A witness in a murder trial said she told police "what they wanted to hear" when they questioned her, a jury heard.

Karen Smith, 23, said at Leeds Crown Court yesterday, that she felt "harassed" and "had words put in her mouth" by officers when she made a statement in September 1998 about the strangling four years earlier of Amy Shepherd, 86.

The body of Miss Shepherd was found in her home in Folly Hill Gardens, Wibsey, Bradford, on August 2, 1994.

She had been strangled, probably with a tea towel, the court heard, and stabbed in the neck with a kitchen knife as she lay dead or dying, according to the prosecution.

Richard Whelan, 23, then of Sunnybank Avenue, Bankfoot, Bradford, denies her murder.

Miss Smith told Paul Worsley QC, prosecuting, that she had started going out with Whelan at the end of 1989. She told the court that she, the accused, his twin brother Andrew, and Karen Hemingway had visited Miss Shepherd for the first time in 1990, when they were all 13, but she had not let them in the house.

Miss Smith said a day or so later she and Richard Whelan had visited Miss Shepherd's house and watched television with her. But her friend Karen Hemingway, 23, who was friendly with Miss Shepherd, told the court no-one visited the pensioner's home the day after the four teenagers first visited.

Under cross-examination by David Robson QC, defending, Miss Smith admitted that in her statement to police about these visits she made up a story about the whereabouts of stolen jewellery from Miss Shepherd's house when she was murdered.

In police interview she said she had been offered the jewellery to sell but Mr Robson said this was "pure fantasy". Mr Robson asked why she had made the story up to which she replied she felt under pressure.

Earlier, the court heard Mary Kilbride, 80, was murdered in her home 12 days after Miss Shepherd. A hand towel was found around Mrs Kilbride's neck and she had been stabbed through one eye with the handle of a dressing table mirror as she was dead or dying.

Mr Worsley said Mrs Kilbride's killer was Richard Whelan, convicted in June 1995, of her murder and had allegedly. He told the jury it was the Crown's case that Whelan was also Miss Shepherd's killer.

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