BLIND killer Yvonne Sleightholme has vowed she will never admit to shooting dead a Ryedale woman - despite losing a battle to clear her name.

"I will never confess to something I didn't do, even though it may mean many more years in prison," she said in a statement to the Evening Press.

And Sleightholme, convicted in 1991 of the murder of Jayne Smith in a farmyard at Salton, near Malton, claimed: "I want justice for myself and I want justice for Jayne."

The 48-year-old's comments came after the Evening Press revealed last week that her continuing denial of guilt had delayed her transfer to an open jail, and now looks set to delay her release on parole.

The High Court rejected an application for leave to apply for a judicial review of a decision by the Criminal Cases Review Commission to refuse to refer her case to the Court of Appeal.

Two judges said they felt the commission had acted correctly within its statutory terms of reference.

They praised the "extremely hard work and diligence" of David Hamilton and Margaret Leonard. The two Londoners have long been seeking to prove that Sleightholme, serving a life sentence, is a victim of a miscarriage of justice.

But they dismissed concerns raised by the two campaigners about the commission's decision, saying they were "minor" matters.

The campaigners had claimed that important evidence had emerged since the trial, for example about a number of bootprints found in the farmyard, which they felt made the conviction unsafe.

Sleightholme, formerly of Seamer, near Scarborough, who has been hysterically blind since her arrest for the murder, sat quietly alongside the campaigners and gave little reaction to the judges' decision.

Afterwards, as a small group of supporters mounted a demonstration outside the court building on behalf of the prisoner, Miss Leonard read out Sleightholme's statement and said that she was "disappointed and upset".

"But this is not the end of the road," she added, revealing that she and Mr Hamilton were examining fresh evidence with a view to making a new application to the Commission.

Updated: 09:45 Saturday, January 13, 2001