Remorseless killer who dragged Amazon driver to his death in Leeds to spend 30 years behind bars

Callous Mark Ross murdered Claudiu-Carol Kondor by purposely smashing the side of the van into a parked car at high speed while Mr Kondor was clinging to the outside of the Ford Transit.

Ross, 32, maintains he did not know Mr Kondor was hanging on and screaming for him to stop.

But following a six-day trial at Leeds Crown Court, the jury found Ross guilty of murder.

During his sentencing hearing this morning, he was told by the judge, Mr Justice James Goss, that he will be on licence for the rest of his life, but will only be eligible for parole after serving 30 years.

He said it was “murder for gain” and that Ross, who had “chosen a criminal lifestyle”, would have to live with what he had done. He rejected there was true remorse from Ross.

He told him: “I can’t be sure you intended to kill Mr Kondor, your actions must have terrified him in the last moments of his life.

“You callously murdered him. No court can undo the harm you have caused.”

Cannabis addict Ross said that he was in around £4,000 of debt with dealers when he stole the van on the evening of August 20 last year.

He had seen the Amazon delivery van parked up on Alliance Street, Armley, with the door open, the keys in the ignition and the engine running.

In an opportunist move, he jumped into the driver’s seat and started making off.

Mr Kondor, a 42-year-old Romanian who was lived in Sheffield, had delivered a parcel and when he noticed Ross in the driver’s seat, tried to open the passenger-side door to stop him.

Sickening CCTV footage was played to the court that showed Mr Kondor, who was wearing a high-vis vest, clinging to the open passenger-side door as Ross hit 60mph in a 20mph zone.

He was dragged for more than 500 metres with his feet scraping along the road. Ross was seen to swerve the van from side to side to force Mr Kondor into letting go.

Eventually he scraped the van along the side of the parked car on Heights Drive in Wortley, ripping Mr Kondor from the van and leaving him stricken on the pavement.

He was pronounced dead a short time later having suffered catastrophic head and chest injuries. He suffered a fractured skull, a bleed to the brain and a cut through the heart’s aorta. He died “within seconds”.

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Ross, of Conference Road, Armley, later claimed speed bumps in the road had caused him to swerve, along with parcels that had fallen into the driver’s side footwell.

But the Crown said Ross purposely drove erratically to “get rid of his unwanted passenger”.

Prosecutor John Harrison KC told the jury during the trial that it “must have been obvious” that Mr Kondor was there.

Ross continued and later parked up the vehicle where he and his friends unloaded the parcels from the van so they could sell them for drugs.

A tracker on the van led police to where it was left abandoned and then to Ross who was arrested in his flat.

Ross admitted a charge of theft from April of last year in which items were stolen from a lorry parked up at Warwick Services on the M40 in the Midlands.