An investigation into the violent killing of an elderly Wellington woman in her home was a “witch hunt”, a jury has heard.
Police were “hellbent” on disproving Julia DeLuney’s statements and exposing her as a liar, her lawyer, Quentin Duff told a jury today.
DeLuney, 53, is on trial in the Wellington High Court for the murder of her 79-year-old mother, Helen Gregory.
The Crown case is that DeLuney killed Gregory at her Baroda St, Khandallah home on January 24 last year, then staged the scene to look like Gregory died after an accidental fall.
She claims she drove from the Khandallah property back to the Kāpiti Coast to get help after her mother fell from the attic, and that her mother was murdered in the 90 minutes that she was gone.
Duff began his closing arguments to the jury this morning, saying the “insidious effect of the attic myth” turned ordinary behaviour into something suspicious.
The “attic myth” is a phrase Duff coined, 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.
“Mrs DeLuney never told the police that the cause of death of her mother was from the fall in the attic,” he said.
“One thing remains true, and that’s that at no stage has Mrs DeLuney said that’s the cause of death.
“They [police] attributed the myth to her. . . They were hellbent, you might think, on disproving and exposing Mrs DeLuney for being a liar.
“Ordinary actions, ordinary things, are made to look suspicious, to sound like lies, but only if you apply the attic myth.”
He pointed to the Crown’s suggestion that DeLuney had left her mother’s house with a yellow rubbish bag containing the murder weapon and her bloodied clothes.
Crown prosecutor Stephanie Bishop last week suggested DeLuney put the bag into the skip bin near her studio apartment in Kāpiti, before taking it out the next morning and putting it into a black, non-transparent bag, carrying it down the street and putting it in a wheelie bin that was being emptied into a rubbish truck.
Duff used this as an example of mundane actions being made to look suspicious, telling the jury it was up to them to decide whether there was a rubbish bag at all, but if there was it could have been rubbish that DeLuney took from her mother’s home to dispose of for her.
He described it as a “very ordinary act of love just to go and pick up a rubbish bag because it saves mum a trip”.
He said there was no evidence the black rubbish bag DeLuney was seen carrying the next morning had been taken out of the skip, and that if the skip bin was full, it would have made sense for her to carry it down the street to the rubbish truck.
“An ordinary act of rubbish disposal gets turned into a landfill search,” he said.
He also pointed to other pieces of evidence through the trial, including phone data suggesting Gregory’s phone had ascended one storey at 9.35pm the night she was killed, and a photo showing one of the curtains in an entranceway was partially off its railing.
If the jury believed Gregory had gone up into the attic with her phone at 9.35pm, then they must believe DeLuney’s version of events was correct, he said.
As for the curtain off its railing, which was captured in a photograph some weeks after the death, he argued it was unusual for someone of Gregory’s tidiness to leave the curtain like that for any length of time, and that this could be a sign of a disturbance that police had missed.
He suggested Gregory had heard a knock at the door, and upon opening it her attacker might have burst through, knocking the curtain partially from the railing, chased and killed her.
There is no evidence to show when the curtain came off its railing, and whether this happened before or after Gregory’s death.
Duff also said police had not done enough to analyse evidence that somebody had knocked on the door of a house down the road that night around the time of Gregory’s death.
He referred to the Crown’s assertions that DeLuney’s motive may have been financial, and that she had defrauded her mother just two days before killing her, using a lie to take the last of her mother’s money.
Forensic accounting evidence was earlier shown to the jury, revealing DeLuney had received tens of thousands of dollars in bank transfers from her mother in the year before the death, as well as $75,000 in mystery cash deposits. She used these cash deposits to feed her cryptocurrency spending habit.
Duff said there was no evidence that Gregory had confronted her daughter about the money or refused to give her any, prompting a potential fight.
He said DeLuney had to have hated her mother to have killed her in such a violent way, and argued there was no evidence to show any hatred, contempt, or a breakdown of the relationship between them.
“There is no evidence that you have seen that can be interpreted as this daughter having such a hatred for her mother or being so unhinged.”
Duff has finished his closing address, and the judge will begin summing up today.
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.