A debt-ridden robber from Birmingham who stabbed a taxi driver through the skull in a frenzied knife attack has been jailed for at least 30 years after being found guilty of murder.
Jurors at Worcester Crown Court took about four hours to unanimously convict Andrew Bayliss after hearing that he compiled a journal confessing that he was "swimming in guilt" in the months after killing Mohammed Arshad in a Worcestershire road next to the Birmingham City training ground near Hopwood.
Bayliss, of Ratcliffe Avenue, Kings Norton, had denied murder, claiming that a childhood friend he met in a park was responsible for the killing.
But CCTV images and forensic evidence presented to the court, which included bloody palm-prints found on the victim's vehicle, proved that Bayliss had carried out the stabbing.
The warehouse worker's journal - in which he even wrote that he deserved to be caught - was found under his mattress when he was arrested in November 2009 following an appeal on the BBC's Crimewatch programme.
Mr Arshad, a father of three whose wife was expecting their fourth child, died in hospital a day after suffering 14 separate knife wounds on July 22, 2009.
Jailing Bayliss for life and ordering him to serve at least 30 years before being considered for parole, Judge Alistair McCreath said the killing had devastated the victim's family.
The judge told the defendant: "In July of 2009 you were in desperate financial trouble - you were in substantial debt, living beyond your means in part because of your drug abuse and in part because of other extravagances in your life.
"You and, I am satisfied, you alone hit on a plan to relieve the financial pressure on you by robbing a taxi driver."
Judge McCreath, the Recorder of Worcester, said the "terrible incident" had culminated in Bayliss stabbing Mr Arshad repeatedly, inflicting six injuries to his head alone.
"This was an attack of considerable intensity, brutal and savage," the judge told Bayliss. "Your intent as you carried it out cannot have been less than to kill."
Mr Arshad, 36, from Birmingham, was left to die in a ditch beside Wast Hills Lane, near Hopwood, as Bayliss sped away in his taxi.
In his self-incriminating journal, apparently written for friends to read after his arrest, father-of-one Bayliss did not mention the man he later blamed for the killing.
In the notebook, Bayliss wrote that he "could not imagine being jailed until I am an old man" and that he "would rather die than spend life in prison".
Other excerpts from the notebook, described by the prosecution as the intense, personal, agonised thoughts of a man wracked with guilt, read: "I know I deserve to be caught but instincts are telling me to run and I am in so deep.
"I have wasted my life and destroyed others. I don't deserve anyone to be at my funeral."
The two-week murder trial also heard that Bayliss was picked up by Mr Arshad from near the gates of Broadmeadow School in Kings Norton on the evening of July 22.