A man who murdered his friend after stabbing him 200 times during a drunken row was yesterday given a 12-year sentence without parole.
Hugh Wesley Vance (28), Church Gate Studios, Comber, Co Down, was told by a judge that he would “serve the sentence in full without remission”.
Vance had pleaded guilty to murdering his friend Kyle Neil (23) in his apartment on April 12th, 2015, after he claimed a fight broke out after he had asked Mr Neil to leave but he had refused.
He claimed that Mr Neil came at him with a knife and he acted in self-defence, telling police it was a “frenzied and repeated attack. I lost power when he was going to try and kill me. It was either his life or my life.”
Conditional discharge
Co-accused Stephanie Todd (26), Russell Court,
Belfast
, was given a 12-month conditional discharge for obstructing police investigating Mr Neil’s murder.
The mother of one was also banned from driving for three months for driving Vance’s car with Mr Neil’s body in the boot with excess alcohol. A charge against her of assisting an offender was left on the books in the usual terms.
Postmortem
Mr Neil’s body was found in the boot of Vance’s Ford Fiesta car after Todd drove it to her mother’s house at Windsor Avenue in south Belfast.
The judge said Todd had “played no role or had any responsibility” for the death of Mr Neil.
A postmortem examination said Mr Neil sustained 200 knife wounds and the fatal wound was to an artery in the neck.
Passing sentence yesterday at Downpatrick Crown Court, sitting in Belfast, Mr Justice Colton said he was giving "significant and substantial credit" to Vance for his guilty plea which had "spared Mr Neil's family of having to come to court to listen to the harrowing evidence in this case".