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| For obvious reasons, the following diary contains no names. It also contains no specific dates or places. |
Crown asked if the witness would have noticed the car earlier if it had been there for about two weeks. The witness said if it had been there that long he would have noticed it earlier, as he went past the spot where it was parked to go shopping every day.
Defence declined to cross-examine.
Witness 50. Council Ranger working parking patrol with Witness 47. This witness briefly corroborated the information give by Witness 47 concerning the finding of Deceased's car. Defence declined to cross-examine.
Crown indicated to the judge that a new phase of evidence was about to begin, and he needed some time to set up some equipment in the court. The judge called a recess while this was done.
Duirng the recess, we again discussed the contradictory nature of the evidence concerning the dirtiness or cleanliness of Deceased's car. We'd now heard from two witnesses (47 and 49) who described in detail specifically the dirty nature of the car in the street, which brought their attention to it as a possible abandoned car. We had also seen photographs of the car at the police station prior to being examined by the police fingerprint expert (Witness 13), in which we could all clearly see dirt and streak marks on the car. Yet Witness 13 had said that when he examined the car it "appeared clean, as though it had just been washed". We'd checked the transcript to confirm our recollections of this.
Now seemed an appropriate time to send a note to the judge asking if we could have the state of the car as examined by Witness 13 verified. Juror A wrote the note, suggesting that perhaps Witness 13 could be recalled, shown the photos of the dirty car, and asked if this was how the car looked when he examined it. If he insisted the car was clean when he examined it, the only reasonable conclusion we could come to is that someone had washed the car after it being impounded by the police but before they had a fingerprint expert analyse it. Which would be strange, to say the least, and possibly extremely suspicious.
When we went back in, the judge read the note and told us we had a good point and he would see what he could arrange to clarify it for us.
Witness 51. Friend of Accused A. This witness was a long-time friend of Accused A, but said since the time of Accused A's arrest he had only spoken to him once by telephone. Accused A had moved in with this witness for two weeks, beginning a week after Deceased's disappearance, because of marriage problems Accused A was having with his wife.
This witness also worked for Accused A's Property Maintenance Company (PMC) for a three month period, beginning around the date when Deceased disappeared. The witness could not remember exact dates. Crown asked the witness if during this time he had access to the workshop/garage at Business Premises, and the witness confirmed this. The witness confirmed he had seen some chain at the workshop, but could not remember enough to describe how long it was or in how many pieces.
Witness 52. Legal liaison with telecommunications company who supplied mobile phone service to Accused A. Crown tendered a two-page document containing a call record of all calls from Accused A's mobile phone for dates around the day when Deceased disappeared, and had the witness describe the meanings of the columns of data. The records were projected on to a screen via a laptop computer and LCD projector, so that Crown could point out particular calls with a laser pointer. Crown also gave printed copies to the jury and highlighter markers to mark particular calls.
The witness indicated that certain calls shown to a particular number were incoming calls diverted to Accused A's pager service, shown as outgoing calls because the diversion was charged to Accused A's account. The incoming caller on these calls was not shown.
Crown pointed out a series of calls, beginning with three calls in the afternoon of the day Deceased disappeared, to Deceased's mobile number. The first call lasted 37 seconds, the next two 1 second each. Crown pointed out that Deceased was known to carry his SIM card, but not installed in a phone, and the witness agreed that in such a case any calls to his number would be picked up by his voicemail service. The witness agreed these three calls could represent a call, leaving a message on Deceased's voicemail, then two follow-up calls to try to get Deceased, which were hung up as soon as the caller realised he'd reached voicemail again.
Around 6pm that day there was a call to the Business Premises of Security Company, from a mobile base station several kilometres across the city. Another call to the Business Premises was made at 9:45pm. The next call was made to Deceased's mobile number, and lasted 39 seconds.
The next records indicated incoming calls diverted to Accused A's paging service, around midnight. These corresponded to the calls made by Deceased's girlfriend, looking for Deceased. The next outgoing call was to Deceased's girlfriend, around 2am, and from a base station well outside the Sydney suburban area, and immediately adjacent to the river in which Deceased's body was found. Two more calls were made around 7am, one to the home number of Deceased's girlfriend's sister, then there were 21 incoming calls in a row all diverted to Accused A's paging service, covering the time from 7am to 5pm (on the day after Deceased disappeared). Crown had the witness confirm that this was consistent with the user having his phone switched off for the day.
Then there were a couple of outgoing calls, and finally a call made to Boat Hire Business at 6pm, from a base station in the suburb where Boat Hire was located.
Crown then tendered a document showing all the pager messages received by Accused A's paging service on these two days. We could see the messages left by Deceased's girlfriend during the night, as well as the five messages left by Witness 40 when she was trying to contact Accused A the next day. The document also contained some additional messages from the following days, indicating two messages in separate days to Accused A to pick up some cigarettes for Accused B, specifying the same brand we'd already heard that Accused B smoked.
Defence asked a few seemingly pointless questions, obtaining clarification that calls shown to Accused A's paging service were in fact incoming calls to Accused A's mobile phone, not outgoing calls.
Witness 53. Legal liaison with telecommunications company who supplied mobile phone service to Accused B. This witness made similar descriptions of the mobile phone records of Accused B.
Accused B's records showed four calls to Business Premises in the mid-afternoon of the day Deceased disappeared, apparently requests for someone to come pick him up from the railway station. The next call shown was an incoming call to his voicemail, early in the evening. The next call was a voicemail alert call around 2am, which the witness described as being the alert that is sent to the phone to indicate to the user that a voicemail message is waiting to be heard. The witness said that typically this would be sent soon after the user had switched his phone back on, so the call record was consistent with Accused B having turned his phone off from some time in the late afternoon or early evening until around 2am.
The next call was immediately after the voicemail alert, and to the number of Deceased's girlfriend. Now she had never said that Accused B had called her, but that Accused A had called her twice during that night. Apparently from these phone records, Accused A had made those two calls, one from his own phone, one from Accused B's phone. The base station shown for this call from Accused B's phone to Deceased's girlfriend was the riverside village where Deceased's body was found.
The next call was made from the same base station some minutes later to the voicemail access number of Accused B's phone.
In cross-examination, Defence had the witness confirm that the voicemail access number was a simple 3-digit number used by all subscribers to his company, and that anyone knowing that number could access someone else's voicemail if they happened to have their phone. Defence also had the witness confirm that once the phone is on and a voicemail is waiting to be heard, the phone would continue making an alert noise every few minutes until the message was dealt with, and that a person might access the voicemail simply to stop the phone from making a noise. Defence also had the witness confirm that the incoming number which left the message on voicemail was not called from Accused B's phone at any time in the next two days.
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