A torturer and killer who was jailed for at least 30 years for the murder of a woman whose body was never found is to challenge his conviction claiming prosecutors failed to make timely or full disclosure of her role as a police informant.

Philip Wade, 42, was sentenced to life imprisonment this year after he was found guilty of murdering financial adviser Lynda Spence whose disappearance in April 2011 sparked a massive police investigation.

Ms Spence, 27, of Glasgow, was abducted and held at a flat in West Kilbride, Ayrshire, where she was tied to a chair, burned with an iron, had a thumb cut off and toes crushed.

Wade had denied the murder but after he was convicted along with co-accused Colin Coats, 42, the trial judge, Lord Pentland, told him the crime was "truly monstrous and barbaric".

The judge told Wade: "The evidence shows you are a violent and dangerous man with no respect for human life or for the values of a civilised society."

But Wade has now launched an appeal against both his conviction and the sentence.

Several of his proposed grounds of appeal against conviction were rejected at a sifting stage and his counsel Gary Allan QC yesterday unsuccessfully argued at the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh they should be reinstated.

Mr Allan said: "In respect of each of these grounds it would be appropriate for the court to quash the conviction for murder."

He said when taken together they amounted to a miscarriage of justice. Several of them related to the adequacy of the directions the judge gave to the jury at the end of the 12-week trial at the High Court in Glasgow.

Mr Allan said: "The case involved both a murder without a body and a murder which was not witnessed by any of the Crown witnesses."

While Wade's bid to have his full proposed grounds of appeal heard at a hearing failed he has remaining grounds challenging his conviction which have been allowed, including an alleged failure to adequately disclose to the defence that Ms Spence was a police intelligence source.

Before she went missing Ms Spence was asked by the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency to become a covert human intelligence source which she had agreed to. She was to provide intelligence on suspected criminals.

Wade's lawyers claim the Crown failed to make timely or adequate disclosure to them that she had been recruited by the SCDEA and this caused significant prejudice to Wade's defence.

It is maintained there was material that there were a number of possible perpetrators with motives other than Wade.