Julia DeLuney is on trial at the High Court in Wellington where she denies murdering her 79-year-old mother Helen Gregory (insert) in her Khandallah home in January 2024. Photo / Mark Mitchell.
WARNING: This story contains forensic details and images of the scene that could be upsetting.
A highly experienced ESR scientist who was called to a sudden death at a Wellington house, thought the crime scene had been staged, and she was dealing with a homicide within minutes of arriving.
Forensic senior scientist Glenys Knight thought what she encountered in that Khandallah house was so unusual, the following day she video called a more experienced colleague in Christchurch to show her the blood staining inside the Baroda St property.
Helen Gregory, 79, was found dead inside her house on January 24, last year. Her daughter, Julia DeLuney is on trial at the High Court at Wellington, where she denies murdering her mother.
She says her mother fell while putting toilet paper in the attic, and after helping her mother to bed, with only minor injuries, she drove to her house on the Kapiti coast to get her husband to come back and help.
They returned to find the house looking like a warzone, saying someone else had entered the house and attacked her mother, she said.
The Crown says that DeLuney violently attacked her mother, possibly with a vase, before staging the scene to make it look like she’d fallen from the attic
Asked by Crown prosecutor Stephanie Bishop to comment on the scenario of someone falling in the cupboard and being supported to the bedroom, Knight said in her opinion, the blood staining that had been found on that night wasn’t consistent with that scenario.
She said in her opinion there was no evidence that an impact had occurred inside the cupboard, and if there had been and if someone was bleeding heavily, she would have expected to see blood drips and bloody handprints where someone had tried to get themselves up.
The first thing you do when you hit your head is put your hand to your head, she said.
She said the blood staining in the cupboard was consistent with a heavily blood-stained person or fabric, or both, coming into contact with the surface and transferring the blood.
The blood stains found on the items at the bottom of the cupboard - including an ironing board, phone, two bulky packages of toilet paper and a vacuum cleaner - were almost entirely made by blood transfer, she said.
She also suggested the blood patterns didn’t support the idea of a fall, explaining that inside the cupboard, telling the court it was almost like someone had “poured” blood down the back wall.
She also explained that dripping blood created red droplets that left circular stains.
There was only one blood droplet found in the corridor, and in her opinion, the bloody swipe marks in the hallway looked like they’d been made by fabric, some in a right-to-left motion and applied after the injuries in the bedroom.
She also said blood on some of the swipe marks appeared to have clotted, a process that she estimated would take 5-10 minutes.
“Blood does not come out of the head already clotted,” she said.
The court heard of the extensive blood staining on the bedroom walls and furniture.
ESR analysis of the room showed blood splatter at a height of 1.6m on the bedroom walls, large saturation stains on the carpet and a short drag mark underneath a bedside table, which had been left by a person or object, she said.
Knight told the court that an initial impact is unlikely to leave any splatter, because it breaks the surface of the skin, and the blood begins to pool. The impacts that follow are what create blood spatter, she said.
Asked by Bishop to describe how many times Gregory had been hit in the bedroom, Knight said there had been 10.
She said whoever had attacked Gregory would have been left with quite a lot of blood staining, particularly on the lower half of their body.
The court also heard Knight had climbed up to the attic to take some of the photographs now being shown to the jury.
Knight explained the ladder’s four rungs were nailed to two vertical pieces of wood, which ran from floor to ceiling. There was only a narrow gap between the rungs and the wall, making it impossible to get your foot on top of the rung, she said.
Knight explained that, unlike a typical ladder, which is on a lean, this one went straight up, and she’d clung to it to climb up to the attic, which hadn’t been easy.
“You’re going up almost on your toes, I felt like I was rock-climbing,” she said.
While there was blood on the ladder, she said she could see none in on the attic floor or on the bottom two ladder rungs.
A vase, which police believe is similar to the one that was at Gregory’s house in the months before her death, but has never been found, was passed around and inspected by the jury.
Knight examined the vase and gave her opinion as to how it compared to the rings found on the kitchen bench, which were detected under luminol testing. The vase has never been found, and the police were unable to match the size of the rings with other household objects.
Knight told the court she couldn’t rule out that if the vase she examined had been placed upside down on the kitchen bench, it could have made a similar impression to the one found on the tile on the kitchen bench when the house was tested.
But she also reiterated that she was unable to confirm that it was blood that had left those impressions. While Luminol had tested positive, a second, different test had returned a negative result. She explained this could have been because the blood was diluted or the Luminol had detected a substance other than blood.
During cross-examination, DeLuney’s lawyer Quentin Duff questioned Knight about the preparation of her ESR report and the peer review process.
He also asked her about her impressions of arriving at the scene. Knight said she had been told it was a sudden death, but within two minutes of entering the house, she realised it was a homicide.
This was because of the blood staining she saw on the hallway walls on the way to the bedroom.
The following day, once Gregory’s body had been removed, she turned her mind to the blood stains and, because they were so unusual, decided to video call her Christchurch colleague, Rosalyn Rough.
She told the court that Rough also agreed that what they were looking at appeared to be a staged scene.
But Duff suggested Knight had reached this conclusion before January 28, when she began inspecting the hallway and utility cupboard area.
Knight, who had more than two decades of experience and had attended more than 150 crime scenes, rejected that, saying her examination of the scene had been incredibly detailed, she’d taken more notes than was usual for a scientist to take at a homicide.
“I’ve examined every blood stain to ensure I was coming to the right conclusion.”
She explained that the blood clots and blood swipes she’d seen on the hallway walls and inside the utility cupboard when she first walked into the house had seemed odd to her. She described some of the blood flow on the walls as “sluggish.”
But she said her initial focus had been on removing Gregory’s body from the house.
The trial before Justice Peter Churchman is now in its second week of what is expected to be a four to five week trial.
Catherine Hutton is an Open Justice reporter, based in Wellington. She has worked as a journalist for 20 years, including at the Waikato Times and RNZ. Most recently she was working as a media adviser at the Ministry of Justice.