A COMPUTER forensics expert who examined equipment used by Danilo Restivo on the day Heather Barnett was killed said he found no evidence of it being used until after 10am that morning.

The hard drive and a floppy disk were seized by police from the Nacro training centre in Wallisdown Road, where Restivo attended a course, and were later analysed by Craig Wilson.

Mr Wilson told Winchester Crown Court an administrator logged the computer on at 9.09am on the day of her murder but there was no evidence it had been used until an hour later at 10.10am. He added there was an indication that a file had been modified and then an Italian website, lycos.it, accessed at 10.33am.

Mr Wilson is managing director of Digital Detective Group. His data recovery programmes have been used globally, including by the FBI.

“I drew on all the computer data to draw up a timeline of all the activity on that computer that day,” he explained.

Restivo, 39, of Chatsworth Road, Charminster, denies murdering Heather Barnett on November 12, 2002. The prosecution claims he carried out the killing and then went to Nacro.

Mr Wilson said he also found fragments on the hard drive of deleted stories from the Daily Echo from the days and weeks after Heather’s death. He pieced them back together.

They included a story headlined, “Police issue description of potential witness” on Monday November 18, and, “Victim’s friends could help catch murderer” from November 21.

Cross-examining, David Jeremy QC told Mr Wilson: “There is a difference between no user activity and no evidence of user activity. You can only speak about the evidence you found, not the evidence that may have been there once but was subsequently deleted or overwritten. It follows you cannot be sure you recovered all the data that day.”

Mr Wilson said: “You would expect to find some trace of user activity if there had been any. There was no evidence and my conclusion was the computer was idle.”

The trial continues.