A daughter accused of murdering her elderly mother and staging the scene to make it look like an accident has been found guilty.
Julia DeLuney, 53, has been on trial in the High Court at Wellington for the past month and was today found guilty by a jury.
The Crown case was that DeLuney had been defrauding her mother to feed her cryptocurrency spending habit and this may have prompted a confrontation on the night of 79-year-old Helen Gregory’s death on January 24 last year.
Prosecutor Stephanie Bishop said DeLuney had “lost control” and beat her mother to death with a heavy object, most likely a vase, then smeared her mother’s blood over the walls and utility cupboard to make it look like Gregory had fallen from an attic ladder into the cupboard below.
Defence lawyer Quentin Duff said his client was the victim of a “witch hunt” and that a third, unknown person must have broken in and killed Gregory in the brief window of time that DeLuney was out of the house fetching her husband from Kāpiti.
The trial ran for more than four weeks and focused on multiple strands of circumstantial evidence, including analysis of blood patterns at the scene, forensic dissections of DeLuney’s bank accounts and CCTV footage of DeLuney’s movements after the death.
Crypto spending
Forensic accounting revealed DeLuney was not making enough money to support her spending habits without a mystery $75,000 cash injection across the year before Gregory’s death.
She also spent more than $150,000 on cryptocurrency in that time and allegedly took her mother’s money and invested it without her knowledge.
The Crown suggested finances were a motive for DeLuney to kill Gregory.
Staging the scene
DeLuney told police her mother fell from the attic and hit her head on the night in question, suffering a small injury that did not appear to be serious.
She said she left her mother lying on the floor and went to get her husband so he could help decide what to do with Gregory. When she came back, the house was a “warzone” with blood smeared across the walls, attic ladder and utility cupboard.
A forensic expert said the blood could only have been put in these places later, rather than transferred there from an injured person as they staggered to the bedroom.
The Crown said this meant DeLuney had staged the scene, while the defence argued the mystery attacker must have done it.
The rubbish bag
The Crown showed CCTV footage of DeLuney leaving her mother’s house on Baroda St and driving to a petrol station, with what the Crown suggests was a yellow council rubbish bag in the passenger seat of the car.
Bishop said DeLuney may have used the bag to conceal her bloodied clothes and the murder weapon, believed to be a heavy vase, and that she disposed of it in the skip bin near her studio apartment.
She then suggested DeLuney took the bag out the next morning and put it into a black plastic bag, which she was seen on CCTV putting into a wheelie bin down the street for the rubbish truck to empty.
A police search of the landfill nearby did not reveal anything.
The defence argument
Duff said police had started the “attic myth”, claiming police wrongly believed DeLuney had said the fall from the attic caused her mother’s fatal injuries.
He said if the jury applied the “attic myth” to many of DeLuney’s actions, it would look “weird”, but removing that lens revealed ordinary actions when assessed with a knowledge of DeLuney’s regular habits.
He suggested an intruder had burst through the patio doors, knocking a curtain partially from its railing, and chased and killed Gregory while she was waiting for DeLuney to return.
The jury delivered its verdict after 11.5 hours of deliberating.
DeLuney appeared calm as she entered the courtroom before the jury was brought in.
Her face remained neutral, though her jaw was tense and her lips twitched as the guilty verdict was read out.
She turned to glance once at Gregory’s loved ones in the public gallery before being led away to the cells.
Melissa Nightingale is a Wellington-based reporter who covers crime, justice and news in the capital. She joined the Herald in 2016 and has worked as a journalist for 10 years.