MAN GUILTY OF DOG WALKER'S MURDER

The half-naked body of the 34-year-old victim was found in the River Ely in March 1996.

Her hands were tied behind her back with her dogs' leads before she was thrown into the water to drown, the jury at Cardiff Crown Court heard during the month-long trial.

Mrs Skipper's estranged husband, Phillip Skipper, was arrested and stood trial for her murder in 1997, but was acquitted. He died of cancer in 2004 at the age of 48.

Pope, 60, was arrested over the death in December 2007 when his DNA was found to be a match for two spots of blood found on Mrs Skipper's clothing. There was a one in a billion chance that the blood on Mrs Skipper's jeans came from someone other than Pope, the court was told.

The father-of-four, of Cherwell Close, Fairwater, Cardiff, claimed his blood got on the jeans after one of Mrs Skipper's dogs bit him in a chance meeting three weeks before her death.

Prosecutor Robin Spencer QC dismissed the explanation as "patent nonsense". However, Mark Evans QC, defending Pope, said his client, who is illiterate, was not intelligent enough to fabricate the story.

Pope was interviewed as a witness during the original investigation, after a colleague at engineering firm Bearings noted his likeness to an e-fit produced by police investigating the murder. He told officers at the time that he had never met Mrs Skipper, but detailed the "chance encounter" outside a Cardiff shop after his 2007 arrest.

Speaking on behalf of the family, Mrs Skipper's sister Heidi Mathison said: "We are grateful that advances in scientific technology were able to identify Pope. For almost 13 years we have lived every day with the knowledge that the person who took Karen from us was out there walking free, free to live his life.

"Justice had now been done. It will not bring Karen back to us and we will never get over her death, but it gives us some closure and maybe she can finally rest in peace."