Violet Price (pictured), 80, had been missing from her home in Moustier village

A man has been sentenced to life in prison for the rape and murder of an 80-year-old British expat whose dismembered body parts were found scattered in a forest in the Dordogne area of southwestern France.

Madi Mahaboudi, 33, who has a previous conviction for unlawful killing by strangulation of another woman, was convicted on Friday of the murder of Violet Price, who was originally from Northampton and had gone to live in France in 2012 to be near her son Paul.

A medical expert told the court in the town of Agen that the attack in April last year on Price in her home in the village of Moustier had been extraordinarily violent.

'In 15 years of practice, I have never seen such a degree of bruising on the throat and neck,' he said, after asking members of the British pensioner's family to leave the courtroom before he read out the gruesome list of physical and sexual injuries found on her body.

Mahaboudi, who was addicted to cannabis and pornography and had a history of mental illness, was the brother of Price's daughter-in-law.

On April 11, 2015, Price returned to her home after attending a barbecue with family members and friends in a nearby village. Mahaboudi, who is from the French Indian Ocean department of Mayotte, was also at the barbecue.

He later turned up at her house apparently looking for his ex-girlfriend, who told the court she had left him because of his heavy drinking, repeated death threats, and sexual violence inspired by porn films.

Price let him in and made him a cup of coffee, on which his DNA was later found and which led to his arrest.

The elderly widow at one point turned her back to her killer.

'I grabbed her by the neck and squeezed,' Mahaboudi told the court, adding that he could not explain why he did it except that 'something stronger than me came over me.'

It was only when police traced the DNA found on a coffee cup, and on a hair found in the victim's bed, that they made a breakthrough in the case

The medical expert said that the accused raped the victim before killing her. Mahaboudi then put her body in his car and took it back to his home in a nearby village where he cut it into seven parts and dumped them in different locations in a nearby wood.

Price's son Paul, who is a businessman working in the area, raised the alert after he later went to his mother's house when she failed to answer the phone.

Police launched a massive hunt for her, mobilising dozens of officers, a helicopter and divers.

But it was only when police traced the DNA found on the coffee cup, and on a hair found in the victim's bed, that they made a breakthrough in the case.

They arrested Mahaboudi and he quickly admitted his crime and told them where the body parts were.

Prosecutor Pascal Prache (left) speaks during a press conference in Agen, in April last year, where it was revealed body parts believed to be that of missing Violent Price had been found in two separate locations

His defence lawyer, Isabelle Gillet, told the court that her client 'was a boy who had never developed because he had a very authoritarian and severe father' and that he had been raped as a child by a family friend.

The accused, asked if he had anything to say before jurors retired to deliberate at the end of the three-day trial, presented his excuses to the victim's family and said: 'I ask to be given another chance. Deep down inside me I know I can be rehabilitated.'

Mahaboudi was in 2005 sentenced by a court in Mayotte to eight years in jail for having caused the death of a woman he first seduced and then strangled.

Soon after he finished his sentence in mainland France he asked to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Bordeaux.

'I felt dangerous,' he told the court. When he got out of the hospital he went to live with his sisters in Dordogne, the picturesque region where thousands of Britons live as expats or have holiday homes.