Mum gives evidence during trial

MURDER accused Brenden Jacob Bennetts insisted Jayde Kendall would “come back” when police asked him about the missing 16-year-old.

“I don’t know where she is. I swear, if I knew, I would tell you guys,” Mr Bennetts told police.

“She’ll come back when she’s ready.”

Bennetts (right) claimed he consoled the Lockyer District High School student when she was upset.

“I said ‘nothing lasts forever’ and ‘even the darkest points will end eventually. She seemed to like that’.”

In the police interview played in Brisbane Supreme Court, Bennetts claimed Jayde wanted to go to Brisbane.

“Something about seeing the city lights at night,” he added.

That interview with homicide detectives Christopher Knight and Murray O’Connell happened after Jayde’s disappearance, and before her body was found on August 27, 2015.

Bennetts, 21, has pleaded guilty to interfering with a corpse, and to manslaughter but he pleaded not guilty to murdering Jayde.

Fighting back tears, Wanda Bennetts gave evidence at her son’s murder trial.

She said she asked her son about interactions he had with police.

“Brenden told me that they’d taken his car and his laptop and his phone and he told me that he’d picked Jayde up from school ... and he dropped her off at a bus station and that she had texted him on the Thursday asking for a favour,” Ms Bennetts said.

“I said I was angry, pissed off. I started crying. I asked him ‘How come you never said anything?’ He said he was scared.”

Later, the court was shown an interview from August 19, 2015, with Detective Senior Constable Andrew Lowe and Brenden’s sister, who was 13 at the time.

“My brother felt guilty because he didn’t think she was going to go missing. If something happens to her now, Brenden’s going to be feeling guilty forever,” the girl said at Laidley police station.

The teenager had recently seen a movie and the cop asked her about it.

“Ironically it was about a girl who runs away and then she goes missing. It was a really bad movie,” Brenden’s sister said.

Jayde had disappeared five days earlier.

The trial continues. –NewsRegional