COURT DRAWING: An artist's impression of the killing.
SOMEWHERE, a young Southampton woman holds a dark, terrible family secret.
Two months ago she would have celebrated her 21st birthday surrounded by her nearest and dearest.
One important person missing from the celebrations was her biological father, Mark Cameron.
The reason; her dad is spending a life behind bars for a brutal murder that shocked the city just over 20 years ago.
When Cameron was locked up on February 3, 1987, few would have missed the 25-year-old drifter.
But the butchered taxi driver Dougie Latter was not the only victim of the killer, for he also sentenced his own secret love child to a life of torment.
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Following his arrest, his former girlfriend fled her Southampton home to the outskirts of the city to protect her child from being branded the daughter of a killer.
At the time, the toddler was too young to even realise that her daddy was going away - whether she has grown up to discover the horrific truth remains a mystery.
She was born just three weeks after her father brutally stabbed his cabbie victim to death in a field in picturesque Old Netley in the early hours of December 28, 1986.
Mr Latter was known as a "loveable rogue" and a leftover of the Flower Power movement.
It remains a mystery where the gentle cabbie picked up his murderer, but it's believed Cameron had devised a plot to rob him.
On a cold winter's night, just three days after Christmas, he forced the 47-year-old to drive him to a field at Shop Lane, in Old Netley, on a route to his death.
Cameron pulled a three-inch blade on the cabbie and proceeded to slash his throat and stab him in the ribs.
A post-mortem showed Mr Latter literally fought for his life as his hands were cut to ribbons as he vainly fended off the frenzied attack.
The chase continued around the white Peugeot and 200 yards into the field where Cameron demanded the last penny from his dying victim.
Mr Latter's near-naked body was found with 44 stab wounds the following morning by shocked local farmers Richard and Beth Leigh.
Police immediately launched a massive manhunt as Southampton's cabbies drove in fear of a killer on the loose.
Fellow drivers paid a moving final tribute to Dougie Latter by escorting the hearse carrying his coffin through the city.
Meanwhile Cameron, supremely confident he would never be caught, boasted of his callous crime with flatmates at a bed and breakfast in Northam.
He drew a plan describing what he had done and called it "the perfect murder." But one of the men who heard the confession, Stephen Lillywhite, went to the police.
It took the 22-year-old four days to go to police because as he did not want to believe what he had heard was true.
He said he had taken the drug LSD earlier in the day that Cameron had confessed to killing, but he understood perfectly well what was being said.
Mr Lillywhite told detectives Cameron had told him the taxi driver had fought for his life as he bludgeoned him to death.
"He called him crazy . . . I think it was because the taxi driver still kept on coming at him. I don't think Mark could believe that he still had it in him," Mr Lillywhite later told the court.
"Mark explained that the taxi driver was in such a state that there was nothing anyone could do for him.
"He decided that the only thing he could do was to finish him off. He said he put his foot on his throat and then cut it."
Following his arrest, Cameron went on to give different accounts to the police, but he would ultimately betray himself by giving away details that could only be known by police - and the killer.
Cameron admitted to being in the taxi on the night of Mr Latter's death, but blamed the killing on a mystery third man.
Even when prosecuting counsel put it to him that he was the killer an incredulous look spread across his face as he replied: "You must be as crazy as I think I am."
He failed to convince the jury and, indicative of his personality, smirked as the jury foreman announced the guilty verdict.
Following the trial, his ex-girlfriend was left torn between love for the father of her child and hate for the crime he committed.
She said it would be her daughter's decision whether she wanted to one day let her father back into her life.
"I'm so worried for my baby, growing up with the stigma of all this," she said.
"But I'm relieved that at least she'll be grown up by the time he gets out. And if she doesn't want to know him, that's up to her."
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