Ann Hardy said: "I knelt, just as a natural thing, and said 'Oh, poor darling'."

Mrs Hardy had gone to investigate after seeing a pair of legs near a skip in the driveway opposite her home.

She told the Old Bailey she had been woken in the night on September 25, 2005 by two screams which she thought came from a vixen or a girl. Waking up again at 6.30am, she looked out of her bedroom window and saw "a pair of white legs".

Mrs Hardy said: "I put on my dressing gown and slippers and went across the road. I walked round the left side of the skip. I just felt I knew what I would see. It was not going to be a model or a mannequin. I just related it to the screams."

Asked what she saw, Mrs Hardy said: "Sally Anne's body."

After getting no answer from the house, she went home and asked her husband to confirm what she had seen. "He came back and said 'I will call the police'," said Mrs Hardy.

She said she did not know the 18-year-old but had often seen her leaving for work and being dropped off late at night.

The prosecution says Sally Anne was killed by a sex attacker who stabbed her seven times.

Pub chef Mark Dixie, 37, of no fixed address, denies murdering her but says he had sex with her corpse after finding the body.