Bradley Wall murder: Jury sent out to consider verdicts after defendants blame each other for Leeds man's death

Drug addicts Aiden Ramsdale and Patrick Mason are charged with killing the 25-year-old outside a flat on Fairford Avenue in Beeston.

Mr Wall plunged the second-storey window of Ramsdale’s flat in the early hours of June 23 last year, and was then subject to a sustained assault where he lay. He suffered more than 100 injuries.

Paving slabs were dropped on his body and attempts made to set him on fire.

CCTV from the area, pieced together by police, found that Mr Wall had met the pair, whom he did not know, and had gone back to the flat, possibly to buy drugs.

Cameras at a school opposite the flat later caught Mr Wall falling from the window, and then Ramsdale and Mason in the front-yard area.

During the trial at Leeds Crown Court, which started in November, it was heard that both 25-year-old Ramsdale and 32-year-old Mason blamed each other for the killing, saying they each went along with the other.

In a closing speech from the Crown, barrister Kitty Colley told the jury: “The killing of Bradley Wall is a result of teamwork from start to finish, a joint enterprise.

"They were together throughout, and acted together. We invite you to conclude that lies and dishonesty are the foundation in this case. All they can do is blame each other.

“They were total strangers to him, and it is the prosecution’s case that in their desperation, they would rob and kill him."

Ramsdale claims that they got into a fight with Mr Wall because he had child abuse images on his phone, which the prosecution say this is a “total lie” in order for him to justify the murder.

Ramsdale was also caught on an audio recording apparently confessing to his father, describing it like an “ISIS-type killing” with paving slabs.

Summing up, defence barrister for Ramsdale, Christopher Tehrani KC told the jury: “Experience has shown over the years that in high-profile cases where people have made confessions, they can sometimes be unreliable and false. We say the confessions Aiden Ramsdale made are unreliable. We can’t be sure that they are 100 per cent accurate.”

For Patrick Mason, barrister Nicholas De La Poer KC admitted his client was a “disgusting and selfish human being” who was “prepared to engage in all manner of dishonest crime” to fund his drug habit, but said there was a line that “he would not cross”, and would not engage in violence.

Referring to the prosecution’s insistence that both he and Ramsdale were “a team”, Mr De La Poer pointed to footage of a fight outside a nearby all-night petrol station involving Ramsdale and staff not long after Mr Wall’s death, in which Mason did not get involved. He said: “They did not act as a team for the evidence that we have seen.”

He later said the prosecution were “trying to bang a square peg into a round hole”, trying to fit the evidence to implicate Mason.

Judge Rodney Jameson KC sent the jury out at around 11.20am this morning to begin deliberating.