Julia DeLuney is on trial in the High Court at Wellington for the murder of her 79-year-old mother Helen Gregory (pictured inset) in her Khandallah home.
Julia DeLuney is on trial in the High Court at Wellington for the murder of her 79-year-old mother Helen Gregory (pictured inset) in her Khandallah home.
Lawyers representing the former school teacher accused of murdering her mother have suggested the police had tunnel vision while investigating the death and had failed to consider that someone else may have been responsible.
Police had not contemplated whether Helen Gregory may have died as a result of a burglaryamid suspicious activity occurring in her neighbourhood, they claimed.
The Crown has suggested DeLuney, who dealt in cryptocurrency, was in financial difficulty and attacked her mother before leaving the house, driving to her own home and then returning later with her husband.
DeLuney told police that when she left Gregory’s house, her mother had only very minor injuries, yet she’d returned to a “warzone.”
Photographs shown to the jury showed large quantities of blood in a cupboard leading to the attic, in the hallway and the bedroom, where Gregory’s body was found.
Julia DeLuney has been accused of murdering her mother, Helen Gregory. NZME / Mark Mitchell
Today at the trial, Detective Constable Kristina O’Connor, the officer responsible for the search of the Baroda St property, told the court Gregory was a very meticulous and ordered person.
“After 10 days in Helen’s house, I got to know her style and order,” she said in evidence.
O’Connor explained her job in the case was to look for anything that was out of place.
The search of the small bedroom where Gregory was found took police nine days.
O’Connor saw two clumps of bloody hair with flesh attached near Gregory’s body, and a broken pinkish acrylic nail. There was another clump of bloodied hair in the hallway.
A bloody handprint was found on a bedsheet while luminol testing found another on an ottoman in the bedroom.
Outlining the efforts police made to search the house, she told the jury it had been searched “down to the square inch”, taking 150 pages of notes in 10 days.
This included the perimeter of the house.
O’Connor said all the curtains and blinds were closed, except for the patio entrance, which was the main thoroughfare because the front door was locked.
All windows and doors were closed, except for a small bathroom window which was open a fraction.
A burglary complaint, a knock and a suspicious man
DeLuney’s lawyers have suggested the police had tunnel vision while investigating Gregory’s death and had failed to consider that someone else may have been responsible.
While cross-examining Detective Sergeant Giulia Boffatoday, defence lawyer Quentin Duff referred to incidents of suspicious activity in the area around the time of Gregory’s death.
This included Gregory’s burglary complaint to police in the weeks before she died, a neighbour’s report that someone had knocked on their door between 9.30pm - 10pm on the night Gregory was killed and an off-duty police officer’s report of a suspicious man in Khandallah park the following day.
The court heard Gregory gave police the name of the person she thought was responsible for the burglary.
In relation to the neighbour’s report of the door knock, Boffa said the area was extensively canvased and people in the area were spoken to.
Julia DeLuney's lawyer Quentin Duff suggested the police investigation into the death was narrowly focused. Photo / Mark Mitchell
She rejected a suggestion by Duff that the investigation into Gregory’s death hadn’t contemplated that she may have died as a result of a burglary.
Boffa said inconsistent information had come to light following Gregory’s death.
She said there was information that a fall was the likely cause, yet the scene, which included a lot of blood, painted a different picture.
Boffa said DeLuney’s account was also inconsistent with what police later learned about her movements on the night of Gregory’s death.
Asked about the inconsistencies, Boffa said DeLuney had not mentioned that she had made several stops on the way to collect her husband or that she had changed her clothes.
Duff challenged that, saying DeLuney had stopped at a petrol station five minutes after leaving her mother’s house.
That CCTV showed she was wearing different clothes to the clothes she was wearing while at her mother’s, he said.
Yet Boffa said she’d recorded that DeLuney had changed her clothes twice on the trip.
When Duff asked if she’d seen footage of that, Boffa said she’d been shown images, but hadn’t seen the actual footage.
At one point, Duff asked Boffa if she had kept an open mind about who might have been responsible for the death.
“We always do”, Boffa responded.
The trial is expected to last up to five weeks.
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.
