Warning: This article contains graphic images.
“I will take care of you. Please trust me. Xoxoxox.”
It looks like a text message from a loving daughter to her elderly mother.
It turned out to be the words of a woman seeking a $10,000 loan from her mother, a couple of months before she murdered her.
Today, after 11 hours of deliberations, a jury found Julia DeLuney guilty of murder for the death of 79-year-old Helen Gregory at her home on Baroda St, Khandallah, in Wellington.
The Crown case was that the 53-year-old visited Gregory’s home the night of January 24 last year and that, sometime during the hours she was there, she bludgeoned her mother to death with a heavy object, then set up the scene to look as though Gregory had fallen while putting something in the attic.
DeLuney told police her mother did not appear badly injured after the supposed fall, and there was only a small amount of blood on the back of her head, so she lay her down on the floor in a spare bedroom and went to get her husband, Antonio DeLuney, so he could help her decide what to do.
She claimed that when they arrived back at the house about an hour and a half later, they found the bloody scene. The defence case was that another person broke in while DeLuney was out and killed Gregory.
DeLuney sat in the High Court at Wellington for more than four weeks listening to the evidence against her, always sharply dressed and well presented.
Her mask of self-control slipped only towards the very end, as Crown prosecutor Stephanie Bishop was telling the jury there was no plausible reason for DeLuney to be checking the skip bin outside her studio apartment multiple times after leaving her mother’s house, including in the dark with a torch.
“Our dogs!” DeLuney’s voice rang through the room, her eyes narrowed on Bishop. She followed up with a sigh and a loud bang from the dock.
Defence lawyer Quentin Duff appeared to allude to this moment in his closing address to the jury.
“Mrs DeLuney has had to sit here and have all sorts of mud thrown at her,” he said. “Accused of killing a mother that has done nothing but love her and that she has done nothing but love back ... Don’t hold against her one little outburst.”
Helen Gregory was making plans to celebrate her 80th birthday. There would be a visit to the ballet. They were supposed to be booking the tickets that night.
It might be fair to describe Gregory as determined, and perhaps a little eccentric in how she handled her money. She kept large sums of cash stashed around her home in special hiding places because she didn’t trust the banks, and she was particular about her routines. She was also fearful of going into a home, and had insisted to family she wanted to remain in her own house.
She was described by one witness as a lovely person, who was strong both mentally and spiritually and regularly attended church and prayer meetings.
Generous and eager to help those who needed it, she was also modest when it came to her own generosity.
Photos of Gregory, shown to the jury through the trial, show her beautifully attired in floral dresses, lipstick neatly applied. One photo, taken on Christmas Day, shows her about to tear open a gift as she half smiles at somebody just out of the frame.
When Detective Senior Sergeant Tim Leitch was preparing to brief his team on the case the morning after Gregory’s death, he scrawled a few words in his notebook, prompts for what he wanted to say to the officers helping him investigate.
“A terrible end to a wonderful life,” he wrote. And it was terrible, no matter who you believed: death at the hands of someone she loved, or those of an intruder.
Duff described it to the jury in agonising detail. “[DeLuney] didn’t know that somebody had taken something that is probably as heavy as that vase,” he said, gesturing to a vase on the exhibit table that police believe was similar to the one thought to have been used in the murder.
Duff paused for what felt like an eternity. It may have been about 20 seconds. Then he finished his sentence: “and smashed her a number of times over the head.”
The question the jury had to solve was whether the person who swung that object was DeLuney.
The case against her was entirely circumstantial but the Crown had “10 strands” of evidence to convince the jury DeLuney was guilty.
“The circumstantial evidence is so strong that the 10 points or 10 strands are not just threads of a rope, they are like ropes themselves,” Bishop said.
Despite the lack of a smoking gun, it would appear the jury agreed.
Below are the key points from those 10 strands as they emerged throughout the trial.
The motive – crypto spending, financial strife
A glimpse into DeLuney’s bank transactions in the year before Gregory’s death offered some insight into the likely reason for the killing.
Despite her polished exterior, always looking “fabulous”, as her lawyer put it, she was struggling to afford her lifestyle.
Forensic accountant Eric Huang gave evidence last week, saying DeLuney did not make enough money to sustain her spending habits without a mystery $75,000 cash injection across the year. His report could not explain where the cash came from, but showed that on some days tens of thousands of dollars in cash were deposited into the account over several smart ATM transactions, minutes apart.
DeLuney spent more than $150,000 over that year on cryptocurrencies, and messages between her and Gregory indicated she had also put some of her mother’s money into crypto. A witness also alleged Gregory had told her that DeLuney took cash hidden in the home and invested it without Gregory’s knowledge.
A text exchange between the pair in November 2023 showed DeLuney asking her mother for $10,000.
“Julia, there was only $2700 in my hiding place!!!!!” was the reply.
In response, DeLuney told her “your money is now making money”, and said she would be “delighted” with the result in April.
There was some back and forth, with Gregory saying she didn’t have enough cash left in her hiding places and would have to transfer money electronically instead.
“Please be careful, when I transfer this I will have zero. I thought I had at least $25,000 in [the] box,” she said.
“I will take care of you. Please trust me. Xoxoxox,” DeLuney replied.
In an email just two days before Gregory’s death, DeLuney told her mother her money had made a profit of $268,000, attaching a screenshot for proof. But the Crown said this was a lie, and that the screenshot showed someone else’s account.
DeLuney said she needed more money from Gregory in order to withdraw some of the profit.
In her closing address to the jury, Bishop suggested this was an attempt to extract the last of Gregory’s money, the end of an “elaborate fraud”, and that it was possible the pair had argued about the money the night of the death, or that Gregory had caught DeLuney searching the house for cash.
The telltale bloodstains
A grisly scene awaited first responders when they arrived at Gregory’s home that night. It was also such an unusual scene that a forensic expert said she knew almost immediately that it was staged.
There was blood on the walls, on the bedroom furniture and on Gregory. There was also blood on the top rung of the attic ladder, and in the utility cupboard that the ladder was inside.
ESR forensic senior scientist Glenys Knight said that in her opinion, there was no evidence an impact happened inside the cupboard, as DeLuney claimed.
If there had been, and if someone was bleeding heavily, she would have expected to see blood drips and bloody handprints where someone had tried to get themselves up.
She also suggested the blood patterns didn’t support the idea of a fall, explaining that inside the cupboard it was almost like someone had “poured” blood down the back wall.
Other bloodstains appeared to have been applied in a side-to-side motion on the walls, possibly with a piece of fabric, and some of these appeared to have clotted, a process that she estimated would take five to 10 minutes.
“Blood does not come out of the head already clotted,” she said.
The blood on the top rung of the ladder also did not make sense, because if Gregory had fallen, it would be more likely that blood would be found at the bottom.
Bishop told the jury the blood evidence showed the scene was staged, and that it did not make sense for a random intruder to stick around to stage the scene. She said the burglar would have needed to know DeLuney’s story around what happened that night to have staged it in a way that lined up with her account.
Luminol testing also returned positive results in the kitchen and DeLuney’s car. There was evidence that blood may have been washed away in the kitchen sink, with the luminol test showing splatters all around the bench, and pooled at the plughole and on the plug.
There were also imprints of circles found beside the sink, which Knight said she could not rule out coming from the vase if it had been placed there to drain. Police could not find any other household item that matched, but it was close in size to another vase that is believed to be similar to the suspected murder weapon.
Meanwhile, luminol testing came back positive for various parts of DeLuney’s car, including the footwells, steering wheel, and over much of the passenger seat. While some of these marks might be explained by DeLuney and her husband having traces of blood on their hands and feet after Gregory was found dead, Bishop said this did not explain the marks on the passenger seat, and suggested this came from a rubbish bag she said may have carried the murder weapon.
What was in the mystery rubbish bag?
The footage also showed something in the front passenger seat when DeLuney left the house to get her husband – which the Crown suggested was a yellow council rubbish bag containing the murder weapon and DeLuney’s bloodied clothes.
She had told police she changed into her mother’s clothes before leaving, because her clothes had a small amount of blood on them from her mother’s injury.
Bishop said CCTV supported the theory that DeLuney took the rubbish bag and put it in the skip bin outside her studio apartment, possibly going back to check on it more than once with a flashlight.
The next morning, more CCTV captures DeLuney leaving the apartment complex cradling a black plastic bag, which she took down the road and put into a wheelie bin as it was being emptied by a passing rubbish truck.
Driver Gavin Twist told the court she asked him very nicely if she could put the black plastic bag in the large red rubbish bin he had just emptied. He agreed.
“She was cradling the bag as she put it in the bin,” he said. Footage from the truck shows her lowering the bag carefully down with both hands.
When the bag landed at the bottom of the bin, it made a thud, he said.
Police searched Spicer’s Landfill in Porirua but never found anything they believed to be the bag. Bishop suggested to the jury that DeLuney had taken the yellow bag from the skip bin and stuffed it into the black bag.
Duff said an “ordinary” act of rubbish disposal had simply been turned into something suspicious by police.
What was the alternative?
If DeLuney didn’t kill Gregory, then who did? There was no doubt she had been killed by somebody, and that the attic fall, if it had even happened, did not cause her death.
Duff said whoever killed Gregory must have had a very personal hatred for her, or perhaps was “mad” or on meth.
“I only know that somebody went and beat this beautiful woman, paused, and then came back to beat her again,” he said.
He pointed to evidence about a couple living up the road, who said someone had knocked on their door that night and disappeared before they answered, roughly around the time of the death. Police sent somebody to speak to the couple, but ultimately discounted the information as irrelevant to the case.
The officer in charge said the house was some distance away – about 250m – from Gregory’s, and that there were no other reports about doorknocks or suspicious activity in the area.
Duff said police had developed “tunnel vision” by that point and should have analysed the evidence further.
He suggested a scenario where an intruder knocked on Gregory’s patio door while DeLuney was out, and that the injured Gregory opened the door and the attacker burst through, knocking a curtain partly off its railing, and chased and killed Gregory in the bedroom.
He also referred to a coffee cup that had been found in an outdoor pot plant that normally hid a set of spare keys for the house, saying more should have been done to find out where the cup came from, and a DNA test should have been done.
Bishop has consistently shot down the theory that a burglar or intruder killed Gregory, noting there was no evidence any items had been taken from Gregory’s home, despite several items of value being left out in plain view.
There was also no other sign of disturbance or intrusion, though Duff argued the disrupted curtain was one such sign. There is no evidence to show if this happened before or during the police scene examination.
A loving daughter and brutal killer
How did a woman who texted her mother, promising she would take care of her and asking for her trust, then move so sharply in the opposite direction?
Bishop pointed to diary entries, where DeLuney spoke about her struggles with money and desire to buy a house, a goal which felt unattainable.
“It’s been an awful year so far,” she wrote a couple of weeks before killing Gregory.
“I’m done. Been trying so hard to crack this but as soon as I think it’s in my reach it gets taken away again and again.”
She painted a picture of a woman not coping with her finances, noting she had a drinking relapse after 12 years of sobriety four months before her mother’s death, possibly a sign of how much the struggles were getting to her.
“You will never know exactly what happened that night, but the Crown says ... the elaborate fraud perpetrated on her mother just two days prior to her death is a significant factor,” Bishop said.
“It might go some way to explaining why Julia DeLuney lost complete control and killed her mother that night.”
- Additional reporting by Catherine Hutton
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.