A model who was used as bait in a honey trap to lure a man to his death was among six people to be jailed for life for his murder.
Lee McKnight, 26, owed £2,000 to an associate who persuaded Coral Edgar, 26, to send him ‘booty messages’ on Snapchat encouraging him to come to her home in Carlisle for sex on July 24 last year.
Once inside, he was set upon by Jamie Davison, 26, and two other men who beat him so savagely he was left looking like a ‘torture victim’, the city’s crown court heard.
Mr McKnight was ‘on the point of death’ when he was wrapped in a carpet and dumped in the River Caldew where he drowned.
Jurors were told Davison was the ‘middle-man’ in an alleged £500,000 a year drug enterprise.
He recruited Arron Graham, 26, and Jamie Lee Roberts, 18, as ‘extra muscle’ to ‘make an example’ of Mr McKnight and show others the consequences of failing to settle their debts.
The court heard he was also being chased for money by dealers higher up the chain.
After using Edgar to help flush Mr McKnight out of hiding, the men tied him to a chair and subjected him to a horrific two-hour attack.
He was punched, kicked, stamped on and lashed with a diamante-headed riding crop Edgar’s mum had bought from a sex shop.
A pathologist who later examined his ‘broken’ body found he had suffered 36 separate head wounds, a fractured skull and several broken ribs.
Jurors heard he would have still been alive when he was thrown in the water.
Edgar’s mother Carol, 47, let the men use her Nissan Navara to drive Mr McKnight’s body to the river.
Roberts’ dad Paul, 51, admitted helping his son by destroying blood-stained clothing and bringing him something fresh to change into.
All six denied murder but were found guilty following a trial lasting several weeks.
Davison, from Harraby, and Graham, from Currock, were jailed for life with minimum terms of 30 years and 26 years respectively.
The judge, Mr Justice Hilliard, said Davison and Graham both knew that Mr McKnight was still alive and that they both chose to deliberately drown him.
He said: ‘I am sure that Davison and Graham put him in the river. They drowned him. Deliberately.
‘This was in my judgement murder for gain and a murder intended to obstruct the course of justice.’
Paul Roberts, from Carlisle, was jailed for life with a minimum term of 20-and-a-half years.
Coral and Carol Edgar, both from Carlisle, were handed life terms and ordered to serve at least 13-and-a-half and 13 years respectively.
Jamie Lee Roberts, also from Carlisle, was sentenced to detention at Her Majesty’s pleasure with a minimum term of 13-and-a-half years.
In a moving victim impact statement, Mr McKnight’s mother Wendy described how her family have been left ‘heartbroken’ by his death and haunted by the thought of what he went through in the ‘torture chamber’.
She said: ‘You don’t expect your son to be murdered and taken away so soon without even being given a chance to say goodbye.
‘We do try to go about our lives as normally as we can but underneath our hearts are broken. He was loved by so many and we were proud to call him our son.
‘This has pushed our family to the limit.’
Her statement continued: ‘It was hard to believe that Lee will never walk through our front door again and there will always be a spare seat at our table – we will miss his smiling face and infectious laugh.
‘Every family has lost a love one through different causes, but this is a lot different and we will miss Lee so much
‘No sentence will bring back our son but will give us peace that those responsible for playing a part in his death have been brought to justice.’
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