EX-COP HAD $2.25M LIFE POLICIES ON DE FACTO
AN EX-POLICE officer accused of killing his long-time de facto wife had taken out two life insurance policies totalling $2.25 million just months before her death.
Louis James Mahony, 44, has pleaded not guilty before Toowoomba Supreme Court to a charge of murder arising from the death of Lainie Coldwell who was found with serious head injuries at the foot of a gum tree in the front yard of the couple’s then Charleville home on August 23, 2009.
Mahony claimed Lainie had fallen while removing party lights from the tree and hit her head on rocks at the base of tree.
Opening the case against Mahony, Crown prosecutor Carl Heaton QC said it was the Crown case that the defendant had staged the scene to appear as if Lainie Coldwell, then 36, had fallen from the tree.
“We say that scene was a construct of Louis Mahony,” he told the court.
Though not formally married, the couple had been together for 18 years since their teenage days, he said.
However, it was alleged the relationship had deteriorated due to Mahony having affairs with other women and Ms Coldwell had told her parents and others she was leaving Mahony and taking their then three-year-old daughter to a property the couple had at Dundee Beach outside of Darwin.
The couple had begun their relationship in Charleville but had spent five years in the Northern Territory during which time Mahony was in the police service before they returned to Charleville in 2007.
Both had worked at the meatworks in Charleville.
On Lainie Coldwell’s birthday of June 23, 2009, two months before her death, a life insurance policy worth $1.5m taken out on both of them had been created on-line on the computer at the family’s home of 11 Walter St.
For the policy to be valid, both parties had to be at the computer but it was the Crown case Ms Coldwell was at work and that it was “very doubtful” she knew there was a policy taken out on her life, Mr Heaton said.
A photograph of the scene produced to the court showed Mahony’s black F250 utility backed in toward the base of the gum tree with a ladder leading from the tray up into the tree.
However, Mr Heaton said two biochemical engineers who had studied the photographs concluded that it was unlikely Ms Coldwell could have ascended the ladder into the tree without the ladder falling out from under her.
Mahony’s version was that he was inside the house with their daughter who was having an afternoon nap when he found his wife at the foot of the tree.
Mr Heaton said Ms Coldwell’s body was on the opposite side of the tree to where the ladder was and that the shape of the rocks were not consistent with the injury she sustained.
Also, she had no other fractures or bruises, he said.
Mr Heaton said found alongside the rocks was an antique clothes iron which had a pointed end which the Crown submitted could be consistent with Ms Coldwell’s head injury though the Crown could not say categorically.
Ms Coldwell died in a Brisbane hospital on the morning of August 25, 2009, having sustained a “catastrophic injury to the back of the head leading to brain damage”, Mr Heaton said.
Two days later Mahony had contacted the insurance company to make a claim on the policy, he said.
Police hadn’t initially investigated the incident as a homicide but a terrible accident, however, investigations had taken a different turn after the insurance company investigated the policies and the cause of death.
The jury would hear in a recorded interview with an insurance investigator, Mahony denied having affairs or that he had been unfaithful, that he described the relationship with his partner as “beautiful” denying that she was leaving him and that they had made love in a gym equipment shed at the back of the house just two hours before the incident, Mr Heaton said.
The jury would also see copies of emails retrieved from the family computer in which Mahony conversed with a South Korean woman who had previously worked at the meatworks in which the couple declared their love.
The trial before Justice James Douglas continues.