With her lawyer, she had two meetings with Detective Stacey Bailey but declined to make any statement and was charged in March this year with causing Ms McGarva's death by the unlawful act of dangerous driving, thereby committing manslaughter. She also did not give evidence in the trial, which started on Wednesday.
Trial judge Justice Denis Clifford, however, had yesterday issued the regular warning to the jury of nine men and three women that they should take no inference from an accused exercising their right to silence.
The jury deliberated for just over an hour-and-a-half before delivering a not guilty verdict just after 5.30pm.
The dead woman's brother Neil McGarva, who also lost brother Steve in a crash caused by a drunken driver on the Takapau Plains in 2001, said family sitting through the trial were not surprised by the outcome but believed Sayers had told doctors what happened and patient-doctor confidentiality and pre-trial decisions prevented the full details from being put to the jury.
"We feel just cheated, devastated," he said outside the courthouse. "There's nothing, really, we can do."
Mr Forster said last night: "The best evidence we've got is that she could not have recalled the crash, because of the way she was affected by amnesia".
"Initially she told doctors she had no memory of the crash, but as she was being monitored all the time for risk of self-harm, it became a real risk that she was adopting suggestions (about what happened)."
Like members of the McGarva family, Sayers' parents, from Puketapu, with Mr Sayers' sister, were in court throughout the trial and were "incredibly sorry" for what had happened and realised how "terribly hard" the loss of Pam McGarva had been for her family.
He said that as is often the case in similar tragedies, the trial process had prevented them from expressing their condolences to the McGarva family earlier, for fear it may have been seen as attempting to pervert the course of justice.
Mr Forster had been authorised to express the sympathies on their behalf.
The jury retired at 3.48pm yesterday, after the defence decided against calling any evidence and prosecution and defence closing addresses and the judge's summary were completed in little more than an hour. The jury had been told the crash happened just minutes after Sayers' boyfriend Shane Phillips had told her it was "over" and to leave their unit in Tamatea. She was on anti-depressant medication at the time, and a friend told the court that several months earlier, in an emotional state after drinking and using cannabis and the synthetic K2, Sayers had spoken of cutting her wrists when she was in the navy some years earlier. She had said being with Mr Phillips was the best thing that had happened to her, and she would "probably" kill herself if the relationship ended.
Mr Walker conceded it was a circumstantial case, but asked the jury to consider the coincidences, including that Sayers had driven across the road and into the path of the only other car on the 100km/h straight section of Prebensen Drive west of the intersection with the Hawke's Bay Expressway. No one saw the crash.
Mr Forster argued that while police had not established an "accidental" cause, the Crown was unable to eliminate some possibilities, including distraction amid the stress Sayers' had endured during the afternoon.
