HOMELESS Philip Bell has claimed that he was smoking a large amount of cannabis at the time he was alleged to have killed teenager Terry Edmonds.

The 21-year-old former removal man said he lied to police that he had not returned to the car park where the murder took place that day because he was paranoid about them knowing he was "doing drugs".

Terry’s body was found in Bell’s suitcase at the former Morrison’s car park in Tunbridge Wells, where he lived rough, 12 days after she went missing on Bank Holiday Monday, April 17 2006.

Alun Jenkins, QC for Bell, asked him: "It comes to this: Were you responsible for the death of Terry Edmonds? Did you kill her?"

Bell, 22, replied "No" to both questions.

He denied he had been back to the car park before being shown a CCTV image of him at the nearby railway station two seconds behind 17-year-old Terry, as she arrived on a train from Tonbridge.

The prosecution say they were on a "collision course" and there was then a lost hour in which he strangled Terry with her own scarf in a sex attack.

Bell said he had been into the town before returning to a stairwell to his bed. There was no reason, he said, that he would wish to meet Terry, who lived at Calverley Hill hostel in Clarence Road.

Asked if he saw her when walking down the station steps, he said: "Not to my knowledge I didn’t. I wasn’t really paying attention to who was around.

"There might have been someone in the vicinity when I walked up the stairs. I got undressed and got into my bed. Then I had a smoke of cannabis resin."

Bell claimed he consumed just over 7g of the drug, much more than he normally had. Asked why, he replied: "Because I was stressed out and because I could."

He was stressed, he said, because of an earlier argument with his girlfriend. He was more stoned than normal. He told how he heard voices either above or below him.

A few days later, he claimed, his suitcase went missing. "I had a suitcase missing, someone was found in a suitcase," he said. "I did connect the two."

Bell said he had a T-shirt with the slogan: "I am running out of places to hide the bodies."

The trial continues.