THE key witness in the Burnley lodger double murder case said she feared she would become his ‘next victim’.

Jayne Pickard, 52, said she was she was ‘horrified’ to discover her former Hargher Clough Junior School classmate Barry Morrow, was the lodger at the centre of a European police manhunt, after the bodies of Angela Holgate and her mother Alice Huyton were discovered strangled on a bed in Southport.

The supermarket checkout worker, formerly of Accrington Road, Burnley, said: “It makes me feel sick to think what could have happened. I could have been his next victim, who knows what was on in his mind?

“We were in constant contact, texting and ringing even when he was on the run. I always got the impression if he’d asked me out and I knocked him back, he wouldn’t have taken no for an answer."

This week a Merseyside coroner concluded Morrow had unlawfully killed the 54-year-old Tesco worker and her 75-year-old mother at her home in Fairhaven Road, Churchtown.

Morrow, formerly of Brush Street, Burnley, went on the run and fled to France around December 3 last year, where he contacted the Lancashire Telegraph via Facebook.He then enlisted Burnley-based solicitor Keith Rennison, of Donald Race and Newton as he handed himself in.

Police charged him with murder, but the former Warbuton's engineer was found hanged in his cell at HMP Manchester in February.

Ms Pickard has also revealed how she had planned to meet up with Morrow, a former Ivy Bank High School pupil in Yorkshire after getting close with him online.

But he cancelled their plans the same week he went on the run.

The mother-of-two, who would have been called to court as the prosecution’s prime witness, said: “He rang me to say he was a long way from home and it would be a long time before he returned.

“Barry said he had an almighty row with Angela and came home to find her hanged, but he didn’t know what happened to her mum. It was at that moment I knew he had done it.

“I later found out that when he was ringing and texting me asking for a friend, his landlady was already dead.

“It was a huge shock. We were in the process of arranging a school reunion. He even lent me £100 when I was going through a tough time.

“During our chats, he told me how he made his fortune in South Africa and had become a millionaire, but I am sure none of it was true.”

An inquest into Morrow’s death has been adjourned by a Manchester coroner while an investigation is carried out.