A former strip-club worker has denied confessing to punching a man who later died, an inquest was told yesterday.
Barry Coleman died after falling down a flight of stairs at Wicked Willies in Christchurch in December 1996. The nightclub's owner, Gregory Mather, was charged with murder, police later amending the
charge to manslaughter. Two other men were charged with assault.
Mather and an associate, Terry Brown, were also later charged with obstruction after approaching a police witness.
However, in August 1997 all charges were dropped after a private investigator found flaws in the police case and produced new evidence.
No one else has since been prosecuted for the Christchurch man's death.
The inquest got under way last year, but was adjourned part heard and resumed this week.
The Press reported that in court yesterday, a staff member implicated by two men who had given evidence this week said he was not in the club when Coleman fell. Nor did he remember allegedly confessing to one of those witnesses.
The man denied confessing during a taped phone call set up by a private investigator working for Mather and business associate Terry Brown.
Barrister Paul Johnson read from a transcript of the taped conversation in which a woman said: "So, Baz (Coleman) just walked towards you and you just hit him once and he just fell down the stairs?"
The man answered: "Yes."
Yesterday the man said, through an interpreter, he had never talked to the woman and never said "that to her at all".
"Between me and him (Coleman) it was all right," he said.
The inquest was adjourned for three weeks because of problems between the man and his translator.
- NZPA
