Mark Dixie, 37, who had claimed he had sex with the 18-year-old’s corpse but had not killed her, was told he would not be eligible for parole for 34 years.

“What you did was so awful, so repulsive, I will not repeat it here,” Old Bailey judge Gerald Gordon told Dixie.

“You have shown not the slightest remorse for what you did — quite the opposite.” The sentence, the judge said, had to reflect the public’s revulsion over his heinous crime.  There were cheers in court when he was convicted earlier on Friday and members of the victim’s family shouted abuse as he was led away to the cells.

Dixie responded to the taunts by turning and shaking his fist to them and encouraging them to fight him.

Bowman was stabbed outside her home in Blenheim Crescent, Croydon, at about 4.00 am, shortly after being dropped off by her boyfriend Lewis Sproston, a 22-year-old plasterer who himself spent three days in custody on suspicion of the killing.

In a defence labelled by prosecutors as “desperate,” Dixie, who has a string of previous convictions for sex crimes, told the jury he had stumbled on the blonde’s naked corpse by chance as he staggered home drunk and high on cocaine after celebrating his birthday.

He claimed he did not realise she was dead until after he stopped having sex with her. Bowman, who was working as a hairdresser and part-time model at the time of her death, was discovered by a neighbour.

DNA tests on semen linked Dixie with her dead body, which was found with stab wounds in the neck and abdomen. Dixie had been a suspect in the “Claremont” serial killer case in Perth, where three woman were murdered in the 1990s — the same time as he lived in the city. He had been cleared by Australian police of any involvement in those crimes.