Jury to decide whether man intentionally drove over cliff to try to kill wife

The cliff where the couple's car crashed on June 9 last year. Photo / Google Earth

A jury has gone out to deliberate on whether a man is guilty of attempting to murder his wife by driving their car off a cliff.

Moments before the man allegedly pressed his foot to the accelerator and aimed straight at a fence bordering the road, his wife told him she wanted a divorce and had feelings for another man.

“If there’s no you, there’s no me,” he allegedly told her, before their car plunged over the cliff and landed 40 metres into a tree-lined gully.

The man, who has name suppression, is on trial for attempted murder in the High Court at Palmerston North.

The jury has heard evidence this week about the events leading up to the crash and what happened in the aftermath.

The woman told the court she climbed out of the passenger seat following the crash and crawled up the bank to the roadside, bloody, bruised and terrified her husband would try to “finish her off”.

She ran home and found her teenage daughter before they both ran to a neighbouring property where the owner called police.

Twenty minutes later the man also crawled out of the gully and ran to the same property screaming his wife’s name before banging on the windows and doors begging for help to look for her.

According to the daughter’s evidence, the woman lay in a ball in a spare room of the house, sobbing, saying over and over again “he tried to kill me”.

The woman climbed back to the roadside after the crash, then ran to a property nearby for help. Photo / Google Earth

Police arrived soon after and arrested the man, charging him with attempted murder the next day following an interview where he claimed that he was exhausted and had simply fallen asleep, rather than deliberately drive his wife over the cliff’s edge.

Crown case

The Crown case is that the man was desperate, angry and upset about his marriage and it all came to a head on the final stretch before the couple reached their home that night near Dannevirke.

“Something inside him snapped. He said he couldn’t live without her and then he put those words into effect,” Crown prosecutor Deborah Davies told the court this morning in her closing submissions.

“The only possible reason was to kill them both.”

Davies said that the man’s defence of falling asleep prior to the crash simply didn’t add up as the pair had been arguing incessantly about their marriage for almost the entire car ride.

“You can’t be in the middle of a conversation about one of the most important things in your life - your marriage - and just fall asleep.”

Davies said the woman had been honest and credible from the moments after the crash up until she testified on Monday, with her statement remaining consistent throughout.

She asked the jury to trust their gut about whether someone was telling the truth but to also base their verdict on hard data, specifically that extracted from the vehicle.

The trial is taking place at the High Court sitting in Palmerston North this week. Photo / Jeremy Wilkinson

That data, confirmed and interpreted by a police crash investigator, showed that the accelerator was depressed right up until the car went over the edge, the brakes were never used and the tyre tracks were pointed straight at the cliff with no deviation.

Yesterday, the jury was taken to the scene of the incident where the defendant’s defence team showed them several other points along the rural road that would have been much more effective at killing himself and his wife if that had been his intention - rather than aiming for a tree-lined gully.

However, Davies said that the Crown case wasn’t that the man had planned to kill his wife from the outset, but rather that he’d snapped in the moments before choosing to drive the car off the road.

“At that moment he was not a rational loving father anymore. He was a broken desperate man who was not thinking straight.”

Defence case

The defendant’s lawyer, Steve Winter, told the court there were no bad people in what he called a “unique trial”.

He then narrowed in on the woman’s assertion that her husband had said “If there’s no you, there’s no me” before accelerating toward the cliff.

Winter pointed out that her recollection of that phrase didn’t appear in her interviews with police immediately after the incident, nor in her official statement and questioned whether it had really occurred.

“It’s a dangerous phrase. It’s what the case is all about. And you can’t rely on it, it’s that simple.”

Winter also mentioned that the chronology of the conversation didn’t match the crash data which placed them as passing a wool-shed roughly 100 metres from the edge of the bank about five seconds before impact.

Winter said it was too short a distance for an entire conversation about the man moving out, his wife telling him he had too much to live for and then him allegedly saying the crucial line that the Crown’s case hinged on.

As for the crash data Winter said it was irrefutable that the car’s wheels were pointing 54 degrees to the left, indicating that an attempt had been made to take the corner.

“Cars do not drive round corners on their own.”

Another key aspect of the defence case was that the man had said a stop occurred somewhere between Palmerston North and the couple’s home near Dannevirke in which he claimed he was tired and asked his wife to drive.

The woman completely denies such a conversation or stop happened.

“If he is even contemplating killing his wife, why would he stop and ask her to drive? That’s why that is important,” Winter told the jury this morning.