Bristol UWE student who murdered housemate jailed for life

A student has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 28 years for murdering his university housemate after lying in wait and stabbing him 30 times.

Zack Coughlan, 23, ambushed Jamie Collins, 21, in the garden of their home near Bristol on 8 April and left him dying in the alleyway to dispose of bloodstained evidence. He called police eight hours later.

Coughlan had denied murder and a trial was under way at Bristol Crown Court but he changed his plea to guilty on Tuesday.

In a statement read in court, Collins’ step mother Lisa Jane Collins said his death had “affected our family in a deep, lasting and profound way. From now on, we will always be the couple whose boy got murdered”.

Both men were final-year University of the West of England (UWE) students and lived together in a house in Filton.

Collins only had two pieces of coursework to complete before he would have returned home to his family in Swansea, where his dad already had an engineering job set up for him.