BUYING a pizza as she made her way home, it is one of the last known sightings of Jo Yeates alive.

Stopping at a Tesco store after enjoying Christmas drinks with friends, the 25-year-old former Hampshire schoolgirl could not have known the steps she was then to take would be her last.

The chilling moments as Jo returned to her Bristol flat were last night carefully reconstructed for a nationwide police appeal to find her killers.

It is the latest high-profile bid being used by detectives as they continue the hunt for whoever strangled the landscape architect and dumped her body at the side of a road.

As darkness fell yesterday, a BBC Crimewatch TV crew took over the store in Regent Street to recreate the scene as Jo entered the shop and made her purchase. Last night police said that tests had confirmed Jo had not eaten the pizza.

Using an actress to play the former pupil of Sherborne House in Chandler’s Ford and Romsey’s Embley Park, “Jo”

can be seen in her familiar cream coat, carrying her rucksack, as she left to walk to her home in Canynge Road, Clifton.

The scene is part of a longer reconstruction which shows Jo making her final journey alone, and will be aired next week – almost six weeks after Jo vanished on December 17.

Her snow-covered body was found eight days after she disappeared, dumped at the side of a road just a few miles from her home and missing her coat, boots and one ski sock.

The filming of the TV appeal came on the day that Jo’s family made a direct public appeal for anyone who had information about their daughter’s murder to come forward and end their torment.

David and Theresa Yeates, supported by their son Chris and Jo’s boyfriend Greg Reardon, travelled to Bristol from their home in Ampfield, near Romsey, to make the emotional plea.

They specifically urged the country’s “armchair detectives”

to help and urged anyone with genuine suspicions of someone they know to come forward.

Speaking about the filming, DCI Phil Jones, leading the inquiry, said: “This is a valuable opportunity for us to reach out to the nation in their homes.”

“The programme allows us to visually recreate the route home she took with the aim of jogging the memories of those people who may have seen her.”