THE horrifying details of how a young man was allegedly tortured and murdered has been laid bare to a jury through a "confession" from one of the accused.

Lee Nicholls revealed the gruesome details of how he and his friends allegedly murdered Jamie Dack when talking to police during a series of interviews.

Jamie’s body was discovered on Easter Sunday in a burning industrial bin. He was already dead, having been beaten and repeatedly stabbed.

Yesterday at Winchester Crown Court jurors listened as a recorded interview with 28-year-old Nicholls, in which he divulged the harrowing details of Jamie’s last hours, was played.

He described how he unleashed a vicious beating on the 22-year-old on the evening before Good Friday, using a baseball bat with which he hit him “again and again and again”.

Nicholls told police: “I just had a blackout and just lost it and kept on hitting him and hitting him and hitting him.”

Jurors heard him describe how they held Jamie inside a Southampton flat, bleeding and seriously wounded, before returning to deliver the fatal attack the following day.

Nicholls said it was either Andrew Dwyer-Skeats or Donna Chalk who sent him a text message saying: “You got to come now, we got to do it again, he’s on about going to the police.”

On Good Friday Nicholls returned to the property in Bevois Mews from the Southampton Street hostel where he was living and, despite Jamie promising he wouldn’t “grass them up”, he didn’t believe him and tied him up and gagged him with a sock.

The three and their co-accused Ryan Woodmansey, then all went into Southampton city centre and sold Jamie’s laptop so they had money to go to a rave in Bournemouth that night.

They all returned to the flat and Nicholls was furious at the idea that Jamie had flirted with his girlfriend, and stabbed him in the leg.

He told officers: “I knew as soon as I stabbed him that was it.... I knew I had to finish him off. ‘Took it in turns’ “We all took it in turns, we gave him a beating first of all with the baseball bat, all three of us.”

He then described how he, Woodmansey and Dwyer-Skeats all stabbed Jamie, before Nicholls delivered the final fatal blow to his neck.

“I stabbed him five times in the neck and then the sixth time I stabbed him was the one that killed him.”

Nicholls told the officers how he went and changed his bloodstained clothes before Dwyer-Skeats called out that Jamie was still alive because he had a faint pulse.

He said: “There was only a tiny, tiny faint pulse so I knew there was no point in calling an ambulance ’cause I knew by the time the ambulance got here he’d be dead, so I just left him. To die. We left him to die.”

Jurors looked visibly upset as Nicholls then described how he “trod on him” to ensure he was dead, before delivering several kicks and prodding him with a baseball bat “just to check”.

Jamie’s body was then wrapped in carpet and left in the flat while all but Nicholls went to the all-night rave.

On Saturday they regrouped at the one-bed flat and set about forcing Jamie’s body into a wheelie bin, breaking his bones to make him fit.

In the early hours of the following morning, armed with a can of petrol, all four set about wheeling him and a second bin filled with bloodstained clothing and materials, to Empress Road.

It was there they torched Jamie’s body, but panicked and forgot to set fire to the evidence from the flat, the court was told.

Chalk, 21, and Dwyer-Skeats, 26, from Bevois Mews, Nicholls from Southampton Street and Woodmansey of no fixed abode, all deny murder.

The three men admit perverting the course of justice by disposing of and setting fire to Jamie’s body. Chalk denies that charge.

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