A DUNFERMLINE mother’s “blue-eyed boy” has been jailed for a minimum of 18 years after strangling her and hiding her body underneath a caravan.

It took jurors only an hour to find Ross Taggart, 31, guilty of the murder of his mother, 54-year-old Carol, after the conclusion of his trial yesterday.

Judge Lord Uist, handing out a life sentence, told him: “How you have lived with your conscience since you murdered your mother, I do not know.

“You have been convicted by the unanimous verdict of the jury of the terrible crime of the murder of your own mother, a woman who did a great deal, indeed probably too much, for you in the course of her life.

“In the course of an argument on December 21 or 22 last year you caused her head injuries and throttled her to death. You thereafter embarked on a calculated course of deceit by reporting her as missing to the police and persistently lying about your actions.

“You have shown no regret or remorse and continued to deny your involvement before the jury in the face of overwhelming and unanswerable evidence.”

He added that at times Taggart’s response to the evidence in the case was “ludicrous”.

Taggart claimed his mother had stormed out of the house they shared at 3 Hill of St Margaret, Dunfermline, in the early hours of December 22 last year, sparking a missing person search.

Her body was found by police wrapped in bedding and other material and trussed in twine under a caravan at Pettycur Bay Caravan Park in Kinghorn on January 11.

Taggart was convicted of murdering his mother and staging a cover-up despite claiming: “I didn’t kill my mum. I am the last person that would lift my hands to my mum.”

But advocate depute Iain McSporran accused Taggart of being “an accomplished and plausible liar”. Before his mother was reported missing, Taggart went to the home of a woman in Dunfermline he had contacted through dating website Plenty of Fish seeking sex.

He then treated himself to a night out in Edinburgh with cocktails and a meal and a visit to the cinema to see The Hunger Games using his mother’s credit card.

Days later, he visited a pawnbrokers in the city looking to sell a favourite diamond ring of his mother, claiming it had been left to him. The ring sale did not go through, but he did get £100 for a gold bracelet.

Mrs Taggart’s Vauxhall Antara was later found in Dunfermline with the address of the woman he had visited programmed into the satnav, although he claimed he had not put it into the system.

DCI Keith Hardie from Police Scotland’s major investigation team said: “During the initial inquiries to trace Carol-Anne Taggart, her son Ross provided various pieces of information to police that were either inaccurate or completely false.

“His intentions were to hinder the investigation to find his mother and establish what had happened to her.

“After Carol-Anne’s body was found, it was established she had been subjected to a significant level of violence prior to her death and as a result of the evidence gathered during our inquiries, Ross Taggart was quickly arrested.

“The conclusion of this trial will now allow the rest of the Taggart family to begin to move on with their lives and I would like to thank them for their continued support and assistance during this investigation.”