AN obsessive lover who could not face losing his girlfriend to another
man was jailed for life yesterday for his murder.
Martin Scott drove 400 miles to bludgeon and stab Craig Mackie to
death. One of the stab wounds almost severed the 21-year-old victim's
heart and two blows to the head fractured his skull.
Within hours, 19-year-old Shanika Jayewardene arrived to start a new
life with Mr Mackie, only to find his battered body lying in a pool of
blood on his bedroom floor.
After a seven-day trial a jury at the High Court in Edinburgh took 80
minutes to find Scott, 22, guilty of murdering Mr Mackie in the victim's
flat in West Port, Dunbar, East Lothian, on December 2 last year.
Lord Prosser told Scott, of Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, that
in light of the jury's verdict there was only one sentence he could
pass, imprisonment for life.
Scott, smartly dressed in a dark suit, smiled towards the back of the
court as he was led away to begin his sentence.
After the verdict, Mr John Mackie, the dead man's father, fought back
tears as he said: ''My son did not a thing wrong in his life.
Unfortunately, he fell in love with the wrong girl.
''I don't hold any resentment towards Shanika. I have spoken to her
since the murder and I really think she was trying to run away from
Scott. He was obsessed to the point of being mental.
''Although the verdict will not bring my son back at least justice has
been seen to be done.''
Mr Mackie's wife, Ella, suffered a stroke on the day of her son's
funeral and was still not well enough to attend the trial. Mr Mackie,
45, said she had been very depressed because of the case but he hoped
the verdict would help to ''perk her up''.
The deadly love triangle began in May last year when Mr Mackie, an
assistant chemist at Torness power station in East Lothian, travelled to
Bristol to attend a course. Miss Jayewardene was the receptionist at his
hotel.
At the time she had been going out with Scott for nearly two years,
but told him in August that their affair was over. The two still saw
each other, but, according to her, just as friends.
Scott obviously saw the situation in a different light. He claimed
that they were having a sexual relationship more or less until the
moment Miss Jayewardene decided to give up her job and go to Dunbar to
live with Mr Mackie.
Scott's father urged him to forget Miss Jayewardene, but he replied:
''I can't, I can't.''
He even tried to destroy her new relationship by phoning Mr Mackie
pretending to be a homosexual friend of Scott, advising him to have a
test because Scott was HIV positive.
The call was made during the last weekend in November while Miss
Jayewardene was visiting Mr Mackie and his parents in Dunbar, but
instead of driving a wedge between the couple it served only to bring
them together.
Miss Jayewardene took the coach back to the West Country, arriving on
Wednesday morning to find Scott waiting for her at the bus station in
Thornbury. She told him she was heading straight back to Scotland that
night to start a new life with Mr Mackie after informing her parents and
quitting her job.
She told the court of his reaction: ''He was telling me I couldn't go
... I couldn't leave him, he couldn't be without me.''
Apparently on the spur of the moment Scott decided to get to Mr Mackie
before Miss Jayewardene could and drove up to confront him at his flat
in Dunbar. He took with him an airgun he had bought shortly before.
According to Scott, he just wanted to make sure that Mr Mackie would
look after Miss Jayewardene, a message he could have conveyed by a
simple telephone call rather than an 800-mile round trip.
Only Scott now knows exactly what happened in the flat. His version
was that he defended himself when Mr Mackie came at him with a knife
after taunting him about his sexual prowess.
The self-defence plea was effectively destroyed by pathologist Dr
Basil Purdue who detailed the 27 separate injuries, including four stab
wounds, inflicted on Mr Mackie.
He found no defensive type injuries on the body, which suggested that
the victim had been helpless or unconscious during much of a prolonged
and violent attack or had been taken by surprise by a blow which rapidly
disabled him.
By the time Miss Jayewardene arrived in Edinburgh at about 7.30am on
the overnight bus, hoping that Mr Mackie would be there to meet her, he
had been dead for more than an hour.
She kept calling the flat, finally leaving a plaintive ''where are
you?'' message on his answering machine.
She caught the 10 o'clock train to Dunbar and borrowed a set of keys
from Mr Mackie's mother to get into his flat where she made the horrific
discovery of his bound and gagged body.
Despite protestations of panic, Scott's immediate behaviour after the
killing did not suggest a man in a state of mental turmoil. He drove
south and almost immediately arranged a date for the next day with a
secretary he knew.
He told his father that he had spent the night in Weston-super-Mare,
but by now news of Mr Mackie's death had travelled south.
Scott had apparently decided to see a priest to explain what had
happened and to seek advice, but instead his father took him to the
police station.
In a letter to Miss Jayewardene, written from prison, he had claimed
that Craig Mackie's death had been a terrible accident, but that was a
story the jury refused to believe.
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