A GRANDFATHER accused of killing his baby granddaughter pretended to be dying of a brain tumour, a court heard today.

Amelia Rose Jones died aged 41 days old on November 12, 2012 after suffering a "catastrophic brain injury”. Mark Jones, 45, denies murder.

His daughter Sarah Jones, 26, told Newport Crown Court today that they had not always been in contact, but shortly before baby Amelia was born they resumed their relationship.

Living just around the corner from her Waun Hywel home in Pontnewydd, Cwmbran, Jones at first visited around once a week but began to spend more and more time at her house.

Ms Jones said: ”At the beginning I was happy but over time he was in my house a lot. It became very overpowering."

She became very concerned for her father because he told her he had prostate cancer, she said.

He began to walk with the aid of a crutch, saying it was because of an operation, and said he found it difficult to get up and down the stairs.

She started to receive phone calls from a withheld number from a man calling himself Dr Hughes, who spoke in a foreign accent.

The doctor told her details of her father’s condition, saying he was seriously ill and would need his daughter’s help to get in and out of the bath, and to give himself injections.

Worried, she followed the doctor’s advice and noticed Jones had tubes attached to his body which her father claimed were left from an operation. "I had no reason to doubt him”, she said. “I wanted to show this doctor that Mark had support at home. I believed he was really ill.”

But Paul Lewis QC, prosecuting, asked her: ”It's agreed in this case that there was never a Dr Hughes. It was your father all the time?"

She agreed, saying that over the course of several months ‘Dr Hughes’ had phoned her up to 60 times, saying the defendant had listed her as his next of kin.

But he never gave her a number she could contact him on, saying instead that she should dial 999 if she had medical concerns.

The jury heard previously that Mark Jones disliked Amelia’s father Ian Skillern, and were told they would have to decide if this could be a possible motive for murder.

Sarah Jones said today that neither man would be in the same room as the other, and said her father was unhappy when she and Mr Skillern got back together after splitting up.

Mark Jones, formerly of Govilon Place and now of no fixed abode, said he would “take a step back” and no longer visit the house as much, she said.

Ms Jones added: “He said if I was going to have Ian in my life he didn’t want to be around.”

But the same day, Dr Hughes phoned to say he had observed a shadow on her father’s brain in scans. He was reticent about what this meant but when pressed told her it could be a brain tumour, Ms Jones told the court.

In the following weeks Dr Hughes confirmed to her Jones had a brain tumour as well as prostate cancer and said he would die if he did not have another operation.

At the news, Ms Jones said: "I felt numb. I didn't know how to support him. He said he didn’t know how to deal with it.”

Ms Jones said she never suspected his cancer was a lie until baby Amelia died and she was taken into police custody for questioning.

While there she told officers she was worried about her father because he had to take medication every day, but was told: “There’s nothing wrong with Mark”.

“I thought they were crazy,” she told the jury, and it was only later that she realised ‘Dr Hughes’ had been her father all along, disguising his voice by putting on an accent.

Earlier in the day, forensic pathologist Deryk James gave evidence.

He said fractures to Amelia’s legs were likely to have been caused by pulling and twisting, her fractured skull was probably caused by her head hitting a blunt object and fractured ribs were probably due to compression such as squeezing.

Under cross-examination he said: "Each individual injury could have an accidental explanation. But somebody ought to know what it is.”

Dating fractures was not an exact science, he said, especially in young children.

Proceeding.