The British man accused of killing his American wife and baby daughter was facing bankruptcy, a university friend testified yesterday.

Benjamin Pryor, a hedge fund manager from Fulham, London, said accused double-murderer Neil Entwistle told him he was in a “perilous” financial condition.

“On a financial level everything had come apart. He was thinking about filing for bankruptcy,” Mr Pryor told the court in Woburn, Massachusetts.

Mr Entwistle, 29, an unemployed computer programmer from Worksop, faces life in prison without parole if convicted of shooting dead his wife Rachel and their 9-month-old daughter Lillian at their home outside Boston in 2006.

Mr Pryor, who first met Mr Entwistle at the rowing club at the University of York, said the young couple had been “just keeping their heads above the water” and were “using credit cards to pay for various things and trying to pay them off the best they could”.

In a setback for the defence, the judge ruled that the prosection could present evidence that Mr Entwistle trawled the Internet for sex and logged on to his account at the Adult Friend Finder swinger site shortly after the killings.

But Judge Diane Kottmyer refused to allow prosecutors to show the jury a photograph of a naked-and-aroused man lying on a lounge chair which was allegedly posted on the Internet. The defence says the man in the photograph is not Mr Entwistle.

A forensic expert testified that Mr Entwistle’s DNA matched “sperm fractions” found on his wife’s underwear, suggesting the two had sex on the day of the killings.

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