TOP detectives have described David Chenery-Wickens as one of the most “unusual” killers they have ever come across.

Outwardly Chenery-Wickens was a respectable churchman who dressed up as Father Christmas over the festive season and volunteered at a local steam railway.

But a seven-week trial at Lewes Crown Court revealed the 52-year-old medium as a compulsive liar who believed his own fiction.

After delivering the life sentence Justice Cooke said the minister had told a series of “preposterous lies” and created an “elaborate charade”.

In police interview Chenery-Wickens, who gave his name as 'The Reverend Chenery-Wickens', liberally changed his story, adapting his lies to match new challenges.

First he said Diane had gone missing during a joint trip to London.

When police CCTV showed she had not been on the train with him, he said she had actually planned her own disappearance in Sussex and he had sworn a spiritualist oath of secrecy, When asked why he had cause to ask girlfriend Kerry Lippett how to get blood out of the carpet the day after he murdered Diane, he said he had suffered a nose bleed in his lounge.

He went on to tell the jury he could not possibly have murdered Diane because in his role as a spiritualist minister who communicates with the dead he would 'know what was coming to him'.

In fact Andrew Goble, caretaker at the Lavender Line railway, where Chenery-Wickens worked, said he had long since been known as 'The Vicar of Fibley'.

Mr Goble said: "He'd lie about anything and had done for the five years or so I'd known him."

Chenery-Wickens was described by prosecutor Phillip Katz QC as a 'sexual predator from day one – and I mean day one."

Chenery-Wickens grew up in Beckenham, Kent and married his childhood sweetheart Faye Robinson when he was 20 but the pair, who had two children Adam, now 27, and Natalie, now 25, 'grew apart' and divorced in 1995.

He got into spiritualism and began communicating with the dead when he was in his 20s.

He met Diane in 1996 when he worked as a delivery driver taking props to the BBC and carrying out tarot card readings for actresses on the side.

Diane asked him to make a prediction about her 'private life' and the couple dated for a year before marrying in a spiritualist ceremony in Dorset in 1997.

But friends of Diane were quickly suspicious of Chenery-Wickens who appeared to have 'no past' and 'no male friends'.

He told Diane he was no longer speaking to members of his family and she was forced to ask her friend Karel Van Bommell to act as his best man at the wedding.

From then on the web of lies got thicker and as soon as the couple moved to Sussex in 2000 Chenery-Wickens jumped at the opportunity to develop his image as a 'vicar' in the local community.

But no one was to know he would turn out to be a killer.