Jurors heard Nikki Allan ‘unwittingly skipping to her death’ as she was lured away (Pictures: PA)

A seven-year-old girl ‘unwittingly skipped to her death’ while being lured by a neighbour to a derelict building where she was brutally murdered in 1992, a court heard.

David Boyd, then aged 25, is said to have led Nikki Allan to the Old Exchange Building near their block of flats in Hendon, Sunderland, on the night of October 7, 1992.

After carrying her through a boarded-up window, he allegedly smashed her skull with a brick before viciously stabbing her several times through the heart, ‘making sure of the job of killing her’.  

Jurors at Newcastle Crown Court heard the killer then dragged the schoolgirl’s body by her ankles ‘into the blackness of the basement’ where he hoped it would remain undetected.

But Nikki was found the following morning by two of the many residents frantically out searching for her.

The jury was shown harrowing police video from the murder scene showing the interior of the derelict building, a blood-stained brick used to attack her and drag marks on the floor.

Drops of Nikki’s blood were found outside the building, indicating the attack started on wasteland outside, the court heard.

Murdered schoolgirl Nikki Allan (Picture: PA)

Richard Wright KC, prosecuting, said Nikki had been playing outside flats known as the Garths that evening.

A factory worker later reported seeing a little girl and a man in his 20s walking along a road in the area, with the girl trying to catch him up.

Mr Wright said: ‘The little girl would occasionally drop behind and would then skip to catch up.

‘This was Nikki Allan.

‘She was with her killer, and she was unwittingly skipping to her death.’

A man called George Heron was charged with her murder and went on trial at Leeds Crown Court in 1993, jurors heard.

Mr Wright said: ‘The jury found him not guilty of murder. They were right to do so.

‘George Heron was not the killer of Nikki Allan. The killer of Nikki Allan was David Boyd, the man sitting in the dock at the back of this court.’

Nikki’s mother Sharon Henderson pictured at Newcastle Crown Court (Picture: North News)

The court heard the case went cold over the next three decades until scientific breakthroughs allowed experts to detect Boyd’s DNA in ‘multiple areas’ of Nikki’s clothes.

Jurors were told he was well-known to the youngster and her family and the boyfriend of her babysitter.

Mr Wright said: ‘The case against David Boyd is a circumstantial one but it is, we will invite you to conclude, a compelling one, a case that will enable you to come to the sure and safe conclusion that he is guilty of her murder.’

He said rather than being abducted by a stranger who ‘bundled her into a car’, Nikki was lured from near her home.

Boyd visited the old Exchange building with a 12-year-old boy to look for pigeons days before Nikki died there and he knew his way around the inside, the court was told.

Mr Wright said there was only a ‘shallow pool’ of murder suspects – and the killer must have been a local white man in his 20s who knew Nikki and was in the area at about 10pm and ‘intimately familiar’ with the disused building.

Boyd told police he saw Nikki on the night of her death and was, by his own account, ‘the last man to describe seeing her alive’, jurors heard.

David Boyd is on trial charged with Nikki’s murder (Picture: PA)

The witness who saw the girl skipping helped to produce a sketch of the man and Mr Wright showed the jury photos of Boyd from the time.

The prosecutor said the man in the sketch bore a ‘striking resemblance’ to how Boyd looked at the time.

He told jurors, ‘only the killer knows why he did what he did to Nikki’ – but invited the jury to conclude the killer did not lure Nikki away for a ‘benign reason’.

He added: ‘It may well be – and the evidence certainly supports this interpretation of events – that something occurred in the grounds of that derelict building that caused Nikki Allan to scream and for the killer to assault her.

‘One distinct possibility is that her brutal death was not what had been intended at the outset but was instead brought about by her ability to identify the person who had taken her there and had hurt her outside the building.’

Boyd, of Norton, Stockton, Teesside, denies murder. His trial continues.

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David Boyd, 55, is accused of murdering Nikki Allan on the night of October 7, 1992.