Accused murderer Kirk Matthew Lankford underwent a full day of cross-examination yesterday, recounting in sometimes grisly detail how Masumi Watanabe died and how he disposed of her body.

Lankford displayed little emotion on the witness stand, although at one point he sharply complained about how police treated him and his wife the day they arrested him last year, bursting into his Kalihi home and repeatedly swearing at him.

Lankford repeated his story about how Watanabe died accidentally the morning of April 12. He said Watanabe had stepped in front of his truck and it made contact. He gave her a ride, trying to find her home, but she "dove" out of his truck and hit her head on the ground or a roadside rock, he testified.

He did not report the accident because, he said, he knew it would cost him his job.

He said he put her body in the back of his Hauoli Pest Control truck and completed a full day of work, only removing it some 12 hours later after he had bought a shovel and other supplies to bury her.

By the time he transferred the remains from his work truck to his personal pickup truck, Lankford said, the body had become "pretty stiff" from rigor mortis and was "smelling really badly."

Watanabe, 21, was about 5 feet tall and weighed about 100 pounds and he couldn't fit her lengthwise into the heavy-duty garbage bags he had just purchased at Home Depot, Lankford told Prosecutor Peter Carlisle.

He said he bent her legs at the knees "toward her chest," but because of the body's stiffness, the legs wouldn't stay bent.

So he used duct tape to hold the bent legs in position by wrapping the tape around her knees and her back, Lankford said.

Then he could fit her inside the garbage bag, Lankford said, sealing it closed with more duct tape.

He put that bag into two more bags, taping each one closed.

"Why stop at three bags?" Carlisle asked.

"I don't know," Lankford answered. "I know I used three."

Lankford said he drove to Kahana Bay on Windward Oahu, where he planned to bury Watanabe because it was a "peaceful" spot. But that plan went awry because he had bought the wrong kind of shovel at Home Depot and because he was interrupted by John Thoma, a homeless man who frequented Kahana Bay.

Lankford sharply denied parts of Thoma's earlier testimony, saying he never told Thoma that his name was "Matt Ford."

And he denied telling Thoma that the reason he was digging in the ground around midnight at remote Kahana Bay was because he had lost a gold chain there and was trying to retrieve it.

"I did not tell him that," Lankford said.

And he said he did not believe that Thoma had seen the license plate on Lankford's truck, a key piece of evidence that police said helped identify Lankford as a suspect in Watanabe's disappearance.

Thoma testified that after he told Lankford that he was going to call police, Lankford left in a hurry, but not before Thoma saw the license number on the truck. Thoma said he used a knife to scratch the number four times in the white stripe running along the side of Kamehameha Highway.

But he still transposed the numbers with the letters. Instead of scratching NXF562, he wrote 562NXF, Thoma testified March 7.

Yesterday Lankford said he has "a strong inclination" that Thoma never saw the license plate because he never got close enough to the truck.

Lankford said he had a "remote starter" on his truck, so the vehicle was already running when he got back to it and he left Kahana Bay very quickly.

As a result, he said, he was "pretty sure" Thoma couldn't identify him and he "wasn't too worried about" police coming after him as he drove toward Kane'ohe, looking for another place to dispose of the body.

Near Kualoa Ranch, he stopped by an open area along the shoreline and decided to take the body out to sea, he said.

"It seemed like the best place I had seen so far," Lankford told Carlisle.

Lankford said he stripped down to his boxer shorts, took off his shoes and socks and carried the body offshore.

"When it got deep enough, I put her down and started to push" the body through the water, he said.

He said he went "at least a couple of hundred yards" offshore, perhaps as far out as the length of "four or five football fields."

Because the soles of his feet were heavily calloused, he said, he wasn't injured during the walk, although he occasionally stepped in holes in the reef.

"No coral cuts?" Carlisle asked.

"There probably was some," Lankford answered. "I think I did have some but I don't remember any of them being real bad."

When the water was about chest deep and the "top of the bag was even with the surface of the ocean," Lankford released it.

"It didn't seem like it was really moving," Lankford said, when he turned to walk and swim back to shore.

Watanabe's body was never found.

Lankford is expected to finish his time on the witness stand this morning, followed by additional witnesses for the defense.