The boyfriend of a teenage model who was stabbed seven times and sexually assaulted as she lay dying or dead said that they had argued on the night of the attack but that she was alive when they parted.

Lewis Sproston, 22, told the Old Bailey trial of the man accused of murdering Sally Anne Bowman that he had last seen her alive in the rear-view mirror of his car as she walked into the driveway of her home in South Croydon, Surrey, in September 2005.

“I stopped and saw her walk towards the drive in the interior mirror,” Mr Sproston said. “She was looking at me for a couple of seconds and was then looking towards the garden.”

Her battered and bloody body was found on the driveway a few hours later. She had been stabbed and seriously sexually assaulted.

Mark Dixie, a chef aged 37, who has a history of sexual violence, has admitted having sex with Miss Bowman but claimed that she was already dead when he found her, the court has been told. He denies murder.

When Mr Sproston was arrested at lunchtime on the day of Miss Bowman’s death he had asked police: “Is this about the row with my girlfriend last night?” the court was told.

Anthony Glass, QC, for the defence, asked Mr Sproston whether he had a guilty conscience about what had happened.

“Not really,” he replied. “I thought she made it home. I thought she was perfectly well and healthy. It was just a normal argument. Me and Sally had an argument before and the police were called, a little domestic argument.”

Mr Glass asked him: “Had you left her dead or dying?”

“Are you being serious?” replied Mr Sproston, adding: “No.” Mr Sproston told the court that he had never hit Miss Bowman.

Mr Sproston, a plasterer, said he had driven her home after she had called him at about 1.30am at the end of a night out with her sister in Croydon town centre. During the call, he said, he thought that he heard a man call out her name in the background.

As a result he sent her a text message that said: “I am coming to get you. If I see you with a bloke I will spit in your face.”

Mr Sproston said: “It was just one of those things — I didn’t mean anything. I wouldn’t have been happy if she had been with another bloke, but she was not when I got there.”

After arriving at Miss Bowman’s home the couple sat in his car for a couple of hours during which they argued before kissing and making up, Mr Sproston said.

“I thought she had been with boys and she thought I had been with girls. It was just jealousy. There may have been raised voices but not shouting.”

Mr Sproston said he had eventually persuaded Miss Bowman to get out of the car about 4.10am. “I never made her physically get out of the car, I just hinted by opening the door,” he told the court.

As they talked on the pavement his girlfriend grabbed his neck and ripped off his chain.

Mr Glass asked: “Did you lose you temper and kill her?”

Mr Sproston replied: “No”.

During the initial police interviews Mr Sproston said that he thought he had seen a man with a shaved head walk slowly past the car as they had the row. However, he admitted in court that he was now not sure that he had not simply imagined the man.

Mr Sproston also recalled the couple’s on-off relationship since they met on Christmas Day 2003.

“There were arguments. We always made up,” he said. “She didn't think my friends liked her. I was jealous. I think she was more trusting of me.”

One on occasion Miss Bowman had complained to police that he had spat at her and at another time one of her sisters had punched him in the face after the couple had argued, he told the court. Mr Sproston said the rows were about “silly things” and after returning from a holiday shortly before her death the couple had broken up.

Earlier, statements given by Miss Bowman’s parents, Linda and Paul, and her three elder sisters were read out. Mrs Bowman said that her daughter’s relationship with Mr Sproston, her first boyfriend, was “intense with both being extremely jealous”.

The family said that Miss Bowman was determined to be a rich and famous model. She had signed with a local agency and a large modelling firm had shown interest in her.

The trial continues.

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