A former butcher strangled a woman he met on a night out and then sliced off her head and kept it in an underground tunnel as a souvenir, a court has heard.
Christopher May is also accused of stuffing the fingers of Tracey Woodford into a woman's handbag after using his skills from his old job in a butcher's shop to dismember her body.
Then 50-year-old is alleged to have met the 47-year-old woman in his local pub and then brought her back to his flat.
Prosecutors told Cardiff Crown Court how once inside the home, May strangled the victim and then used a "gruesome collection" of knives to chop up and decapitate her in the bathroom of his flat.
He is accused of then carrying her head in a plastic shopping bag to a nearby rugby club and storing it 138 metres down a drain.
May denies murder.
Prosecutor Roger Thomas said: "It seems his experience in a butcher's shop has been put to use on a human body."
The pathologist who carried out the post mortem examination said the dismemberment has been "carried out with someone with experience of knives or of cutting up bodies or animals."
Mr Thomas said: "May's previous employment as a butcher meant he knew how to use a knife, how to remove meat from ribs, legs, and shoulders.
"He was good at boning."
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