A MURDER sparked off by a stolen kiss has led to an East Lancashire man being jailed for life.

Steven Sheppard, 47, protested when he saw his on-off partner Donna Harrison in a clinch with Wayne Mackie during a drinking session in Colne.

Just a short time later Mr Sheppard was lying dead with more than 34 separate injuries, after being bludgeoned with a candlestick and stamped on with heavy work boots by Mackie.

The killer later claimed he had no memory of the incident, at a terraced house in Portland Street, Colne, last October.

But yesterday a jury at Preston Crown Court found him guilty of murder.

As trial judge Mr Justice Butterfield sentenced him to life in prison he told Mackie he had been convicted on ‘overwhelming evidence’.

He said: “This was a savage and sustained attack upon a man who was helpless in drink.

"In my judgment, it was not a pre-meditated attack, but it was certainly an attack carried out with such ferocity that the only intention which can properly be drawn from what you did at the time was that you intended to kill him.”

Mackie, 40, who accepted he had been in a fight with Mr Sheppard, but could not recall details of the violence, will serve at least 15 years.

Miss Harrison, of Beech Street, Padiham, was cleared of murder and an alternative charge of manslaughter and was discharged from the dock.

Prosecutors had alleged that the 35-year-old woman had encouraged the attack on the victim and labelled him a ‘paedophile’.

She denied making the accusation and later telling two teenagers she had ‘murdered someone’. Mr Sheppard, from Winewall, Trawden, has no convictions for paedophilia.

Mackie battered Mr Sheppard with a brass candlestick with such force that it was left bent at a 45-degree angle. Blood from the victim was also spattered over his work boots.

Dennis Watson QC, prosecuting, said the violence erupted during a drinking session at the home of Mackie and his partner Andrea Richardson.

The two couples had been drinking steadily through the day but Miss Richardson went to bed.

Mackie confessed to kissing Miss Harrison and said Mr Sheppard had ‘gone for him’.

Mackie later woke up Miss Richardson and said he had killed him. She went downstairs and saw Mr Sheppard’s lifeless body, covered in blood.

He had seven rib fractures, a collapsed lung and external injuries to his head and neck.

After the verdicts were returned, Peter Wright QC, for Mackie, said there had been an intention to cause really serious harm, rather than to kill. He also submitted there was a lack of pre-meditation.

"It is a matter which erupted very quickly,” said Mr Wright.