“You’re not f***ing leaving me, baby. You’re not going with that c***.
“... I’m going to shank him up.”
Those were among the words murder defendant Chrishan Raju told then-partner Georgina Hellawell on the day he stabbed her male friend to death, the woman told jurors today in the High Court at Auckland.
Raju, 27, started his trial this week by acknowledging he was the one who killed Joeli Rankin, whom everyone called “Skunks”, on February 26 last year. But the homicide was justified as self-defence after Rankin forced entry into the Mt Albert home with a machete, the defence contends.
Hellawell wiped away tears as she sat in the witness box today, recalling the lead-up to and the aftermath of the incident. It was a Monday afternoon and she and the defendant had been arguing all through the weekend, she testified.
The last straw, she suggested, was when Raju yelled at her that day to “get my f***ing kids out of my room [because] he was trying to sleep”.
“I just wanted to leave, like, leave forever,” she said. “I told him we were breaking up and I couldn’t do this any more ... He was telling me I’m not going.”
She first asked other friends for a ride but they wouldn’t pick her up because she didn’t have gas money, she said, adding that Raju got more angry when he found out she had called Rankin asking for help.
“I looked at him as a brother,” she told jurors of Rankin, explaining that Raju had never liked him.
“I could call him for anything and he’d be there...
“Chris would think that me and Joeli would sleep together ... I’d always tell him there was nothing going on. Chris wouldn’t believe me.”
Over the course of three or four calls to Rankin, Hellawell said her partner retrieved a steak knife from the kitchen and reiterated that she wouldn’t be leaving the house with the other man.
“I’m going to shank that bitch if he tries – f***ing bitch n****r,” she recalled her partner saying of Rankin, allegedly driving his point home by stabbing the wall with the knife.
“In all honesty, I didn’t think he would,” she told jurors of the alleged threat. “I thought he was just saying it to scare me and wouldn’t actually do it.”
When Rankin learned of the knife, it didn’t deter him, she said. He said he would bring a machete. Hellawell told jurors she thought the presence of a machete would cause Raju to back down and “Chris would just let us go in peace”.
But when Rankin showed up at the house, there was nothing peaceful about it, a video of the incident showed.
Video, filmed by Rankin’s partner, showed him shouting taunts as he walked up to the home. The loud crack of shattering glass could be heard in the courtroom as jurors watched Rankin break the front window of Raju’s bedroom.
He pounded on the locked front door and tried, unsuccessfully, to kick it in
“F***ing open the door!” Hellawell recalled Rankin yelling, explaining that she yelled back to her friend: “Chris has a knife and he doesn’t want us to leave.”
The video ended as Rankin climbed a fence into the backyard. When he entered the house moments later through a broken ranch slider, Raju was still in his room, the witness said.
“Where is he?” she recalled her friend saying as he walked past her.
“He’s in the bedroom – be careful, be careful,” she responded as he walked straight to the room, she told jurors.
At that point, she said, Rankin was holding the machete but it was to his side. She next heard a scuffle from inside the room before both men spilled out into the hallway.
She gripped her children and closed her eyes as blood started to spatter on to the walls, she said, explaining that she screamed for both men to stop.
After the hostility stopped, she ran her children to a bedroom then attended to her friend, who she could see was clearly in a bad way, she said.
“I’m sorry, baby, I had to,” she recalled the defendant telling her. “You know I was tired. I didn’t even eat this morning. I just woke up.”
Rankin’s girlfriend called 111 as Hellawell did chest compressions, she said. An ambulance later arrived but the paramedics wouldn’t go inside until police also arrived, she said, acknowledging that she took her anger and frustration out on first responders.
During cross-examination, defence lawyer Jasper Rhodes suggested directly to the witness that she was exaggerating or outright fabricating her ex-partner’s behaviour that day to make him look worse before the jury.
“How can it get any worse?” she responded, disagreeing.
The defence lawyer also suggested the witness was glossing over Rankin’s alleged bad behaviour. He noted an incident 11 days earlier in which Hellawell witnessed Rankin challenging another man to a fight.
Rankin had long harboured a resentment of the defendant, Rhodes suggested, pointing to past statements in which Rankin called the defendant “a bum” and “no good” for the woman. The confrontation that day had nothing to do Hellawell’s intention to leave, he said, suggesting it was instead about Rankin’s simmering dislike of the defendant.
She disagreed.
Rhodes directed the witness back to her earlier statement about the scuffle in the bedroom. The defendant had emerged from the bedroom first with his back to the witness, she said.
That suggests Raju was backing away from Rankin, a defensive position rather than an aggressive one, the lawyer contended.
The trial is set to continue tomorrow before Justice Michele Wilkinson-Smith and the jury.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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