A HEROIN addict has spoken of the moment he used a heavy wooden lamp stand to beat two men to death as they slept in his flat.

In dramatic scenes at Leeds Crown Court John Paul Marshall, 43, described how he "snapped" and attacked his two drug-dealing friends in his Gillygate home.

The unemployed council tenant said he had been driven to the edge by lack of sleep, heroin withdrawal and intimidation by the pair, who had outstayed their welcome after he invited them in three days earlier.

He said that he woke up on December 1 to find that Kevin Mulgrew, 38, was asleep on his sofa with a tube used to inhale heroin smoke still sticking out of his mouth. He grabbed the lamp stand and cut off its cord with a pair of scissors.

He said: "I hit Mulgrew over the head, three or four times, hard. I wanted to knock him out. He slumped to his side and I hit him again. Then I hit Wall with the lamp base over the head, too."

Mr Mulgrew and Daniel Wall, 27, both died from massive head injuries.

Marshall has denied murder, but has admitted killing them on the grounds that he was provoked.

As reported in later editions of yesterday's Evening Press, Marshall then fled to Amsterdam, but was arrested by Dutch police officers in a hostel in the city and extradited back to the UK. The jury was told how Marshall told the arresting officers that he had killed the two men, but said they had threatened him and had "asked for it".

Speaking in his own defence, Marshall said that after the attack he held a plastic bag over the faces of both men to make sure they were dead. He then covered their bodies and tidied his flat.

He claimed he was bullied by the two, who moved in after their previous home was raided by the police and boarded up.

He said that after a few days, when he suggested that the two men move on, they threatened to take his cannabis supply and his money and told him that they knew where his two sisters lived.

During their stay, they gave him a small amount of drugs, but he said it was not enough to sustain his £30-a-day habit.

He said: "There was the two of them. They were bigger than I was. I was not assertive enough. It struck me that they would like to have the flat permanently."

Speaking about the night before their deaths, he said: "I was very angry when I went to bed. They had refused to leave and they had threatened me. They would not give me what I thought was a reasonable amount (of heroin) to stay there.

"I was suffering cramps and diarrhoea, cold sweats, shivering, my legs and joints were aching. I had not slept very well. They were couched out on the settee and the chair. They had smoked themselves into a drug-induced stupor.

"Mulgrew had a tube in his mouth...he was slouched forward with foil in his lap. Wall was in the armchair. The flat was untidy. There was litter, there were plates and cups and mugs left around. I could not stand it any longer."

The case continues

Updated: 10:04 Tuesday, December 21, 2004