An Auckland man who acknowledged having fatally strangled a 16-year-old girl during a days-long methamphetamine bender has been found guilty of murder — with jurors rejecting the notion that he should instead be found guilty of manslaughter because he was too out of it to foresee the death.
Vikhil Krishna, 24, stood in the dock with a newly acquired black eye this morning as jurors in the High Court at Auckland returned the verdict after roughly five hours of deliberations spanning two days.
More than a dozen relatives of Trinity Oliver, whose lifeless body was found near a Manurewa train station during Auckland’s 2021 Covid-19 lockdown, filled one side of the courtroom gallery — as they had for much of the three-week trial. Some wiped away tears as the verdict was read.
Justice Peter Andrew set a sentencing date for May.
During closing addresses late last week, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield, KC, had argued to jurors that his client was either suffering methamphetamine-induced psychosis or he was “the most incredibly stupid person you have ever met”.
But prosecutors characterised the defendant’s strange behaviour on the morning of September 11, 2021, as an expectedly panicked reaction for someone who had just knowingly done something terrible. His continued peculiar behaviour in the days that followed, they said, showed someone desperately trying to keep up with his rapidly accumulating collection of lies.
What wasn’t in dispute was Krishna would be found guilty of something.
“He’s still responsible for her death,” Mansfield told jurors. “That’s what manslaughter is for. That’s not letting someone off. That’s them being held responsible for what they did ...
“Convict him for manslaughter, but don’t ... put him in that small category of killers for which he is not a member.”
To be found guilty of murder, each juror needed to find that Krishna either intended to kill the teen that morning or he hurt her knowing his actions were likely to cause death and disregarded the risk. Jurors did not need to unanimously agree on which theory they supported, nor were their individual views revealed.
There was a 12-minute period on the morning of Oliver’s death between when she was photographed by Krishna engaged in a sexual act — her face showing no signs of trauma — and when CCTV cameras from the nearby train station showed him hastily driving away. Her unclothed body, found in the same spot roughly 13 hours later, showed multiple signs of blunt-force trauma to her head, a large bite mark on her arm and multiple injuries to her neck — including a straight, thin 12cm red line stretching across the front of her neck.
That line, Crown prosecutor Natalie Walker argued, was proof that a ligature had been used to strangle the teen — most likely one of the phone charging cords found by police in the defendant’s car. And it’s hard to imagine someone pulling a ligature across someone’s neck “with considerable force ... probably for a matter of minutes” without an intent to kill or at least risk death, she said.
Krishna chose not to testify during the trial, but his lawyers suggested he had put Oliver in a chokehold during an argument or fight inside the car, his brain so befuddled by a days-long meth bender that he had no inkling the dangerous but common restraint could cause death. They called two expert witnesses: a psychology professor who discussed the effects of methamphetamine use, as well as Krishna’s documented history of drug psychosis, and a GP specialising in domestic violence cases who said it was possible the red line on Oliver’s neck could have been caused by the teen’s necklace as she was put in a chokehold.
Pathologist Dr Rexon Tse, called earlier by prosecutors, opined that a ligature was much more likely to have caused the line than her necklace.
Had Krishna been a cold-blooded killer who intended the death, he wouldn’t have been “waving a very big red flag above his head to attract attention” immediately after the killing, Mansfield argued.
CCTV footage showed him driving on the grass berm as he rushed away from the homicide scene just before 3am, running red lights and at one point standing outside his car with his pants off, attempting to push it into a petrol station driveway even though he was able to drive the car moments later. He also called 111, claiming to have been the victim of an attempted carjacking and mumbling through heavy breathing that he “didn’t mean to do anything”.
When police arrived at the Papatoetoe home where he was staying to interview him about the 111 call that same morning, he was wearing Oliver’s distinctive Gucci slides. He gave police enough information about the location of the imagined carjacking that they could have found Oliver’s body right away had they believed him, Mansfield said. When he was arrested for murder six days later, Oliver’s clothes and phone were still in his car.
“You may ask yourself why someone might draw that type of attention to themselves with police if they’re not delusional,” Mansfield said. “It makes no sense.
“If he’s not delusional and he’s not psychotic, then he’s the most incredibly stupid person you have ever met.”
Krishna sniffled and appeared to wipe away a tear as his lawyer argued that he had no motive to kill someone he was genuinely fond of, who he had listed in his phone as “Sexy Thang”.
Prosecutors, however, had a different interpretation of Krishna’s behaviour before and after the teen’s death.
Previous messages showed a brief relationship that had sparked between the two about two months before her death, ending weeks later after what was repeatedly referred to in court as “the puppy incident”, in which Oliver called 111 to report a violent confrontation in Krishna’s car. She told police she fled Krishna as he ripped the strap off her bag and “choked” her puppy, keeping the dog and refusing to return it.
The dog was returned the next day, but the two wouldn’t communicate again until nearly a month later — days before Oliver’s death — when Krishna offered to pick her up so they could smoke methamphetamine together.
The incident showed “a small window into their relationship” in which Krishna was quick to anger and showed hostility towards the teen, Walker said.
While the motive wasn’t known, and jurors didn’t need one to reach a verdict, Walker said something happened in the last 10 minutes of Oliver’s life that caused Krishna to “see red”.
“The number of injuries all over her body — especially on her head and neck — paint a very bleak picture of what the defendant did to her in those 10 minutes,” she said.
Some of the injuries appeared to be defensive, as if the teen was trying to pull a ligature off her neck, Walker suggested, noting that the defendant’s DNA was found underneath Oliver’s fingernails — further suggesting a struggle. The bite mark on her arm might have occurred as she struggled to push him away, Walker told jurors.
“He subjected her to a significant and ultimately fatal assault using a ligature,” she said. “His actions were both conscious and intentional.
“... It would have been obvious to him she was dead.”
Walker described the 111 call that followed the attack as Krishna’s first attempt at self-preservation, however poorly executed, by spinning lies. But the fact he called 111 at all showed “his awareness of what he’d done” rather than someone in a delusional state, she said. When police arrived at his home a short time later, he probably realised he had “bitten off a bit more than he can chew” and he began awkwardly pausing between each question as he thought about how to answer, she said.
He would go on to tell his friends a “sanitised” and “more palatable” version of what happened, beta-testing the chokehold explanation on them before researching chokeholds online to see if what he said was actually plausible, she said.
“A person can still act intentionally, even if they have consumed alcohol or drugs,” she said. “The defence cannot use methamphetamine as a shield for his conduct.”
Judge: 'It's behaviour that is wrong and at your age, you should know better'.