A Crown prosecutor has told a court Wellington woman Julia DeLuney violently attacked her mother, leaving her dead or dying, in January last year.
A post-mortem found Khandallah resident Helen Gregory, aged 79, died from complications of blunt force trauma, with 12 lacerations to her head and three skull fractures.
Her daughter DeLuney is charged with murder, to which she has pleaded not guilty, with her trial opening Monday morning in the High Court in Wellington.
Crown prosecutor Nicole Jamieson told the court that on the evening of January 24, DeLuney visited her mother to book tickets to the ballet.
But sometime between 8.16pm – when DeLuney’s email address received confirmation of the ticket purchase – and 9.45pm when she left the address, the Crown said she violently attacked her mother and then staged the scene to make it look like she had suffered a fall.
But DeLuney’s defence lawyers said the police investigation had suffered from tunnel vision, and failed to consider that someone else killed Gregory.
The Crown’s case
Jamieson laid out the case for the jurors.
Allegedly, DeLuney organised a visit with her mother via email, with the purpose of booking tickets to the ballet.
She arrived a little after 6pm.
Jamieson said phone records showed DeLuney messaged her husband on Facebook around 7.20pm, to say they were looking through her mother’s clothes, and sent a photo of them together in the wardrobe.
DeLuney’s email account received a Ticketmaster confirmation of purchase for tickets to the ballet, and then at 8.16pm, DeLuney messaged her husband to say they were having dinner.
She left at 9.45pm.
It is in this window that the Crown alleged DeLuney attacked her mother, leaving her fatally injured.
She said it was the Crown’s understanding that DeLuney was experiencing financial difficulty, involved in trading cryptocurrency, and had recently received $15,000 from her mother to invest, which the Crown said it appeared she used instead to pay off her own debt.
Jamieson said later evidence would show the possibility that Gregory was attacked using a vase which normally stood on the bedside table.
DeLuney then drove home, stopped at a Mobil station, and then picked up her husband before returning to the Baroda St address. Her husband began performing CPR and an ambulance was called, but first responders were not successful, and Gregory was pronounced dead at 11.45pm.
Jamieson said the case would be “an issue of identity”.
“Who killed Ms Gregory? And that is because Ms DeLuney denies it was her.”
She said in DeLuney’s version of events, her mother went to put toilet roll in the attic and fell. At that stage, her injuries were not “significant”.
DeLuney put her in a bedroom and left her to go and pick up her husband to help, and when they returned, they found blood and significant injuries.
According to Jamieson: “The Crown says that what Ms DeLuney told the police is not the truth.”
The case in defence
Defence lawyer Quentin Duff told the jury the police investigation had failed to consider that someone else might have killed Gregory.
He said from the very beginning, the “rot of tunnel vision” had excluded DeLuney’s “honest, if not perfect explanation” of the evening, and the case had “developed a contagious case of tunnel vision”, which excluded the most obvious explanation – that someone else had killed her.
He said later evidence would show Gregory’s phone ascending one floor into the attic at 9.30pm.
He asserted that between 9.30pm and 10pm, a neighbour told police someone had knocked on their door, and when they went to investigate, nobody was there, introducing the possibility of a third person to the evening.
The Crown began calling witnesses this afternoon.
The trial is expected to go for up to five weeks, and there are set to be more than 80 witnesses called in total.
rnz.co.nz
