JURORS hearing the case of how a vulnerable young man was tortured, beaten and stabbed to death before his body was burnt in a bin have retired to deliberate their verdicts.

For the past nine and a half weeks they have been hearing evidence in the case against three friends accused of the brutal killing of Jamie Dack on Easter weekend last year.

Now, after almost a week of summing up by the Judge, Mr Justice Walker, the jury have been asked to leave the courtroom in Winchester to consider their verdicts.

Big Issue seller Ryan Woodmansey, Andrew Dwyer-Skeats and his then girlfriend Donna Chalk are all said to have played a part in the murder of 22-year-old Jamie whose body was found in the early hours of Sunday April 8 last year.

Firefighters made the gruesome discovery after being called to an industrial bin blaze in Empress Road and found his badly burnt body inside a wheelie bin.

The trio, who were all living in a squat in Bevois Mews, Southampton, at the time, were arrested later that day.

A fourth man, Lee Nicholls, was also arrested. At an earlier trial he changed his plea to guilty of murder during he course of his own evidence and the 29-year-old is now on remand awaiting sentence.

The court has heard how Jamie was attacked with a baseball bat, bottles and knives after being held in the Southampton one bedroom flat for 24 hours allegedly by the gang of four who had stolen his laptop, beaten his PIN number out of him and punished him for false claims of sexual misconduct.

Chalk, 22, Dwyer-Skeats, 27, both of Bevois Mews, and Woodmansey, 32, of no fixed address, deny murder. They have all admitted perverting the course of justice.