A man has been jailed for life for murdering an Army veteran by punching him repeatedly in the head in a drink and drug-fuelled rage.
Gregory Twigg, 32, landed three ‘powerful and cowardly’ punches on British Army veteran Lee Woodward, 39, outside a pub in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, in June 2022.
Mr Woodward, who had retired from the forces on medical grounds, was left severely brain-damaged and died in hospital ten months later.
Twigg was already serving an eight-year and three-month prison sentence after pleading guilty in September 2022 to grievous bodily harm over the attack while Mr Woodward was still alive.
At the murder trial jurors were told Mr Woodward left The Liquor Vaults, where he’d been with his fiancée, and was involved in a confrontation with the occupants of a passing car.
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Twigg, who was in the car, told the court Mr Woodward swore at him and threatened him and his friends as they went on their way to a night out.
The 32-year-old admitted he had taken cocaine and had drunk vodka and sambuca.
After the driver, Nathan Lockley, pulled over, Twigg got out of the back seat of the vehicle and attacked Mr Woodward.
Prosecution counsel David Mason KC said Twigg was ‘fired up on drink and coke and raging’ when he attacked Mr Woodward, who posed no threat to the defendant.
CCTV from a nearby pub showed Twigg knocking Mr Woodward, who was over six feet tall, to the ground.
He began to get up with difficulty, looking like a ‘dazed boxer’, the court heard.
Twigg’s second punch knocked him into a parked car, while the third left him unconscious in the road.
The murderer then fled the scene with his friends and was arrested less than an hour later in Newcastle-under-Lyme.
The trial was told Mr Woodward suffered a severe brain injury and would have required full-time care in a nursing home for the rest of his life, but he died after contracting peritonitis and pneumonia in hospital.
Twigg had told the jury he never intended to cause Mr Woodward serious harm and had only wanted to give him a black eye so that he would leave him and his friends alone.
He said he punched him twice more because he feared Mr Woodward was going to hit him back, and he was ‘devastated’ that his actions had resulted in his death.
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