NICKY Robinson told a jury that while he might have led a life of crime to fund his crack cocaine habit, he didn't murder Kylee Dibble.

Robinson told Bristol Crown Court he met 18-year-old Kylee when he was living with his cousin at Corbett House flats in Barton Hill. He said friendship led to intimacy and he had sex with Kylee on the morning she was found dead but he left her alive and well.

Robinson, 24, denies murdering the teenager in February 2005.

It is alleged that Robinson battered Kylee over the head, possibly in a row over getting money for drugs, before setting fire to her body to cover his tracks.

Robinson told the court he left school with "a fistful" of GCSEs before getting a catering job and then lapsing into drug abuse fuelled by pub burglaries on a weekly basis. "I first met Kylee in the January of 2005," he said. "I was living in my cousin Leanne's flat and I formed a relationship with Kylee.

"That led to a sexual relationship. I had been up to her flat on a few occasions and I had sex in her flat."

Robinson said he had chatted to Kylee in the Corbett House laundry room and asked her to keep an eye on his basket of clothes.

When he left the room she ended up taking the basket to her flat, where it remained until police linked it to him after her murder.

Robinson told the jury on the weekend before Kylee died he partied at a bash to mark the closing of the Three Horseshoes pub in Church Road, St George.

He said he left the pub between 2am and 3am on the Monday morning and went to a friend's house and smoked a £10 deal of crack. After that, he said, he visited another friend in Barton Hill, but got no answer, so he returned to Corbett House where he smoked another £10 deal on the stairs between 4am and 6am.

He told the court: "After, I went downstairs and I buzzed up Kylee, around 5.30am-6am. She answered, she allowed me to enter and she was waiting for me at the security door. She appeared to be totally fine and I went into her living room."

Robinson told the jury he stayed at Kylee's flat for about an hour and they had sex. He said: "I had no reason at all to do her any harm, none at all. I did not murder her, I laid not one finger on her. When I left her she appeared to be totally fine.

"When I left her I went to my cousin's flat two floors below."

Robinson said that at his cousin's flat he played a computer game and had a bath and his young nephew knocked on the bathroom door and said there were fire engines outside.

He told the court he left the flats about 8.45am, and then stayed at a friend's house all day before visiting another friend in the evening.

He conceded that police did approach him in 2005 and 2006 but he had distanced himself from being at Kylee's flat that morning because he didn't want to be a murder suspect.

He denied telling crack cocaine user Jeffrey Ford that he would have left DNA at Kylee's flat and he said that Darren Green, an inmate at Bristol Prison who he had chatted to, was mentally unstable and was talking rubbish when he claimed Robinson had confessed to "losing it" with Kylee.

The court heard that other than convictions for driving matters, burglary and theft Robinson had no convictions for violence apart from an admitted assault occasioning actual bodily harm on Jeffrey Ford in Bristol Prison.

The case continues.