Janelle Patton. Photo / Reuters
NORFOLK ISLAND - The prosecution's theory of Janelle Patton's abduction has been dismissed as "nonsense" by a lawyer defending alleged murderer Glenn McNeill in a Norfolk Island court.
McNeill, 29, has pleaded not guilty to murdering Ms Patton, who was found stabbed to death in a picnic reserve
on the Pacific island territory on March 31, 2002.
Prosecutors allege McNeill, a New Zealand chef, abducted the 29-year-old in his car as she walked along Rooty Hill Road.
Broken sunglasses found beside the road the morning after Ms Patton's death belonged to her and were possible evidence of a violent confrontation, the crown alleges.
But as he summed up the defence case at McNeill's trial today, Peter Garling SC told the jury: "The crown abduction theory is an impossibility."
An abduction must have taken a couple of minutes and "we know she was a fighter", he said.
However, no Rooty Hill Road residents had reported any "screaming, fighting, any evidence of a violent abduction", Mr Garling told the Supreme Court.
Although the road was "not a quiet backwater", nobody had witnessed an abduction.
Mr Garling also said witnesses had given inconsistent reports of seeing Ms Patton in the area at various times, and disputed that the broken sunglasses were Ms Patton's.
"The abduction theory is just nonsense," he said.
"It didn't happen as the crown alleged and you couldn't possibly be satisfied it did."
Evidence that a DNA profile found on the boot lid of McNeill's Honda Civic could have come from Ms Patton was "very weak indeed", Mr Garling argued, and was not enough to conclude she had been in the boot.
He reminded the jury that Ms Patton worked at the Foodlands supermarket, and that the DNA profile was mixed with male DNA that was not McNeill's.
Someone could have touched Ms Patton or an item she had handled as they were shopping, depositing DNA as they opened the boot, he said.
"Foodlands' fresh DNA, we submit, has transferred on to the boot lid," Mr Garling said.
The case continues.
- AAP
