Drug user killed heroin dealer after staging robbery

A DRUG user killed a heroin dealer after staging a robbery at his home as he tried to get more drugs.

Donald Stone later told a witness in a phone conversation that he had robbed the victim but "only got one bag from him".

The High Court in Edinburgh heard that he also stated he "had tied him up and tortured him because he wouldn't give him more drugs or money".

The witness described Stone's tone as "verging on bragging and sounding proud of himself", advocate depute Gary Allan QC said.

Stone's victim Ian Thomson, 56, died in hospital four days after the attack in the West Lothian town of Fauldhouse on December 5 last year.

Mr Thomson, who was known as "Bones" and weighed less than eight stone at the time of death, suffered a punctured lung and broken ribs after the attack at his home in Ogilvy Crescent.

Mr Allan said: "It was the view of pathologists that the now deceased had been severely beaten and died as a consequence of having received blunt force trauma to the chest resulting in fatal pneumonia."

The victim suffered from a poor respiratory system prior to the fatal assault.

Stone, 24, of Scott Place, Fauldhouse, was originally charged with murdering Mr Thomson, but the Crown accepted his guilty plea to the reduced charge of culpable homicide.

He admitted repeatedly punching him, kicking and repeatedly stamping on the victim, binding his hands and tying him to a chair and robbing him of heroin and mobile phones.

Stone, who occasionally worked as a roughcaster, had abused cannabis, ecstasy and other drugs from the age of 15 and regularly took heroin from the age of 17.

Mr Allan said of the small community of Fauldhouse: "The town appears, on the basis of a number of reports, to suffer disproportionately high levels of drug abuse."

The prosecutor said the Crown's information was that Mr Thomson was "closely linked to the illegal drugs trade in West Lothian."

Mr Thomson was the target for several robberies during which he did not resist and came to be seen by many as "a fairly soft mark".

On the evening before the attack Stone and his girlfriend were seen on a bus looking "wasted" after visiting her mother in Livingston who was terminally ill with cancer.

The mother had been prescribed the anaesthetic drug Ketamine and wore morphine patches to relieve her pain.

During the bus journey Stone was seen with a bottle containing a liquid which he told a witness was Ketamine.

He and his girlfriend also displayed their "new tattoos" which turned out to be used morphine patches prescribed to the dying woman.

A man who called at Mr Thomson's the following day heard him cry out for help. He went into the flat and found him lying seriously injured and in pain on his bed.

A woman met Stone and his girlfriend the following day when they were described as "out of their heads" on drugs.

Stone admitted "he'd done in Bones last night to get drugs but he wouldn't give him any," said Mr Allan.

Temporary judge John Beckett QC deferred sentence on Stone for the preparation of a background report and risk assessment.

He remanded him in custody and told him prison was inevitable in a case of this kind.