Who killed Auckland personal trainer Wiremu Arapo? And who or what started the fire that consumed the crime scene? As the Crown wraps its case, George Block looks at the evidence.
An Auckland man accused of murdering his flatmate kept a notebook titled “Hidden Agenda” setting out the version of events he would share with others, a jury has heard.
He also had a book on how to spot a liar, it is alleged.
After two weeks, the Crown has finished calling evidence in the Auckland High Court trial of Sean Hayde and Gregory Hart.
The pair, friends since they started high school, are charged with murdering Wiremu Arapo, 27, and setting fire to his home in Minerva Tce in the East Auckland suburb of Cockle Bay nearly three years ago.
The Crown says they set the fire to destroy the evidence of the alleged killing, then pretended to try battle their way back into the home as a charade for witnesses.
Hayde is also charged with assaulting, strangling and threatening to kill his former partner.
They have pleaded not guilty to all charges. Each will claim the other is solely responsible for killing Arapo.
Hayde’s alleged attack on his former partner has been characterised as a prelude to Arapo’s killing five weeks later on October 20, 2020.
Crown prosecutor Ned Fletcher described the alleged murder as the crescendo of rising tensions driven by a tangled web of resentments and infidelities.
“This is a case about relationships, relationships gone wrong, and their snowballing effects,” Fletcher said.
The jury heard Arapo, a personal trainer, had given Hart notice to leave the house.
Hart who, like Arapo, had served in the Army, was described by the Crown as a layabout flatmate frequently behind in rent and bills.
Arapo was growing increasingly frustrated and was not shy about voicing his views to Hart.
Hayde took issue with Arapo’s criticism of his childhood friend, the jury heard.
He also resented Arapo’s continuing closeness with his new partner, according to text messages obtained by police.
Arapo was Hayde’s boxing tutor and it was through the personal trainer that Hayde met the woman.
Hayde started an affair with the female friend of Arapo’s while still in a relationship with the woman he is charged with attacking, the prosecution says.
While he was initially happy to play the role of matchmaker, Arapo came to dislike Hayde’s relationship with his friend after his alleged attack on his former partner came to light, as laid bare by a text he allegedly sent Hayde the day before he died.
“It’s Wiremu. Don’t f*** the neighbour. [She is] my girl and I don’t want you to hurt her,” Arapo texted Hayde on October 19.
Two days earlier, Hayde texted Hart saying as soon as he moved out he would attack Arapo, according to evidence presented by the Crown.
“Bro the day you get your bond back I’ll actually kick his teeth out,” Hayde allegedly wrote.
The Crown’s case is that the men attacked and killed Arapo on the evening of October 20.
Forensics including a lack of evidence in his blood of smoke inhalation, and burns to the inside of his skull indicating a pre-fire fracture, show Arapo was dead before the fire started, the court heard.
After the fire and before their arrests seven weeks later, Hayde and Hart gave conflicting accounts of what happened that night, the Crown says.
Hart told one of Arapo’s closest friends, Mohammed Muzammil, that he was outside having a cigarette while Hayde and Arapo were inside drinking wine and playing PlayStation.
Hayde allegedly told Muzammil he was outside with Hart when they saw smoke and tried to run back inside.
A woman living near the Minerva Tce house, Zelda Dammert, told the court she heard the sounds of a fight from the home just before the fire erupted, including a man yelling and the sound of someone being thrown into the rental’s French doors.
She also heard what sounded like chairs being thrown around inside the home.
“I was so afraid somebody was going to get killed,” she said.
It was comments such as those from neighbours, the results of Arapo’s autopsy, the inconsistencies in Hayde and Hart’s accounts and other forensic testing that led detectives from Counties Manukau CIB to suspect there was more to the death and launch a homicide inquiry.
The Herald reported on November 19 2020, nearly a month after the blaze, that it had become a homicide investigation.
Five days later, Hart and Muzammil had another phone conversation. Muzammil brought up the article and the questions it raised in light of the inconsistencies in Hayde and Hart’s comments after the fire.
Police were listening in to the call.
Muzammil seemed to know a lot more about the fire than he did at the time of his earlier conversation with Hart.
He repeatedly asked Hart if there had been a fight before the fire.
“Nah bro,” said Hart. “There, yeah wasn’t any issue between me and him, at all.”
The fact Muzammil seemed to suddenly know a lot more was not lost on Hart’s lawyer Paul Borich KC.
Under cross-examination from Borich, Detective Timothy Harnett said the intercepted chat was what police describe as a “consent call”, a legal covert investigative technique.
Muzammil knew he was being recorded and was given more information by police with the aim of keeping their target talking to hopefully reveal more details.
“The idea of a consent call is to encourage a person to keep communicating,” Harnett said.
Harnett described how police found a notebook under a coffee table in the sleepout of the property in Papatoetoe where Hart was living after the fire and before his December 8 arrest.
The manufacturer had embossed the phrase “Hidden Agenda” on the cover.
Someone had attempted to cross out the phrase Hidden Agenda in pen.
Inside the notebook, Hart laid out his version of events.
Harnett said they approached Cotton On, the clothing and stationery company that manufactured the Typo-branded notebook, to obtain a fresh copy of the same type as Hart’s.
It showed several pages were missing from Hart’s version.
Police senior document examiner David Boot said the notepad had certain indentations that could not be sourced from text found on the pages still in the book, indicating the removed pages contained writing.
The limited number of decipherable indentations were similar in content to the writing found on the existing pages, but not exactly the same, Boot said.
Among the dozens of witnesses called by a Crown was a woman Hart dated briefly after the the fire.
Under cross-examination from Hayde’s lawyer Julie-Anne Kincade KC, the woman said Hart had told her he had an e-book titled How to Spot a Liar, written by a former military interrogator.
When he was bailed several days after his arrest on December 8, Hart returned to his family home in Papatoetoe where he spoke to a group of people including his ex-partner, the mother of his son.
“Sean just lost it,” he allegedly told the group.
“Sean and Wiremu never liked each other, they hated each other.”
The prosecution claims Hayde and Hart used petrol as an accelerant to burn down the house after allegedly killing Arapo.
An empty petrol canister was found in the boot of the white Holden Astra Hayde used to drive to Minerva Tce on the day of the fire. Hayde bought a small amount of petrol from Mobil Highland Park on the day of Arapo’s death.
ESR forensic scientists found petrol residue on a shoe left at the scene.
Kincade has raised the possibility the fire was started by a candle. Muzammil earlier told the court Arapo had lit a candle to make the home smell better as part of a spring clean.
Crown witness Peter Wilding, former national fire investigation manager for Fire and Emergency NZ, told the court the cause of the fire was officially classified as “undetermined”.
A detector used to test for the presence of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) did not find enough to establish the presence of a liquid accelerant such as petrol.
But Wilding believed the behaviour of the fire could still suggest an accelerant was used.
“The speed of the fire is remarkable,” he said.
Other signs of a fire fuelled by an accelerant were the collapse of the roof within five minutes and the fact the blaze remained largely contained to Arapo’s wing of the house, where investigators believe the fire started near a couch, Wilding said.
He did not think a small candle in a glass cylinder could have caused the fire.
On Friday, Hayde’s defence team called experienced English forensic scientist Greg Waite who, during a 25-year career in public and private service, has investigated many homicides and fatal fires, the court heard.
In recent years he has run his own private forensic consultancy, he said via video link from the UK.
He was more open to the candle theory.
Waite said a candle could have been a viable ignition source in the Minerva Tce fire.
The speed and intensity of the fire, and the rapid compromise of the roof, could be a result of the early stages of the fire being largely driven by the extremely flammable and intensely burning polyurethane foam in the couch, he said.
“I certainly can’t rule out an accelerant has been used in this case, I just haven’t seen any evidence for it,” Waite said.
He rejected Wilding’s conclusion that the limited spread of the fire suggested an accelerant had been used, saying the degree of travel of the fire was a result of ventilation rather than acceleration.
The trial continues on tomorrow, when Kincade will open her case in Hayde’s defence.
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