NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — Melanie McGuire's sister-in-law denied in court Tuesday that she tried to frame the fertility clinic nurse for the murder of her brother and said she was not the author of handwritten notes that seemed to detail such a plan.

The testimony by Cindy Ligosh, the victim's sister, at McGuire's murder trial was elicited by prosecutors who contend the defendant herself sent the documents to investigators in a last-ditch effort to avoid facing charges in the 2004 slaying of her husband, William.

The writer of an unsigned letter that accompanied the two pages claimed to be a colleague of Ligosh and to have come across notes in her handwriting in the trash of her realty office.

On the stand, Ligosh said the letter was a lie.

"I saw that for the first time when I testified at the grand jury," she said of a paper with the words "set her up" scrawled across the top.

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She noted that the return address and phone number for the realty office were wrong. Asked if she knew who was responsible for that and another document headlined "final stages," Ligosh said she did not.

Her testimony also seemed to bolster the prosecution's theory that William McGuire was shot to death through a throw pillow. Green fibers were found on a bullet in his chest, but the green pillows recovered in search warrants do not match those fibers.

Under questioning by a prosecutor Tuesday, Ligosh said she remembered many accent pillows in the couple's townhouse, including green pillows other than the ones catalogued by police.

That testimony was vigorously disputed by the defense. In cross-examination, an attorney for McGuire, Joe Tacopina, confronted Ligosh with a police report of an interview she gave a year and a half after the murder. She acknowledged that the report never mentioned additional green pillows, but said the officer had gotten her account wrong.

"The way it was written is not the way it was said," she said.

Tacopina suggested her testimony too neatly supported a theory prosecutors only announced in court recently.

"Did anyone tell you that was a particular problem for the state in this case?" he asked.

She said no one had.

Ligosh, who has custody of the couple's two young sons, was a widely anticipated witness, and her testimony was some of the most emotional of the month-old trial. Asked to identify the victim's wedding band, she fingered a gold ring proffered by a prosecutor, sighed deeply and broke into tears.

Ligosh's appearance seemed to touch the defendant as well. The women only made eye contact once, when Ligosh identified her sister-in-law for the record, but during one break in testimony, McGuire's eyes filled with tears and she dabbed at her face with a tissue.

The pair clashed in recent years over the custody of the couple's two young sons, with Ligosh being awarded guardianship over the objections of the defendant and her parents. But in her testimony, Ligosh never mentioned the dispute and told jurors that she had liked her sister-in-law.

"We had a very good relationship. I thought they were the perfect couple," she said.

She said she was "very, very close" to her brother and became frantic when she did not hear from him for several days in the spring of 2004.

"We spoke every day, if not 10 times a day. We were best friends," Ligosh said.

She said that McGuire told her that her husband had left her after a fight about the new home they had purchased. She said her sister-in-law told her that she did not know where he had gone, but that the caller ID log on their home phone indicated he had called once but not left a message.

"She told me that her [divorce] attorney told her to take a picture of it, but that the picture didn't turn out," she said.

Ligosh said that she searched for clues to her brother's disappearance, going to the McGuires' still-vacant new home, phoning his friends and combing his credit card records.

"I just couldn't figure out where he could be," she recalled.

Ligosh said she asked Melanie McGuire for her husband's license plate number so she could look in parking lots in Atlantic City, but the defendant told her she did not remember it.

Jurors have already heard wiretaps in which McGuire admits going to Atlantic City the day after her husband left in search of his car and moving it as a prank. She also acknowledged returning two additional times to see if the car had been moved.

On cross-examination, the defense highlighted a written list Ligosh and the victim had made of ways to persecute their other sibling, a sister who lived in Florida. Questioned by a prosecutor, Ligosh referred to it as "doodling" and said she and her brother had compiled it as a joke over glasses of wine because the sister was complicating the process of settling their mother's estate.

"It was just sibling, brother-sister immature stuff," she recalled.

But pressed further by Tacopina, Ligosh described the ways they had devised to hurt their sister. They included writing fake letters to her from prison "psychos" and telling her they no longer believed her longstanding charges that their father had molested her, allegations that Ligosh said the family actually believed were true.

"We would never have done that," she protested. "This was just between Billy and I having a glass of wine."

She acknowledged suggesting that police investigate whether steroids were involved in her brother's death. She said she told them her brother's head seemed larger in past years and worried aloud to detectives that it might be "a la Jason Giambi," referring to the New York Yankees player suspected of steroid use.

She also told detectives about comments by her brother that led her to suspect he had a fling with an opera singer. She said he had complained about a strange rash on his back and then told her he and the woman had been in the park together.

"He never said he did have relations [with her] but I assumed that he did," she said.

McGuire, 34, faces a possible life sentence if convicted of first-degree murder and other charges.

Testimony continues Wednesday.