HOMELESS Philip Bell throttled a teenage girl with her own scarf in a sex attack and then hid her body in his suitcase at a car park where he slept rough, a retrial has heard.

He and victim Terry Edmonds were on a "collision course" as they arrived at Tunbridge Wells railway station on the day she met her death, it was alleged.

Bell, then 21, was captured on CCTV cameras at the station just two seconds behind 17-year-old Terry on April 17 2006.

Maidstone Crown Court was told that there was then a "lost hour" during which Terry was sexually assaulted and strangled and placed in the suitcase hidden in the car park.

Anthony Haycroft, prosecuting, said it took police 12 days to find the body, which was fully-clothed and in a foetal position in the case.

"We allege on the evidence you can be sure she was murdered on the day she went missing," he told the jury of nine women and three men.

"The only issue is by whom was she murdered? Someone strangled her with her own pink scarf. We say that someone is Philip Bell."

Terry, who lived at Calverley Hill hostel near the station, had been to Tonbridge on the day she was killed to visit a male friend, having told her boyfriend she was going to Maidstone.

She returned to Tunbridge Wells in the early evening and was seen on CCTV at 6.23 and 19 seconds. "That was the last sighting," said Mr Haycroft. "She then disappeared."

Her usual route home was to walk through the stairwell of the former Morrison's supermarket car park. She was due to meet her boyfriend Nigel Fitzgerald there, but never arrived.

The prosecutor said Bell, now 22, and Terry would have both gone into the stairwell through the car park, because the lifts were not operating.

Bell was not seen again for 54 minutes until 7.17pm, when the cameras filmed him walking back out towards the town.

"It is Mr Bell's lost hour," said Mr Haycroft. He added: "The case against him is circumstantial. In other words, no one actually saw him kill Terry and he denies it. He has always denied it.

"However, many murders are not witnessed. The Crown say the evidence against him is very strong.

"Despite the nature of it and despite the lengthy interviews with Mr Bell, he could not give an explanation for it.

"We say he is linked to this murder by a least a dozen or more pieces of independent evidence."

The trial continues.