CCTV footage shows murder-accused Julia DeLuney changed her clothes on the night of her mother’s death, before fetching someone to help.
She is accused of murdering her mother, 79-year-old Helen Gregory, in the woman’s home in Khandallah, Wellington, on January 24, 2024 — to which DeLuney has pleaded not guilty.
The high court jury was shown a number of video clips of DeLuney coming and going from her mother’s Baroda Street house.
CCTV footage from BP Johnsonville shows her arriving at 5.47pm — on the way to her mother’s — wearing blue jeans and a vivid green shirt. She is seen putting petrol in her car, a black Citroen.
She arrived at her mother’s at 6.10pm, according to a neighbour’s CCTV camera.
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Between then and 9.40pm, when that same camera captured her leaving the house — pictured as only a tiny figure holding a light at the top left of the screen — the Crown says she violently attacked her mother, leaving her dead or dying in one of the bedrooms, before staging the scene to look like she had fallen from the attic.
Her clothing is not discernable in the nighttime CCTV footage.
But the defence says Helen Gregory did fall from the attic and DeLuney went to get help, in which time someone else caused those fatal injuries.
Later that night, footage from a different petrol station, Mobil Johnsonville, shows DeLuney arriving in the forecourt at 9.50pm — only minutes after she left her mother’s — wearing a pink top, black pants and black shoes, and with wet hair.
Constable Timothy Stott, who was on the stand to walk the jury through the footage, told the court there appeared to be a black plastic bag on the passenger seat — although he stressed he could not say for certain.
The cameras captured DeLuney walking to the after-hours window, where she bought a lighter.
The footage shows she is wearing bright red or orange nails, but one is missing from her thumb, which is visible as she presents her debit card.
The bin bag and the early morning rubbish truck
The jury also heard DeLuney disposed of a black bin bag in a passing rubbish truck the morning after the death.
Footage was captured by cameras attached to the back and sides of a truck doing its rounds in Paraparaumu Beach on 25 January.
The truck’s driver, Gavin Twist, told the court a woman approached him outside Moby Dickens Bookshop just before 7am.
The defence does not dispute that this woman was DeLuney.
Video footage from the truck’s cameras shows her carrying a large black bin bag, cradled in her arms, as she walked down the footpath.
The truck had just emptied a red wheelie bin, which Twist said contained waste from the bookshop, when DeLuney approached.
Twist said: “So she had asked, very nicely, if she could […] put the bag in the bin. And I — because it’s early morning, big day for me — I just went, ‘Yeah’.”
The footage shows DeLuney leaning over the red wheelie bin to put the bundle inside it, and then the truck’s automatic arm picks up the bin again, and tips the black bag into the truck.
Another camera, with a view of the truck’s contents, shows it being pushed aside with a sweeper arm and compacted into the other rubbish.
The trial is in its third week and is expected to take up to five in total, with the defence yet to call its witnesses.
rnz.co.nz