A key witness in the Robert William Pickton murder trial insisted repeatedly Tuesday that she saw a dead woman hanging in Pickton's slaughterhouse.

"It was a body," Lynn Ellingsen said under cross-examination in the B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster. "I know it was a body."

Defence lawyer Richard Brooks pressed Ellingsen on many details of her description of the night she saw the body on Pickton's pig farm in Port Coquitlam, taking her through 16 statements she made to police since the case broke in 2002 and pointing out inconsistencies.

He also took her through her testimony at Pickton's 2003 preliminary hearing.

Brooks has been trying to attack Ellingsen's credibility since she began testifying June 25.

Pickton, a former friend of Ellingsen, is facing 26 counts of first-degree murder in connection with the deaths of women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. He is currently on trial for six of the deaths and will be tried on the remaining 20 later.

Ellingsen, 37, a former drug addict, is a crucial witness for the prosecution because she was the first to testify about seeing Pickton with a dead body.

On June 25, she testified she was smoking crack cocaine the night she walked into the slaughterhouse and saw Pickton standing, covered in blood, next to a dead woman hanging from a chain.

On Tuesday, Brooks showed her one police statement where she said she saw something that looked "like a body." Later, she stated she didn't look at all, but still saw a naked body. Brooks pointed out that sometimes she said she ran away from the slaughterhouse, and other times she said she went in.

At other times she said she couldn't see a woman, or anything.

Ellingsen blames inconsistencies on fear

Ellingsen said her inconsistent statements were due to her fear of Pickton.

"At the preliminary hearing, I was afraid. What if he's not convicted? He's going to come and get me," she said.

She said fear also prevented her from accurately describing the nail polish on the toenails of the body she saw. She didn't mention the polish at all during her first statements to police. Since then, she has said both that she was unsure of the colour and that it was red.

"I was scared," Ellingsen said. "I never came out and said everything at once."

She also noted she was still abusing alcohol when she made some of her earlier statements, which prompted Brooks to further challenge her.

"You blame things on addiction, you blame things on your alcohol," he said. "If it isn't the alcohol, you blame the crack."

"You're not prepared to take responsibility for any of this, are you, Ms. Ellingsen?"

Ellingsen has maintained that years of cocaine and alcohol abuse have made her memory foggy. On Tuesday, she admitted the sequence of events she said led up to her discovery of the body may not be accurate.

Ellingsen has previously maintained that the night she saw the body was the same night she and Pickton were pulled over by police in New Westminster. On Tuesday, she said these events may have happened on separate days.

"As I mentioned before, dates and times I don't recall," said Ellingsen, who has not been able to say when she saw Pickton with the body. "It's possible that it could be and possible it wasn't. There is a little bit of doubt."

Pickton is on trial for the deaths of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Marnie Frey and Georgina Papin — all women who went missing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside between 1997 and 2001.

With files from the Canadian Press