A mother's "blue-eyed boy" has been jailed for life after strangling her and hiding her body underneath a caravan.

Ross Taggart was ordered to serve at least 18 years in prison for the murder of his mother Carol, 54.

A judge told him at the High Court in Edinburgh: "How you have lived with your conscience since you murdered your mother, I do not know."

Lord Uist said: "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," he said.

Within hours of taking his mother's life Taggart had arranged for "a casual sexual encounter" with a woman previously unknown to him.

Taggart, 31, was convicted of murdering his mother Carol and staging a cover-up despite claiming he was the "last person that would lift my hands to my mum".

Taggart claimed she had stormed out of the house they shared at Hill of St Margaret, Dunfermline, in Fife, where she ran a children's nursery business, in the early hours of December 22 last year, sparking a missing person search.

But before she was reported missing he went to the home of a woman in Dunfermline he had contacted through a dating website.

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.

Taggart claimed that his mother had left in her car taking her bag and keys, but leaving her phone.

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.

The dead woman's body was found by police wrapped in bedding and other material and trussed in twine under a caravan at Pettycur Bay Caravan Park, Kinghorn, in Fife, near to a caravan his mother owned at the site on January 11.

The jury unanimously convicted him of the offences in an hour.