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| For obvious reasons, the following diary contains no names. It also contains no specific dates or places. |
The Crown alleged that Accused A planned the murder alone, purchasing the chain and D-shackles, and hiring a boat to dispose of the body. When Deceased arrived at Business Premises for the arranged meeting with Accused A, Accused B was there, having been refused a lift to the station by Witness 34. Accused A then drafted Accused B into the plan to kill Deceased, and Accused B agreed in order to clear his debts with Accused A.
The Crown alleged they had cooperated to kill Deceased at the Business Premises. Crown suggested Accused A pulled the trigger on the gun, but in either case, both accused were guilty of murder. They covered the head of Deceased with a plastic bag and wrapped him in plastic sheeting to prevent spilling of any blood, then took him to the boat which was parked in the garage on a trailer. They placed the body in the gap where the middle seat was removed.
Crown alleged that Accused A had then instructed Accused B to drive Deceased's car to the location where it was later found. Accused B did so, looking up the street in Deceased's street directory and thus leaving his fingerprint on the page showing that street. Accused B then wiped the car clean of fingerprints and waited for Accused A to pick him up. Meanwhile, Accused A had driven his own car to the service station where records show he purchased petrol, drinks, snack foods, and cigarettes - supplies for both Accused A and B for a trip to the river where they would dump the body. Accused A drove back to pick up Accused B from the dumped car and went back to Business Premises to activate the alarm system, attach the boat to the car, and drive off.
They drove to the river. Before going out on the water, Accused A thought suddenly that he didn't want Deceased's mobile phone ringing while they were out dumping the body, possibly alerting someone nearby to their presence and suspicious activities. So he phoned Deceased's mobile number from his own phone - leaving the call record from that area - to see if it would ring, so they didn't have to unwrap the body unnecessarily. It didn't ring, so they proceeded to dump the body in the river.
Later, Deceased's girlfriend called Accused A's mobile, being redirected to his pager. Accused A got the page, and agonised for nearly an hour before returning the call, using Accused B's mobile phone, either because his own was out of range or had run out of power. When he switched on Acused B's phone, it rang to indicate a message waiting to be heard, so he cut this off and called Deceased's girlfriend. He spun a story about going to dinner with Deceased, telling her they ate at a restaurant on one particular road, but not the name of the restaurant. Some time later, Accused B used his own phone to access his messages. These phone calls were made from the area of the river, as evidenced by the phone records.
They drove back to Sydney and went to their respective homes. Accused A called Deceased's girlfriend again in the morning to return another message, then switched his phone off until late in the afternoon in order to sleep. After waking, he drove to the Boat Hire Business to return the boat, calling them to let them know he was bringing it back - leaving another call record in the appropriate area.
The Crown then outlined an alternative scenario, in which the accused were innocent. This would require some unexplained assassins trailing Deceased, jumping him as he left the Restaurant at which he and Accused A had innocently been having a meal - with Deceased neglecting to phone his girlfriend to find out where he needed to pick her up from or to let her know he would be late. They would coincidentally use exactly the same gauge of chain and size and number of D-shackles that Accused A bought a week earlier to weigh down the body, and dump it in the same area that Accused A and B happened to be making phone calls from the same night. Crown argued that very clearly, the chances of this happening were astoundingly small, so small as to be negligible, leavng us with the only possible conclusion that Accused A and B killed Deceased.
Crown described this as a most horrible and cold-blooded crime. He quoted Shakespeare, calling it "Murder most foul" (from Hamlet).
Crown noted that if only Deceased's body had not been found, the incriminating evidence of the chain, shackles, phone calls from the area where the body was found, significance of the boat hire, the 0.22 ammunition, the shot to the lower brainstem area that Accused A knew about... none of this would have pointed to Accused A and B's involvement. If only the body had not surfaced, they would have committed an almost perfect crime. But, and here he quoted Shakespeare again, this time from The Merchant of Venice: "truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long".
Crown then proceeded to deconstruct Accused A's police statement, indicating that he lied about almost everything on it.
Throughout this deconstruction, Crown raised many pieces of evidence, and explained how they all fit together to give a coherent picture of the events leading up to and following the death of Deceased, in the scenario of Accused A and B killing him, and how this was inconsistent with any other reasonable explanation. The day ended amidst this field of points of evidence.
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