FORMER PARTNER OF MISSING CHARLOTTE ACCUSED OF MURDER
EVIDENCE POINTS TO HIM AS KILLER, TRIAL TOLD TWIN SISTER TELLS OF ‘ROCKY’ RELATIONSHIP
THE former boyfriend of a missing Co Tyrone woman has gone on trial accused of her murder.
Charlotte Murray (34) disappeared in October 2012.
Yesterday, as her ex-partner John Patrick Miller appeared in court, a prosecution lawyer claimed that circumstances point with “certainty and sureness” to him being her killer.
Richard Weir QC, while accepting the case against Miller is circumstantial, told Dungannon Crown Court it pointed “to one man only” — Miller.
The 48-year-old, originally from Coleraine but with an address in Redford Park, Dungannon, denies murdering Charlotte, from Omagh, on a date between October 31 and November 2, 2012.
The jury of eight men and four women also heard that police had investigated reported sightings of Charlotte both here and in England up to nine months after she disappeared.
This claim by defence QC Orlando Pownall came during cross-examination of Charlotte’s identical twin sister Denise.
Mr Pownall said police had asked her about purported sightings of her sister in Moy, Co Tyrone, in June 2013 and in Birmingham, England, three months later.
Ms Murray said she remembered being asked “about things like that”, but not “when and where”.
Earlier, Charlotte’s mother Mary accepted Charlotte and her family were not close, and that the last time she saw her was about a year and a half before she was reported missing.
Contact between them was sporadically by phone, usually initiated by Charlotte “in the early hours” and after drink.
Mrs Murray also accepted her daughter had a troubled past, drank too much, was violent with alcohol and was suspected of abusing Class A drugs.
Charlotte was also said to be suicidal and at one stage attempted to take her own life following the death of a boyfriend.
Her mum also agreed that she had “problems with Travellers” and that she was involved in an assault in which she had hit a man with her shoe.
Her identical twin sister Denise, who reported her missing in May 2013, also said the sisters had not been on speaking terms for a couple of months. Then just after Halloween a notice appeared on Charlotte’s Facebook, which she claimed had punctuation her sister would never use.
However, during cross-examination, Ms Murray admitted she had accessed the entry via another account as Charlotte had blocked her from the social media site.
She further agreed that message in fact had no punctuation in it at all.
Denise said she became worried after there was no contact between them around Christmas, their birthday.
In January 2013 she attempted, through Facebook, to contact Miller, but without success.
Eventually with her brother, contact was made and they met in a restaurant just after St Patrick’s Day.
While Miller brought along a box of Charlotte’s things, he claimed not to know where she was, and had complained that Charlotte had spent all of her time on the computer.
He claimed that in the end they were not talking and just passing each other in the hallway. He also told her Charlotte had left while he had been out working.
During her later cross-examination, Denise claimed she had met her sister in Asda, although she has told police they had not spoken from March 2012 and that she knew nothing of her engagement.
She said she had described her as being “volatile”, and their past relationship was “rocky”.
She also accepted Charlotte had been in care and that part of the problem of little or no contact between her and her family arose out of her aggression, particularly with drink, and that it was not difficult to fall out with her when she drunk.
Earlier prosecution QC Richard Weir admitted this was a somewhat different case in that “no body has been recovered”.
However, he noted Charlotte has “not been seen or heard from since ... and the evidence points to her being dead and that John Miller killed her”.
While later accepting their case was “circumstantial”, Mr Weir maintained when each evidential strand was examined, individually and wholly, it proved that Charlotte “is dead and that she died around the end of October, beginning of November 2012”.
He added: “We can’t say precisely when she died, and we do not know how she died, but we say that circumstances point to Mr Miller and only to him.
“They point inexorably to him, they point comprehensively, they point with certainty and sureness to him.”
He also told the jury that, once they had heard and analysed all of the evidence, they would be satisfied to the necessary standard “that the accused is guilty of
❝ Mr Miller could have and did instigate those texts to falsely show that Charlotte was alive
the offence of murdering Charlotte Murray”. The jury and trial Judge Stephen Fowler QC also heard the strands of evidence include bloodstains found in the bathroom of the home the couple once shared, bloodstains which matched Charlotte’s DNA profile.
Other evidence included examination of various computers, and the mobile phone records of the couple.
These allegedly showed text messages couldn’t have been sent by Charlotte from “Belfast or anywhere near it”, and that “Mr Miller could have and did instigate those texts to falsely show that Charlotte was alive after November 1, 2012”.
When initially spoken to by police in May 2013, he made a witness statement, said Mr Weir, before he was later interviewed as a suspect in Charlotte’s disappearance. “Essentially,” added Counsel, Miller “denies that she is dead, and denies that he has killed her”.
The trial continues.