A young Chinese man was last night convicted of slitting his girlfriend's throat because she said she was leaving him - and then trying to wipe out any witnesses to the crime.
A jury in the High Court at Auckland took nine hours to find Wen Hui Cui guilty of murdering his girlfriend, Bin Lin, known as Ruby, and of fatally stabbing her friend Ge Li in the heart.
He was also found guilty of attempting to murder another of Ruby's friends, Jun Xin, by stabbing him in the chest.
When North Shore police arrived at the house in Black Teal Close, Unsworth Heights, they walked into a bloodbath. Ruby lay dead on a bed upstairs, her throat slit from ear to ear.
Outside, Ge Li lay dead in a pool of blood on the road. Jun Xin was critically injured but survived.
Over three weeks the jury heard how Cui, besotted with Ruby, fell into a deep despair when she disappeared for the weekend in April last year.
Over that time he tried to phone her 50 times.
According to the Crown, she later phoned to say she was coming around, but only to pick up her things.
Prosecutors Ross Burns and Louise Freyer said that the jealous and obsessive Cui could not bear to give her up and decided to kill her.
When she arrived at the house, Ge Lin and Jun Xin waited for her by their car.
Moments later they heard Ruby screaming and phoned the police on a cellphone.
A series of dramatic 111 calls was played to the jury. In the final anguished call, Ruby and Ge Li are already dead and Jun Xin, badly wounded, is pleading for help.
The Crown maintained that after killing Ruby, Cui washed and changed out of his blood-soaked clothes, collected $1500 and walked calmly out of the house towards the two men.
It was the Crown case that having dispatched Ruby, Cui wanted to make sure there were no witnesses.
Without warning he stabbed Ge Li and then Jun Xin almost before they had time to react.
Later, with the help of friends, he escaped to Paihia, where the police found him three days later.
Defence counsel Barry Hart and Chris Comeskey argued that Cui was acting in self-defence, which was a complete defence to all the charges.
Cui told the jury that he confronted Ruby and told her either to give him an explanation or to kill him with one of four knives he placed on the bed.
He claimed that Ruby picked up a knife and tried to stab him, saying he had a "small dick" and didn't satisfy her.
Mr Hart said that Cui instinctively acted to defend himself. Cui claimed that Ruby told him the men outside were members of the feared 14K Triad.
Mr Hart said that when Cui went outside the men made insulting remarks about his mother and threatened him. One went for something in his pocket. Again, Cui acted in self-defence.
Mr Hart also advanced the partial defence of provocation, which would reduce murder to manslaughter.
In addition, he said that Cui was intoxicated, twice over the limit to drive, and was suffering from stress, lack of sleep, lack of food and the effects of Chinese painkillers said to contain morphine.
The Crown said self-defence did "not even get a look in".
Ruby was in no position to be a threat and even if she did pick up a knife, the repeated stabbings and the classic defence wounds she suffered clearly showed that Cui was not acting in self-defence.
The Crown was equally dismissive of the claim that Cui lost his self-control because of provocation. The prosecution said the alleged taunts were merely an afterthought dreamed up by Cui.
The defence maintained that Cui was so grossly intoxicated he was incapable of forming a conscious murderous intent.
In her summing-up, Justice Judith Potter told the jury that a person was responsible for an intent fuelled by alcohol and that a "drunken intent was still an intent".
The Crown said that Cui's actions were not those of a man in a blind panic, but the actions of someone in control - a jealous, possessive man who was upset at Ruby's ending their relationship.
Cui will be sentenced next month.
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