A couple, who murdered a man they later chopped up and fed through a domestic mincer before dumping his remains in a skip, were yesterday jailed for life.

Steven Parton (40), and Karen Morris (23), will serve at least 18 and 15 years respectively before they are considered for parole following what a judge called the "obscene" killing of Nelvaughn Brade.

Mr Justice Curtis, sitting at Birmingham Crown Court, told the pair nothing could justify what they had done to the 22-year-old, who died at the house he shared with Parton in College Road, Perry Barr, and whose remains were discovered a week later on a landfill site in Norfolk.

The High Court judge said: "The killing itself was savage and callous. He may have been no particular angel but nothing he did could possibly have justified what you did to him."

Mr Brade was shot at with a crossbow while he showered at the bungalow in the early hours of November 5 last year.

The bolt missed the lodger's neck and he tried to escape but was eventually floored by his housemate, a former male stripper, who rained blows on his head with an axe.

Morris, of Kitchener Road, Selly Park, also Birmingham, is thought to have dealt the fatal blow, stabbing Mr Brade in the neck.

Over the next few days, the couple dismembered his body, cutting the victim's flesh into "steak size pieces" before putting it through a mincer.

Police who later searched the house found heavilysoaked patches of blood throughout the property.

At one point, the pair were forced to attend accident and emergency at Birmingham's City Hospital after Parton suffered deep cuts to both hands.

He told staff treating him he had cut himself " separating sausages".

Mr Brade's remains were packed into two 25 gallon plastic oil drums which the couple drove more than 100 miles to throw on a skip at a building site, which was later dumped on a landfill site near King's Lynn.

Less than a week later, on November 11, the pair - who had attempted to commit suicide the day before - handed themselves in at nearby Hunstanton police station.

Various reasons were advanced in court as possible motives for the murder. Miss Macur said Mr Brade had been distributing cannabis Parton was growing and that the former stripper had become concerned his housemate was going to steal his 3,500-strong crop of plants.

Morris told psychiatrists who assessed her following her arrest that she had been taking cocaine on an hourly basis in the days leading up to the murder.

But a jury of six men and six women rejected her claim of manslaughter due to diminished responsibility and defence suggestions she had been in a psychosis at the time of the attack. It took the panel just one hour to convict her of murder.