A JEALOUS Hell's Angel honed her shooting skills on a range just two days before she gunned down a man in the street, a court heard.

Heather Stephenson-Snell was said to have visited a shooting club four times over a six month period to learn how to fire shotguns.

The jury was told she was planning meticulously to murder a love rival -- Diane Lomax who was her ex-boyfriend's new woman.

She went round to Ms Lomax's home in Holland Street, Radcliffe, on Halloween Night last year wearing a Scream mask and with a sawn-off shotgun.

But the court has heard that the person who ended up being killed was Ms Lomax's next-door neighbour, Robert Wilkie, who went out to investigate a noise.

Mr Wilkie came out dressed in just his boxer shorts to ask Stephenson-Snell to keep quiet because children were asleep.

But the court heard she refused and in a subsquent struggle with Mr Wilkie the gun was fired and he was shot in the stomach. He died minutes later on the pavement.

Stephenson-Snell, a 46-year-old psychotherapist and leader of an all-woman Hell's Angel bike gang, who lives in of Crombie Avenue, York, is on trial at Manchester Crown Court.

She denies murdering Mr Wilkie and the attempted murder of Diane Lomax.

Yesterday the jury were told that as part of her carefully planned operation, she turned up at the North of England Clay Target Centre, near to her home in York, for lessons.

She practised firing at moving targets from between 15 and 20 yards with a double-barrelled 12-gauge shotgun.

"She was just another customer who wanted to come and shoot," said instructor Kenneth Whelan.

"We had to keep going over the basics all the time. She took a long time to pick it up."

Mr Whelan said she progressed with the following two lessons and started to hit more targets.

But he did not take the defendant for her final lesson on October 29 last year.

He added that the guns she used at the club were more sophisticated than the crude Russian-made single-barrelled shotgun which fired the fatal shot into Mr Wilkie's stomach.

They were lighter, easier to control and had a fool-proof safety catch, he said.

Earlier this week the trial heard that when arrested Stephenson-Snell had a shotgun which had been halved in length and fitted with a shoulder strap which looped through the trigger guard, meaning the gun could be fired by tugging on the strap.

When shown the arrangement yesterday, independent firearms expert Jonathan Spencer said he believed the strap had been threaded through the trigger guard unintentionally.

He said: "My finding is that this was done to carry the gun in a covert way.

"The fact that the strap was in front of the trigger was coincidental rather than intentional."

The court heard yesterday that Stephenson-Snell contacted police to complain that former lover Adrian Sinclair had been harassing her after she sacked him from his job as her house sitter.

She said she found pornographic literature and pictures of naked children in the caravan where he had lived at her York home for around three months.

A letter she wrote to police which accused Mr Sinclair of being part of a paedophile ring was read out in court.

The allegations, made in December 2002, sparked a police raid at the home, on Holland Street, Radcliffe, which Mr Sinclair, a former male stripper, shared with Ms Lomax.

No charges were brought about following the raids.

Earlier the trial heard evidence from Mr Sinclair claiming that Stephenson-Snell had begun a hate campaign against him and Ms Lomax after she found out about their relationship.

Mr Sinclair said he had a sexual relationship with her during the summer of 2002 before he moved in with Ms Lomax -- something she denied when she complained to police that he had harassed her.

Just hours after the shooting, she was stopped by a motorway patrol on the M62 motorway because she was travelling at just 45 mph.

She then gave police a string of false names after they found the terrifying costume and gun in the foot well of her car.

Proceeding