A DEDICATED police murder inquiry team spent more than 900 hours trawling through CCTV images as they pieced together the last hours of Lee McKnight - and how his killers tried to cover their tracks.

During the Carlisle Crown Court trial, the jury were shown hours of footage which helped blow apart the lies of the six defendants.

Among the most poignant videos was the grainy footage of 26-year-old Lee as he walked out of the Tesco filling station in Warwick Road, Carlisle, on July 23, the day before he accepted Coral Edgar's invitation to visit her at Charles Street.

That fateful trip was caught on camera, the images showing Lee as he arrived at her home in the early hours, minutes before being attacked.

Detectives also painstakingly recreated Lee's last journey - the moments after he was bundled by his killers into Carol Edgar's distinctive black Nissan Navara pickup. In one image, a shadowy figure be seen in the rear.

Also in the Nissan was Lee, gravely injured and wrapped in a curtain to conceal him.

Mr Justice Hilliard ruled that it was Jamie Davison and Arron Graham who were in charge of that cruel trip to the River Caldew, south of Carlisle, where the two man - with breathtaking cruelty - put Lee face down into the water to die.

Yet more damning evidence (see the video above) was retrieved from the CCTV cameras monitoring the flat in Grey Street where Jamie Lee Roberts, 18, lived with his father Paul.

In the dead of night, Roberts junior and his pal Arron Graham were filmed leaving the teenager's home as they obeyed the summons from Davison to get to Charles Street, where the duo - recruited as "extra muscle" - subjected Lee McKnight to more than two hours of violence so horrific that Lee looked like a "torture victim".

Other images showed how badly injured Lee was while lying in the Nissan, bleeding so heavily the foam in the vehicle's seat was drenched.

The trial also heard hours of compelling evidence from phone data, much of revealing the movements of the murder gang.

On-street video surveillance has often criticised for being intrusive - but in such a huge and complex murder investigation it has proved to be an invaluable tool.

* For more about the huge police effort to catch the killers, reader our story on this by clicking here.