The liar who killed his friend and then tried to con a murder trial jury into setting him free has been jailed for ten years.

A High Court judge added three years for perjury to the seven years that Jason Nicholas Wade, 29, is already serving for the manslaughter of York father Wayne Nicholson.

A jury at Leeds Crown Court convicted Wade unanimously of three charges of perjury committed at his murder trial in March 1999.

Then, Wade had claimed under oath he had killed Mr Nicholson while trying to defend himself.

But within days of his acquittal for murder, he wrote "murder confessions" in which he described how he struck the first blow and stabbed his victim twice in the chest on the ground, the jury in the perjury trial heard.

"If you had given the evidence contained in your letters to the murder trial jury, and that is the evidence which this jury has found to be true, then it is possible that the jury in the murder trial may have taken a different view," Mr Justice Harrison told Wade.

The murder trial jury convicted Wade of manslaughter on the grounds of provocation, the judge continued.

"I take into account the fact your perjured evidence wasn't accepted by the jury, as they plainly rejected your account of self-defence."

The murder trial jury may still have decided on the manslaughter verdict had they known the "true evidence", the judge added.

The jury in both trials heard details about incidents in which Mr Nicholson had been violent towards Wade and that the victim had taken a knife to Wade's home, fearing he was "being set up". The pair were partners in drug dealing.

Paul Worsley QC, who was Wade's barrister in both trials, told the judge Wade had used "frustration and violence" towards other people and objects in prison since his arrest for murder.

"He has to serve quite a number of additional months in respect of his behaviour and he deserves to", said Mr Worsley.

Earlier in his closing speech, he had called the letters Wade wrote to his girlfriend and an inmate in another prison "murder confessions" that were not true but written to persuade others he was a very nasty person.

Wade showed no reaction as the jury in Courtroom One returned their guilty verdicts after two hours and 20 minutes at the end of the one and a half day perjury trial.

After his lies in the same courtroom 19 months earlier, he had had to wait five hours and 12 minutes before the jury returned their 10 to two majority verdict.

In Wade's letters read to the court, the jury heard how he had arranged for Mr Nicholson to come to his then home in Welborn Close, Tang Hall, the evening he died and sent away a third man who arrived with his victim.

"I got away with murder", he wrote in one letter, and in another he referred to the "life sentence I should have got".