'Temper tantrum' of body parts suspect

Tristian Lovelock and the defendant used to "play fight", the court heard

A man accused of chopping up his friend and roasting his arm in an oven struggled to control his temper at work, a court has heard.

Josette White told Winchester Crown Court how her former work colleague Richard Markham once flew into a rage at a trade fair in Birmingham.

Mr Markham, 28, from Basingstoke, Hampshire, denies murdering drinking partner Tristian Lovelock, 25, last May.

Ms White, who worked with the defendant at Theodore Alexander London Ltd, a furniture dealers in Basingstoke, told the court he had confided in her about his unhappy childhood and time at military school.

A trail of blood led detectives to Richard Markham's house

She said: "We talked about anger and he told me he had previously had problems about controlling his anger.

"Both of us had unhappy childhoods, he said he felt uncomfortable with his childhood.

"I understood he had been sent to a military type school where he felt he didn't fit in very well."

Earlier the jury heard that Mr Markham rained 12 hammer blows on his friend's head and body after a night of drinking and smoking cannabis at his home in St Nicholas Court, South Ham.

Severed head

He then allegedly hacked him into pieces with saws and a knife, before dumping his severed head, legs and one arm in a nearby park and gardens.

He put his victim's other arm in a roasting tin and cooked it in the oven and then fled to New York after leaving messages on friends' answering machines boasting of the killing.

A trail of blood led police to his home, where officers found Mr Lovelock's torso cut in two with a bayonet sticking out of his back in the sitting room.

When arrested by United States police, Mr Markham told them in a statement that he hit out with a hammer because Mr Lovelock had started waving a bayonet in his face.

Mutual friends

On the third day of the trial the court also heard from a succession of the men's mutual friends, part of a group that drank at the King of Wessex pub in Basingstoke.

One friend, Chris Gordon, said the group often got drunk and then went back to Mr Markham's home where horseplay, punching and wrestling took place.

He said that a hammer had been used to playfully hit members of the group and he had also seen other members brandish a samurai sword and a bayonet.

Another witness, Mark Beard, when asked by the judge Mr Justice Michael Morland, agreed that a bayonet and a sword had often been bashed together and this was a "sort of play fencing".

The court also heard that Mr Lovelock, a carpenter, head butted a man outside a bar in Basingstoke on 19 April last year and sometime in early May last year was arrested outside the King of Wessex pub.