'He loved life, he had so much to live for'

Struggling to hold back tears, she said: "We cry every day for the loss of Ben, we do not sleep like we did before.

"Nearly a year on our nights are still filled with nightmares, of our son's last moments and what he went through that fatal night.

"We as a family will never get over the loss of our Ben, we are just trying to get through it. Our family now face a lifetime of feeling this way."

In an impact statement that she read out to the court, Deborah Kinsella said: "No amount of words could ever express the daily pain we feel for the loss of Ben, who went for a good night out and never came home again.

"Ben had only just finished school - a straight-A student. He had a job and a place in college but he never learnt of the wonderful exam results he had achieved and worked so very hard for.

"He loved life, he loved living, and he had so much to live for. He knew where he was going and where he wanted to be.

"He loved nothing more than to make people laugh, he was a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky boy with a heart of gold and would do anything for anyone.

"Ben loved art and wanted to be a graphic designer; he loved his family, cooking, football, music and girls."

In contrast, she said, the killers "knew nothing about our Ben, not a hair on his head, a bone in his body, not anything about our wonderful son.

They had never met him before or spoken to him, they just cruelly took his life away with knives for no apparent reason".

As she spoke the three murderers showed not a flicker of interest, let alone remorse, as they sat handcuffed in the dock surrounded by eight prison officers.

Mrs Kinsella went on: "We were a big, happy, loving family but now we are one down, one missing.

"We have had to move house because it broke our hearts to not see Ben in his bedroom, curled up sleeping and safe in his bed.

"We so miss Ben's love and laughter and most of all the boy thing in our family. Ben was our precious son that we cherished and were so immensely proud of. By the way we had brought him up he had values and respected everyone he met.

"We as a family will never know the man he would have become, the wife he would have met and the children he would have had. This has all now been taken away from us.

"No one should have to go through or see what we have seen with our son. He died in front of us. We then had to visit him in a morgue, the undertakers and finally to bury him.

"We can now only visit Ben at a cemetery, our beautiful son who so loved life."

Her husband George said: "How many families like ours will have to stand on the street outside the Old Bailey to get justice?

"Our son's only crime was to be the last one to run away from those animals."