THE Jodi Jones murder trial yesterday heard Luke Mitchell's first account of how his dog helped him find his girlfriend's naked and bloodstained body.
Mr Mitchell - who was 14 when the Dalkeith teenager was killed - spoke to a detective hours after leading her distraught relatives on a torchlight search.
He also described his relationship with Jodi, saying "we were very close".
Mr Mitchell - who denies the murder - was taken to Dalkeith Police station where he began to tell his story after a hug from his mother, the High Court in Edinburgh heard.
Detective Constable Alan Towers, 43, said that Mr Mitchell wrote a statement which ran to 22 pages.
During questioning, he told how he and Mia, his German Shepherd dog, went out to look for the missing girl.
A text message to his mobile from Jodi's mother at 10.41pm the previous night first alerted him to the fact that something was wrong, he said.
The jury heard how Mr Mitchell then met Jodi's grandmother, sister and the sister's boyfriend, and continued searching along the wooded Roan's Dyke path in Dalkeith, Midlothian. "They were panicky, " he told Mr Towers
The statement, read in court by the detective, continued:
"We walked past the V-shaped break in the wall and a few yards past that, not even 20 yards past that, Mia stopped and put her nose in the air and put her paws up on the wall as if trying to sniff over."
Mr Mitchell told police that he said to the others: "I think she has smelled something".
Then he went back and crossed over the wall before making his way along the woodland side of the wall, shining his torch.
"I saw this white thing which stuck out in the light. I could see it was legs, like a tailor's dummy. After I saw the legs I just took another step then I recognised it was a body lying there."
Mr Mitchell's statement continued: "I could see it was a female. There was blood on the neck. She was naked."
He told the detective that the girl was lying face up: "I thought it was Jodi. I just recognised the face. It looked like Jodi's."
Mr Towers told the court:
"He was perfectly calm throughout the time it took to take that statement."
When asked by Donald Findlay QC, defending Mr Mitchell, if he had expected the youth to be climbing the walls, the detective replied: "Given the circumstances, I didn't know how I would find Luke Mitchell."
Later the jury was sent home while judge Lord Nimmo Smith heard a legal debate.
Mr Mitchell, now 16, denies a murder charge which alleges that on June 30 last year he attacked Jodi of Parkhead Place, Easthouses, Dalkeith, in woods near Roan's Dyke.
The charge further alleges that Mr Mitchell struck Jodi with a knife or similar instrument, before and after she died.
The trial continues.
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