The woman charged with killing her former lover's fiancée told police she had an abortion about a year before graduate student Denita Smith was found shot to death, investigators testified Monday.

A judge did not decide by The Durham News' deadline whether comments accused murderer Shannon Elizabeth Crawley made about her relationship with Jermeir Stroud could be presented at trial.

Defense attorney Scott Holmes asked Superior Court Judge Ronald Stephens Monday to suppress the statements, arguing that police had continued to question his client after she had asked for an attorney.

Crawley is charged in the Jan. 4, 2007, death of Smith, 25, an N.C. Central University student whose body was found at the bottom of a staircase at Campus Crossings Apartments. She had been shot in the head.

Crawley, a mother of two and a former 911 dispatcher for the city of Greensboro, told police Jan. 5, 2007, that she had intimate relationship with Stroud starting at the end of 2004, Durham investigators Shawn Pate and Delois West testified Monday.

Crawley and Stroud, who worked as a Greensboro police officer, broke up in January 2006 after Crawley had an abortion, West testified.

Holmes argued that during police questioning his client was on the phone with relatives advising her to leave if she wasn't under arrest.

Crawley told relatives that police said she couldn't leave until their supervisor had cleared it, according to the testimony of her brother-in-law Christopher Williams, of New Jersey, and her sister Erin Crawley, of Greensboro.

Investigators testified that Shannon Crawley didn't specifically ask for an attorney. Assistant District Attorney David Saacks argued that the fact that Crawley was allowed to leave is proof that investigators were not holding her against her will.

A witness reported seeing a woman matching Crawley's description and a burgundy Ford Explorer at the apartments Jan. 4. While investigators spoke with Crawley in Greensboro, other officers took pictures of her Explorer and worked to confirm it was the same one seen at Smith's apartments, Pate testified.

See www.newsobserver.com for more on this developing story.