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.