A woman’s desperate screams pierced the suburban silence, rousing neighbours in their homes when many would have been starting to consider sleep.
“Help!” Charlie Watson yelled out from the pitch-black void of an expansive backyard, seemingly to anyone who would listen. “He’s trying to stab me!”
The screams continued, sometimes intermingled with the “terrifying growl” of a male voice.
And then, perhaps more chillingly, they ceased.
The mother of four, whose children slept inside, had been stabbed in the throat by her abusive partner, Tupaea Kerr. By the time police found her and rushed to her aid in the backyard of the Glen Eden, West Auckland home, she was already dying from blood loss.
A vivid and graphic account of Watson’s last minutes of life was shared with jurors today as Kerr’s murder trial continues in the High Court at Auckland.
The defendant, 35, has acknowledged through his lawyers that he had an appalling history of domestic violence against Watson. The defence has also acknowledged he is the person responsible for the fatal wound to her neck on November 4, 2024.
But not all homicides equate to murder, lawyer Arthur Fairley told jurors at the outset of the trial this week, suggesting his client never had murderous intent.
Two of those who went outside to investigate the screams were Taulaga Junior Auimatagi and his father, Alini Auimatagi. Their movement activated a motion-censored CCTV camera outside their house.
The footage did not show the defendant or Watson, but it provided jurors with a chilling account of their screams.
“Yo, what the f*** you doing?” the younger Auimatagi could be heard yelling at the defendant. “You gotta f***ing stop that s*** now.”
The screaming continued.
At that point, the witness told jurors today, he started to climb over the fence dividing his family’s property from the backyard where the screams came from. But his father pulled him back.
“He has a knife,” he recalled his father saying of the defendant. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
So the witness instead walked back towards his own home and called 111.
While other neighbours said they couldn’t see anything because of the darkness, the Auimatagis reckoned they were a metre or two away with only the fence dividing them.
“I saw his arm around her neck,” Taulaga Auimatagi recounted. “She was on her knees on the ground. He was standing right behind her.”
He recalled the male later quietly saying, “I love you,” between the woman’s screams – a cadence that repeated itself as many as a dozen times.
Prosecutor Claire Paterson played the CCTV footage again after the father entered the witness box to give a similar account.
“I could see the girl struggle to run away,” Alini Auimatagi recounted through a Samoan interpreter, choking back silent sobs to the point where Justice Dani Gardiner asked him if he wanted to take a break.
When the woman heard their voices, she stood up and tried to turn toward him and his son, he said.
“I couldn’t see clearly her face because there was blood in front of it,” he recalled, recalling that the man still grabbed her by the neck with one hand and appeared to have a weapon in the other.
The witness’ voice became tiny when asked what happened next.
“She said, ‘help’,” he said. “I turned around and went back to my house, because we couldn’t help her.”
The defendant also appeared to shed tears each time the CCTV was replayed.
Jurors also heard from a now-16-year-old who alerted her parents after hearing the neighbour scream out for help.
The girl, whose bedroom window was cracked open, recalled first hearing a female voice yell: “Help me! He’s going to kill me!”
She became more concerned a short time later by the seeming escalation outside her window and decided to alert her parents, she said.
“I heard her say very clearly, ‘He’s going to stab me. He’s going to hurt me,’” she said.
Defence lawyer Matthew Ridgley suggested the teen was misremembering having heard a reference specifically to a stabbing, but the witness didn’t falter.
“Pretty sure I did,” she responded.
The girl’s parents said domestic disputes were unfortunately not “overly unusual” in the neighbourhood, but the intensity of the growl emanating from the darkness that night seemed different. The girl’s mother decided to pull out her phone and record.
They then heard the defendant call 111.
“F***, I stabbed my girlfriend in the throat!” Kerr told the 111 operator during the recorded call, which was played for jurors yesterday. “She’s dying. What do I do?”
The operator asked if the victim was awake.
“She’s gonna pass out. She’s dying, bro,” Kerr responded. “What the f*** do I do?”
The operator came up with a swift plan, telling the caller to grab a clean towel or article of clothing and apply pressure to the wound.
“I don’t know what to do. I’m freaking out,” Kerr said, acknowledging that he hadn’t yet applied pressure as the operator repeated the instructions.
“Is there serious bleeding?” the operator asked.
“Yes, very, very, very serious bleeding,” the defendant replied.
“How many times did you stab her?” he was asked, to which he replied: “Just, just once.”
The operator continued to try to give Kerr instructions, but he gave no indication on the call that he was putting them into practice.
“Oh, honey,” the defendant was recorded saying. “Honey, honey, honey.”
The operator told him help was on the way, but the assurance didn’t seem to have the desired effect.
“Oh f***, I don’t want to stay around,” Kerr said, his last words on the call.
For three minutes, the line was silent as the operator and a paramedic also on the line called out to him.
“Talk to me, man,” the paramedic said. “It’s okay. We just need to help your girlfriend.”
Realising Kerr was gone, the operator and the paramedic began calling out to Watson with the hope that she could hear them.
“Can you put pressure on where he hit you?” the paramedic called out. “Don’t try and talk ... Can you hear us? We’re still here. Try and cover the wound.”
Three minutes later, a police officer at the scene responded to their instructions. Kerr’s phone had been left where she lay bleeding to death.
Other officers found Kerr elsewhere at the property. His hands and forearms were covered in blood, they recalled.
“Tell my kids I’m sorry,” he told one officer before requesting a lawyer.
It wasn’t by happenstance that Watson had run outside and roused her neighbours on the night of her death, her father told jurors earlier this week.
Kāpiti Coast resident Keith “Vince” Watson had previously talked to his daughter for hours on end about the conundrum she found herself in with the abusive relationship and Kerr’s threats to stab her, he said.
“If you stay, you’re more than likely going to get killed,” he recalled telling his daughter.
“But if she left, she was more than likely going to get killed.”
But she had a plan, the father told jurors, explaining that his daughter was completing a business studies course to better herself and had plans for several business ventures. He said she realised in the final weeks that she needed to leave the toxic relationship, but she said she had to extract herself carefully and as amicably as possible for the safety of herself and her children.
“I hadn’t seen that light in Charlie for a long time – a few years,” he said of her plan for a fresh start.
But the father thought there were a few holes in his daughter’s plan, particularly about what to do if Kerr kicked in her door in the middle of the night, he said.
“To me, what she was doing was good, but ... he’s not the sort of guy who makes idle threats,” Kelvin Watson said, telling his daughter that all a security system would do is “record him killing you”.
If Kerr was to show up, he advised his daughter, she just needed to get out of the house as fast as possible – leaving his grandchildren behind if necessary. He advised her to “yell and scream and make a commotion” – anything to get people out of their houses.
“Because if you stay in that house and he does kill you, he’ll get rid of your body and we’ll never see you again,” he recalled telling his daughter.
Charlie Watson didn’t actually have CCTV at her home, but police had recently installed a family violence alarm in her kitchen as a result of previous call-outs.
A recording from the alarm on October 31, less than a week before Charlie Watson’s death, was also played for jurors this week.
“I don’t care, Tupaea – bloody call me a nark all you want,” the alarm recorded her saying during a 2.15am telephone call with the defendant. “I’m sick of the kids and myself being unsafe because of you.
“Just leave me alone ... You’re actually f***ing nuts, bro. Just f*** off.”
She told him she had pushed the alarm button and was waiting for police to arrive.
“You’ve burned me, you’ve stabbed me with keys, you’ve broken my f***ing ribs,” she continued. “You know, the past few weeks, this is the first time in months I’ve gone without bruises all over my f***ing body ... I’m so f***ing sick of being scared.”
She thanked police a short time later for showing up so quickly but ultimately turned them away, falling into an old pattern.
She had pushed the alarm by accident, she claimed.
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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