. Her body was found the following day in scrub, covered with her red beach towel. She had been beaten about the head with a stone.

Three weeks before her murder, Mrs Douty from Harbury, Warwicks, had written to relatives in England describing the island as "paradise" and saying she wanted to stay there for the rest of her life. Butler, from Sydney, was first arrested after members of his family told police that he and his wife had taken a trip to the island on the day Mrs Douty died.

At one stage police offered a £12,000 reward for information leading to a conviction. In 1997, DNA tests linked a semen stain on Mrs Douty's towel to Butler but his defence team argued that the testing procedure was flawed. The team approached the American scientist who first developed DNA testing, Dr Kary Mullis, a Nobel laureate, to give evidence on Butler's behalf.

He wrote a report saying it was possible that dried blood cells taken from Butler had contaminated the semen sample during laboratory testing. But Ross Martin, summing up the prosecution case at the Queensland Supreme Court in Brisbane, told the jury that there was a one in 43 trillion chance of the tested DNA being that of someone other than Butler.

Butler's former wife, Vija Samite Duffey, told the court that while on day trips it was normal for her husband to go jogging and exploring, leaving her to sunbathe and swim. She said that on the day of Mrs Douty's murder, Butler was away for four hours. There was nothing unusual about his behaviour on his return and the couple had a drink before catching a boat back to the mainland.