A teenage car thief has been jailed for 20 years for the manslaughter of Wirral policeman Dave Phillips by mowing him down in a stolen pick-up truck while being chased by other officers.

Clayton Williams, 19, killed PC Phillips just three weeks after coming out of jail on licence for crashing another stolen car in a police pursuit.

Wirral Globe: CCTV image issued by Merseyside Police of the chase featuring a stolen Mitsubishi L200 driven by Clayton Williams

CCTV footage taken as police pursued the stolen truck

He drove at the 34-year-old officer at around 50mph in the three-ton Mitsubishi L200 truck in what the prosecution alleged was a "cowardly and merciless act".

But jurors at Manchester Crown Court cleared him of murder and convicted him of the alternative count of manslaughter, after finding that he did not intend to kill or seriously injure the officer.

In an unusual move, the officer's widow, Jen Phillips, took the opportunity to address the court herself and to deliver her heart-rending victim impact statement from the witness box.

Wirral Globe: Jen Phillips put together a photography tribute to her late husband PC Dave Phillips (Merseyside Police/PA)

Jen Phillips with her husband

The 29-year-old, who wiped away tears, addressed Williams directly in the dock, saying: "I have wrote (sic) this because of what you have done to me and my children."

She then delivered a highly-charged address to the court, telling of her utter devastation at her husband's death.

As she spoke, jurors wept and Williams himself, head bowed, began to wipe away tears.

PC Phillips, a father of two, was thrown into the air and died almost instantly from "catastrophic" injuries in the incident in Wallasey Dock Link Road, Merseyside, in the early hours of October 5 last year.

Cannabis-addict Williams, who said he had been using the drug since the age of six, admitted his dangerous driving caused Pc Phillips' death, but maintained he did not intend to injure anyone and only wanted to evade capture and not go back to jail.

Wirral Globe: Clayton Williams has been jailed for 20 years for the manslaughter of a policeman (Merseyside Police/PA)

Clayton Williams will begin his sentence in a Young Offenders' Institution because of his age

The officer had been crouched on the kerbside deploying a tyre-puncturing stinger device to end the 80mph chase when Williams mounted the central reservation and drove at him.

Williams told the jury of nine women and three men that he was trying to drive around the stinger spikes and did not see PC Phillips until the second before impact. He narrowly missed PC Phillips' colleague, PC Thomas Birkett, 23, and was earlier cleared by the jury of a charge of attempted grievous bodily harm with intent against that officer.

Mrs Phillips said she still has dreams that her husband is alive until she wakes and looks at the empty side of their bed.

"Even now I close my eyes and pray this is all a horrible nightmare. I'm living my worst nightmare."

She said that, on the night her husband died, she had held his hand, "begging" him to live, as doctors fought for 40 minutes to resuscitate him - while Williams was at the time covering his tracks.

"It is indescribable the loneliness and emptiness. Whenever I needed someone to lean on he was there to catch me and support me."

She described watching the last moments of her husband's life played out on video during the trial as "extremely horrific and harrowing".

"Who gave him the right to play God?" she asked of Williams.

Mrs Phillips, who had to stop a number of times to compose herself, described her husband as the "good guy" who "did not stand a chance - he was just doing his job".

"I and the children are the ones living a life sentence. He not only killed my husband, he's killed something inside me too.

"If hell was real, I'm certainly living in it."

Jailing the defendant, who had 33 previous offences to his name, for 20 years, Mr Justice William Davis, said the crime was aggravated by the fact that he was already on licence at the time for crashing a stolen car.

He added: "I'm prepared to accept now, particularly after what we have heard, you must have some understanding of the devastation you have caused, but on the other hand I can entirely understand those whose statements have been read out that any remorse at the time was false, because at the time this poor policeman died you were covering your tracks. That's not remorse."

Stuart, 30, of Prenton, the passenger in the truck with Williams, had admitted burglary and aggravated vehicle-taking, by being allowed to be carried in the Mitsubishi.

He had 32 separate convictions for 57 different offences, and was serving a community order at the time of the fatal incident.

When his flat was searched, property from another burglary which took place on the same night was also found.

Stuart was jailed for six years.

Three other people, who burned Williams' clothes and dumped the ashes in bushes along the River Mersey, admitted conspiracy to assist an offender.

Georgia Clarke and Michael Smith, both 19, were at the home of Williams' aunt, Dawn Cooper, 34, in Wheatland Lane, Wallasey, where her nephew fled after the incident.

Homeless Clarke, who received no secondary education after her mother took her to Gran Canaria and then abandoned her with a one-way ticket back to the UK, was jailed for 12 months.

Cooper, a mother of one with no "significant" criminal record, was jailed for two years as was Smith, a friend of Williams who also had previous convictions.

Williams will begin his sentence in a Young Offenders' Institution because of his age.

The video above is a photographic tribute video prepared by Jen Phillips, widow of PC Dave Phillips.