Ashleigh Pechaluk, acquitted at trial, "got away with murder" and is a liar willing to "throw anyone under a bus to save her own skin," a defence lawyer charged.

"You've told this jury a number of times that you have lied ... One thing we know for sure is that you're a liar," Rick Stern, Puddicombe's lawyer, thundered on Monday.

"I have lied. Yes," Pechaluk responded.

Pechaluk is in her sixth day of testimony at the trial of her former lover Niccola (Nicky) Puddicombe.

The two women were jointly charged with the gruesome Oct. 26, 2006 murder of GO Transit officer Dennis Hoy, the third member in a love triangle, but they are were prosecuted separately.

A jury acquitted Pechaluk in June. Puddicombe's trial began earlier this month.

Pechaluk confessed to murdering Hoy in a videotaped interview with Toronto police homicide detectives hours after Hoy was killed in Puddicombe's west end apartment.

But the jury in her trial never saw the confession because police violated Pechaluk's rights. She was interviewed for 20 hours before she was allowed to speak to a lawyer. The police misconduct made the confession legally inadmissable.

In any case, Pechaluk says it was a false confession designed to protect Puddicombe, whom she loved. She added that she was in a state of exhaustion and was willing to say anything so that she could go home.

At her trial, Pechaluk maintained that she did not kill Hoy.

She acknowledged that there was a plan, allegedly devised by Puddicombe, to murder Hoy as he slept and then deceive the police with a false alibi. But Pechaluk testified that she abandoned the plot at the 11th hour and was asleep when Hoy was bludgeoned to death with the blunt end of an axe. 

Stern played the videotaped interview for the jury where a sniffling, hushed-voiced Pechaluk says "I did it." The lawyer then suggested that the confession was actually a rare moment of truth.

"Are you telling this jury that you were acting?" he asked her.

Pechaluk responded: "I wouldn't consider that acting ... None of this is easy."

Earlier, Stern referenced June 4 -- the day Pechaluk was acquitted.

"That was a big day for you... You must have said, 'I just got away with murder'?"

"Not at all," Pechaluk fired back.

Stern accused Pechaluk of suggesting alternate suspects to the jury in her trial to shift suspicion away from herself.

"You're willing to thrown anyone under the bus to save your own skin?"

Once again, a calm Pechaluk responded: "Not at all."

Pechaluk hasn't explicitly pointed the finger at Puddicombe but she has said: "I'm not protecting her anymore."

The jury has heard that Puddicombe wanted Hoy out of her life because he was becoming increasingly controlling and abusive. The women felt that they couldn't go to the police because Hoy was in law enforcement and would be believed over them.

The crown also alleges that money was a motive. Puddicombe was deeply in debt and she was the beneficiary of Hoy's $250,000 life insurance policy.