Witnesses tell of sex come-on in dead of night

By Alison Horwood

A man similar to Scott Watson woke a sleeping couple on a boat and propositioned a woman for sex, despite being told angrily by her boyfriend to get lost.

"He said, 'Give her to me, mate. I'll look after her. I'll show her a good time'," Aucklander Deanna Cunliffe told the Marlborough Sounds double-murder trial yesterday.

Miss Cunliffe said she hid beneath the bedcovers next to her boyfriend, Andrew Crawshaw, after waking between 2.30 am and 3.30 am on New Year's Day, 1998, to see a man squatting in the doorway of Bianco, their charter yacht.

Bianco, Mina Cornelia and Watson's sloop Blade were rafted together off Furneaux Lodge in Endeavour Inlet on New Year's Eve.

"When I woke I realised Andrew was talking to someone who had come on to our boat. The guy ... was squatting in the doorway. He said, 'What are youse doing ... Are you asleep in here?'" she said.

Mr Crawshaw told the man to go away but he just "kept going."

"He was fairly drunk. He said were we partying in there, and to come to a party."

When Mr Crawshaw told the man to get lost, he stood for quite a while as if contemplating what to say next. He then told Mr Crawshaw to "give her to me."

"I wasn't looking," said Miss Cunliffe. "I put my head almost under the blankets."

She said at that point Mr Crawshaw "got really angry" and yelled at him to go away - "and the guy left."

Miss Cunliffe said the man was about a metre away, but she could see only his rough outline. He was wearing jeans and a white shirt. He had a home-rolled cigarette in one hand and perhaps a drink in the other.

She said she heard the man walking to the edge of Bianco, but nothing else.

Miss Cunliffe agreed with defence counsel Mike Antunovic that it was a quiet night. She heard "nothing else whatsoever" from the time the man left the boat until she fell asleep about 30 minutes later.

Mr Crawshaw told the court he woke to the sound of someone jumping on to Bianco.

"The person then walked over to our cockpit and squatted in the hatchway.

"He said, 'Are you asleep down there?' At that stage obviously I wasn't, but I told him I was."

Mr Crawshaw told the court that after asking the man to go away several times, he became concerned and told him angrily - using a four-letter word - to get lost.

He said the man left in the direction of the Mina Cornelia, but he did not hear him get on that boat or talk to anyone else.

He told the court that he recognised the man as the lone skipper of the boat rafted near Bianco and Mina Cornelia.

He had identified Watson in a police montage of photographs.

A passenger on Mina Cornelia, Deborah Corless, told the court how a man who was introduced as Scott abused her - swearing in her face - when he came on board their boat about 9.30 pm on New Year's Eve to have a drink.

The group went ashore for the party with the man, but were glad to lose him when he was stopped at the jetty by security guards for carrying alcohol.