The murder of Richard Petty for the sake of £80 has revealed a world a million miles from the one most people inhabit. Neil Hunter looks at lives destined to end in tragedy.

FOR heroin addicts Mark Pearson and Joe Tingle, it began as just another day - drinking heavily and taking a cocktail of drugs.

It was Saturday, March 24, and the friends had cracked open a case of Carling lager as they prepared to watch the Euro 2008 qualifier between England and Israel on the television.

Tingle drank 15 cans of lager, injected two bags of heroin and smoked a rock of crack cocaine during the evening as the football match was played in the background.

His lodger and fellow drug supplier Pearson was with him in the house Tingle shared with his partner, Lisa Foster, and her two daughters, aged nine and 11.

Richard Petty, meanwhile, was receiving an unexpected visit from his cousin, Craig, at a flat he had been lodging in for only a week since his release from prison.

Mr Petty had bumped into his relative two nights earlier when he travelled to the Grove Hill area of Middlesbrough to buy drugs, and asked him to pay him a visit sometime.

On the spur of the moment, Craig Petty decided to ride his bike to Billingham on the Saturday evening and arrived at his cousin's town centre flat to find him "merry" after drinking cider.

Within 24 hours, the muddled worlds of the heroin addict and the two dealers were to collide with brutal and fatal consequences as Mr Petty was knifed to death.

Mr Petty needed drugs and decided - along with his cousin, his best friend Debbie McKenna and her boyfriend, Brad Franks - to "tax" local street dealer Mark Fairweather.

Armed with a craft knife, Mr Petty went to Mr Fairweather's home and demanded heroin, but left with £80 after the dealer - who worked for Pearson and Tingle - claimed he had no drugs.

The four friends then travelled to Grove Hill and Mr Petty spent his recently-acquired money on six £10 rocks of crack cocaine and three bags of heroin before returning home.

They smoked a crack pipe and Mr Petty took two of the bags of heroin. Then Mr Franks complained he did not feel safe at the flat because there could be retribution for the earlier theft.

The group travelled to Mr Franks' nearby home and finished off the drugs before the Pettys returned to the flat, where they talked, watched television and fell asleep.

On the other side of town, Mr Fairweather was telling Pearson and Tingle what had happened to their money, but that night, they were too intoxicated to do anything about it.

The next morning, however, Pearson is thought to have been up early, drank half a litre of vodka and several cans of lager as he plotted revenge.

Tingle claims he was in bed until about 1.40pm, sleeping off the previous night's excesses, but was woken by his lodger and left for Mr Petty's flat within 20 minutes.

Throughout the trial and his police interviews, Tingle insisted he knew nothing about Pearson having the knife and the home-made scabbard it was in.

The blade was wrapped in cardboard and tape and hidden in sleeve of Pearson's sweatshirt as the pair walked from their home, in Denby Road, to Melsonby Court.

Once they had gained entry to the flats - after first being refused and then tricking their way in by claiming they were "Joe and Brad" - Mr Petty's life was in danger.

In a ferocious attack lasting no more than 90 seconds, Mr Petty was stabbed eight times and left to die in the lounge of the seventh-floor flat.

As Pearson launched the assault, Craig Petty and tenant Carl Vincent fled from the front room and past Tingle, who was standing near the doorway in the hall.

They told the concierge to call for an ambulance while Tingle - slowed down by a deep-vein thrombosis from injecting heroin - fled from the complex.

Security pictures from the tower block show that only four minutes elapsed between the killers entering and leaving.

A wild-eyed Pearson quickly caught up with his friend and began to frighten him by growling, and saying in a "mad" voice: "I've left him in a f***ing pool of blood."

Pearson threw the knife down a drain and tossed his blood-stained sweatshirt on top of a garage as the pair fled the scene. Both items were found several days later.

Pearson was arrested later that night, while Tingle handed himself in the next day after calling police from a friend's home in Stockton and saying: "This has nothing to do with me."

Pearson pleaded guilty to murder several months before the case reached trial, but Tingle denied throughout that he knew his lodger was armed when they went to confront Mr Petty.

Last month, however, the jury refused to believe his story and convicted him of murder under "joint enterprise" laws at the end of a seven-day trial at Teesside Crown Court.

During one of his many police interviews after his arrest, Tingle told officers: "I shouldn't have got out of bed."

Detective Inspector Andy Greenwood said: "I'm fairly sure that if they had been in a position to go and confront Mr Petty immediately after they were informed by Mark Fairweather of the taxing they would have done.

"But they had consumed a large amount of alcohol on the Saturday night together with their drugs, and during those early hours of the Sunday morning, I am sure that the plan was hatched for revenge.

"Tingle asserts that he was in bed until the afternoon and whether that is true or not, Pearson by his own account had consumed a half-litre of vodka and more drugs.

"Alcohol can affect people in different ways, but one thing it does to most is create Dutch courage and it may well be that Pearson had some sort of bravado that afternoon. Pearson was a man bent on hostility and violence. He inflicted the fatal injuries extremely quickly. Within four minutes, they were on their way from what I would say was a pre-planned mission."