Accused tried to grab me too, woman tells Silver Comet jury

She said she looked over her shoulder and he "was just standing still. I just stared at him as long as I could to get a good look at him."

Then in July 2006, 16 months later, Bell-Pringle testified she saw that face again in news accounts of his arrest on charges of murdering 53-year-old Jennifer Ewing near the 17-mile marker on the popular bike path that stretches to the Alabama line.

When asked if the 46-year-old Ledford was that same man who tried to grab her that day, Bell-Pringle said he was. "I have no doubt at all," she added.

Prosecutors called Bell-Pringle to suggest to the male-dominated jury Ledford had an MO, trying to grab petite women riding the trail alone.

Bell-Pringle, like Ewing, is petite. The psychologist said she is a fraction short of 5-foot-4 and weighed 115 pounds. Ewing was 5-foot-5 and weighed 125 pounds.

Prosecutors said Ledford ambushed Ewing as she finished her 32nd mile on her round trip that afternoon.

They say Ledford tried to force her to perform oral sex on him but she bit him instead, enraging him.

The medical examiner said Ewing was punched and kicked dozens of times. Her nose and larynx were crushed. Dr. Kris Sperry testified Ewing was alive 25 to 30 minutes after the savage beating until she suffocated because her chest was crushed.

Her battered, nude body was found the next morning, July 26, 2006, discarded on a mound of kudzu 70 feet off the trail.

Earlier Thursday, the jury saw Ledford's recorded interview with investigators five hours after searchers found Ewing's.

In that 30-minute interview, Ledford, now 46, insisted he was not on the path the previous day, the day Ewing was killed.

Instead, Ledford said, he was drinking beer and at a housing project just a few miles from the house in Dallas that he shared with his mother and stepfather, picking up a prostitute for sex.

Ledford told a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent and a Paulding County deputy he agreed to pay the prostitute - a six-foot tall black woman. But when he told her he wasn't giving her the $40 he promised, "she had my thing in her mouth and she clamped down.

"I got pissed. I got extremely pissed. I was screaming. I was hitting her," Ledford said in the interview.

Ledford said once she let go, he pulled up his pants and left, without checking his injury. "I thought it was gone. I didn't look until I got home," he told the investigators.

He also said in the interview he injured his knuckles and right hand when he hit the prostitute in the head three or four times to make her let go.

"Maybe it happened just like you said but with a different girl," GBI agent John Farmer said after Ledford gave his version of how he was injured. "It wasn't a black girl. It was a white girl. If this is why it happened we need to know that."

Ledford stuck with his story and then asked to see a lawyer, ending the interview.