HE was handed a 35-year jail sentence and still showed no remorse.

Callous gangland killer Thomas Haigh, of Denby Dale, was today behind bars – and will still be there when he reaches the age 61.

The former cage fighter was sent to jail with a judge condemning his brutal actions in gunning down two men in Cornwall.

Drugs mule Haigh, 26, a former Shelley High School student, must serve a minimum of 35 years for blasting David Griffiths and Brett Flournoy to death on a remote Cornish farm because they were demanding he go to Brazil for a second time and bring back cocaine.

Ross Stone, 28, who was cleared of the men’s murders, will serve five years after admitting burning the men’s bodies before burying them in their van after the shooting at his Sunny Corner Farm home in Trenance Downs, near St Austell.

The bodies of Flournoy, a 31-year-old boxer and pub landlord with two children, from Bebington on the Wirral in Merseyside, and father-of-three Griffiths, 35, from Bracknell, Berkshire, were unearthed after Stone confessed to having disposed of their corpses.

Both he and Haigh owed the dead men around £40,000 in drug debts.

Passing sentence at Truro Crown Court, Mr Justice Mackay told Haigh, of Wakefield Road, he was an “arrogant young man” who had got out of his depth in the criminal underworld.

“These were bad men but they were bad men with the right not to be killed because trading in drugs does not carry the death penalty,” he said.

“You were attracted to the gangster way of life, you convinced yourself you were a big boy playing in the big league.

“But I found your erratic behaviour made you unsuited to this elusive trade.

“This was no more than a result of your chosen lifestyle. You knew the rules of the criminal club you joined and you broke them.”

Haigh and Stone’s four-week trial heard that the victims were gangland enforcers working for an IRA gang which “ran” Liverpool’s illegal drugs trade.

The jury took less than three hours to find Haigh guilty of two counts of murder.

Stone had previously pleaded guilty to two charges of obstructing a coroner.

Haigh, who served nine months in a young offenders' institution in 2005 and 2006 for dealing in heroin and crack cocaine, was on the run at the time of the shooting on June 16 last year.

While living in Workington, he had skipped a court appearance in Carlisle, Cumbria, the previous March for possession of an air gun because he was in Brazil smuggling cocaine back to the UK.

He showed no emotion as the judge said the pressure he was under from Griffiths and his “role model” Flournoy was “no mitigation” for the crimes he had committed.

“You shot these men dead, acting alone and not in concert with Stone,” Mr Justice Mackay said.

“You left him to cover up the carnage you left behind you. Why you did this is to my mind perfectly clear. How you went about it is less clear.

“But you aimed and fired the shots that killed these two men.”

The trial heard that after Haigh killed the two men he fled to Yorkshire before eventually handing himself in to police in Huddersfield.

Speaking outside court, David Griffith’s mother Janet fought back tears as she spoke of the torment her family had been put through, saying the decision to acquit Stone was “hard for us to accept”.

“Our family has been devastated by the loss of our beloved David and the horrific way in which he was murdered,” she said.

“As a family we never imagined we would be standing here today and David would be gone. It really has been a living hell.

“We have had to accept the horrific way in which David was taken from us, but also had to endure six weeks of worrying and looking for David. To find out that he was then murdered, burned and buried was truly too much to comprehend.”

Jane Flournoy, Brett’s sister-in-law, made a statement on behalf of the family of the former British Army soldier, who served with the Royal Engineers for six years. His fiancee Kelly, a staff nurse, gave birth to his third son after he died.

“Much of what has been said about Brett throughout the course of this trial has been unsubstantiated and alleged by two people who have now been convicted of horrific crimes,” she said.

“We have been left totally devastated by Brett’s death. He was a loving son, fiance, father and brother. His death has left a huge gap in the lives of all our family.”

The court was told Haigh was also being pressured into doing a drugs run to Brazil and feared going abroad because a friend was in a South American prison after being caught on a recent trip.

Stone told the trial that Haigh talked about killing the two men in the days before they died.

He claimed the men arrived at the farm and he had been beaten up by Griffiths. But he said he fled when Flournoy produced a gun and did not know how the men had been killed.

The court was told that when interviewed by police he said the men worked for the IRA. He also boasted that he “knew how to get rid of bodies properly” and would not “leave it to a thick farmer (Stone) to tidy up”.