Testimony in the case of Darrell Lynn Tipton took a colorful turn this morning, as a career criminal and self-described jailhouse "rat" took the stand to tell jurors he'd heard Tipton confess to killing a woman.

Billy Lutz, told jurors how he'd approached Tipton in the Greene County Jail in December 2005, and asked if he'd killed Cindy Anne Coop-Trent, as newspaper reports indicated he might have.

"I asked him how he killed her. Then he smiled," said Lutz, who was dressed in a green jail jumpsuit.

The man said Tipton described how he took a skillet and "wore it out on her."

"I made the statement that you probably should have set the house on fire, and he said he was going to, but there was someone who knew he was there," Lutz testified.

He began to regale the jury with a discussion of jail culture and how such conversations are permissible, but was cut short by an attorney's objection.

Stuart Huffman, Tipton's attorney, sought to discredit Lutz by pointing out he's helped police on a dozen occasions — even periodically arranging drug buys for police when he was out of prison. Huffman suggested Lutz was only seeking personal gain by testifying.

The attorney referenced Lutz's testimony in an earlier deposition, in which he referred to his work with police as "a game."

"That’s what it was to me, a game," Lutz said in the deposition. "I can do what I want to, and if I tell them something, they’ll get me out (of jail)."

Asked by a prosecutor whether his testimony made him a rat, Lutz smiled and replied in his gravelly voice: "Oh, very much."

Tipton is charged with two counts of first-degree assault, two counts of armed criminal action and a single count of unlawful use of a weapon in the June 2005 attack on Coop-Trent. Prosecutors contend the two got into an argument and Tipton beat the 38-year-old woman with a skillet before stabbing her.

Coop-Trent later died, but an autopsy was unable to determine a cause of death since the woman had possibly fatal levels of Prozac in her system.

Following the attack, Tipton allegedly fled to Tennessee, where he was captured near his mother's home months later.