Brave Joe Geeling battled cystic fibrosis throughout his short life and became known as a little angel who touched the lives of all he met.

Michael Hamer, 15, was a loner and an isolated youngster who had been bullied at school.

Tragedy struck when Hamer developed an obsession with the 11-year-old schoolboy and hatched a cold-blooded plot to murder him.

Hamer, who was 14 at the time of the killing, was jailed for life yesterday after pleading guilty to murder and was told he must serve at least 12 years in prison.

Hamer smashed Joe around the head ten times with a frying pan then stabbed him 16 times in a "frenzied" attack after the youngster had spurned his sexual advance.

He lured Joe back to his home from their school on March 1 after killing him, he hauled the lad's body into a bin. He wheeled it to a nearby park and dumped it in a tree-lined gully where it was discovered the next day.

Hamer pleaded guilty to murder before the scheduled start of his trial at Manchester Crown Court. Hamer will spend his sentence in local authority accommodation receiving psychiatric treatment.

After giving police and psychologists different explanations for the attack, the court heard how Hamer had admitted making a "sexual approach" before he killed Joe. Passing sentence, Mr Justice McCombe said Joe had responded by calling him "gay"

and threatening to tell others what happened.

"Joe, as you accept, had done absolutely nothing to encourage such an advance," he said.

"The rejection of the advance was the immediate triggering event of what you did to Joe."

The attack on him started with ten blows to the head with a frying pan and continued with a barrage of stabbing blows with three kitchen knives.

The court heard one stab wound punctured his windpipe in two places, cut a major artery and reached his spine.

After Joe died, Hamer dragged him downstairs and through the kitchen before taking the wheelie bin to Whitehead Park, in Bury, Greater Manchester, less than a mile away, and hiding it under leaves, Joe's parents, Tom and Gwen, sat with quiet dignity with more than 20 friends and family in the public gallery, sometimes staring at their son's killer, sometimes shedding tears.

In a statement read to the court, they described their "grief and bitterness" over Joe's death.

"My wife and I privately weep all the time," he said.

"We weep about what we could, would and should be doing with Joe now."