A MAN accused of the brutal murder of seven-year-old Ryan Mason has a previous record for kidnapping a schoolboy, a court was told.

Ronald Mariner, who denies stabbing and battering Ryan to death with a hammer, kidnapped the boy on the same golf course where the youngster's body was found.

Mariner, aged 23, of Bowland Drive, Johnson Fold, stripped and assaulted the boy -- then aged 11 -- in a field adjoining the golf course.

A jury at Manchester Crown Court was told that the previous victim was walking to school across Great Lever and Farnworth Golf Course when Mariner, who was then 15, took him to the field and repeatedly punched and kicked him.

Alan Conrad QC told the jury it was an agreed fact that Mariner had banged the boy's head against a fence, scratched his head and back with a key and grabbed him round the neck and lifted him up in a head-lock.

"He also forcibly shoved his hand into his mouth to stop him calling out when a police car passed by, and forced him to strip naked on three occasions," added counsel.

The victim suffered multiple bruising to the eyes, head and neck. Mariner pleaded guilty to kidnapping and assault when he appeared at Preston Crown Court in May 1995 and was sentenced to a supervision order.

The murder trial jury also heard that Mariner had been playing a computer game involving a hammer and a knife -- weapons used in Ryan's murder -- just seconds before the killing.

Mariner admitted playing the game, called Silent Hill, at Ryan's home in Hawker Avenue, Great Lever, throughout the night when the boy was bludgeoned and stabbed repeatedly.

But Mariner told a jury at Manchester Crown Court he was not the murderer and branded Ryan's mother Lynn as the killer.

He told the court: "I am not telling a pack of lies and just picking on her to blame for the killing."

Mariner did admit that after the murder he wrapped Ryan in a bin bag and pushed him through the streets of Bolton before dumping the body in a swamp on a golf course.

He added: "I didn't phone the police because I didn't want to see Lynn go to jail, I loved her."

The jury has heard Mariner regularly stayed the night at the house and it is alleged he killed Ryan as his mother slept. But in evidence he claimed that on the night of the murder he and Ryan's mother had sex after she drank over four litres of cider.

He said he was playing the video game when Ryan jumped on his mother spilling her drink down her. "I was laughing and then I heard groaning and Ryan went down to the floor. I looked at Lynn and she was holding a knife." Mariner said he ran upstairs looking for a phone to call the police and an ambulance. The mobile phone he found did not work and when he returned downstairs Lynn was holding a hammer.

"She tried to hit me with it but I got it off her and threw her on the couch and paced the room for about 20 minutes deciding what to do."

He claimed he checked that Ryan was dead and put his body in the bin bag before leaving it in a kitchen cupboard because by then it was light outside.

The next night he went back to the house, put the body in the wheelie bin and took it to the golf course.

Quizzed by prosecution counsel, Alan Conrad QC, Mariner admitted that any child killer was "sick and deserved punishing". But he denied he was "telling a pack of lies" to cover up his own guilt.

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