A victim of hatred?
A woman’s ‘‘overwhelming’’ hatred was behind the murder of a Nelson woman, a jury has been told.
Tyler Baillie (also known as Tyler Baillie-Harris), 27, and Rose Morgan, 31, are jointly charged with the murder of Tracey-Anne Harris, who was found dead at her home on Marlowe St, Stoke on February 11, 2016. The pair have pleaded not guilty.
The Crown has alleged that Morgan and Baillie murdered Harris by administering her a cocktail of drugs at her home, then suffocating her with a pillow.
In the High Court at Nelson, Crown prosecutor Jackson Webber said the the pair carried out the murder on behalf of an unnamed woman, who has been granted name suppression, in exchange for methamphetamine and cash.
The crime had been motivated by an ‘‘overwhelming’’ hatred of Harris by the woman, Webber said, stoked by the breakdown of a previous relationship.
The first witness in court on Monday was the exhusband of the unnamed woman, who had also been in an on-off relationship with Harris for some time.
He said Harris and his exwife had been ‘‘at loggerheads’’, which had led to threatening text messages and physical fights.
The worst incident occurred in January 2016, when the man had been admitted to Nelson Hospital after crashing his ex-wife’s car, the court heard. Both women arrived at the hospital and started ‘‘scrapping’’ in the carpark, punching each other and wrestling on the ground. The man said he had moved out of Harris’s house a couple of months before the fight.
He was also the first to find Harris’s body, lying face down in the spare room of her home on February 11.
The man, who had been living with a friend nearby, said he had become worried about Harris after not hearing from her for about a week. While the doors to her house were locked, the windows were open, something he said was highly unusual.
After passing her house several times and calling through the open windows, he eventually climbed in through a window and found Harris’s body.
He said that while Harris occasionally used meth, she was more of a ‘‘social smoker’’, and he hadn’t seen her inject drugs while they were living together.
Under cross-examination from defence lawyer Cameron Lawes, he said he was aware Harris had medication for anxiety, but was not aware she was taking any other drugs.
Webber said the murder had been carried out four days before Harris’s body was found by police.
In the days leading up to her death, both Baillie and Morgan had prepared themselves for the murder, he said.
Baillie had brought Harris’s daughter to the house he and Morgan were living in, under the pretext that he had found her driving her mother’s car without permission – leaving Harris at home on her own.
Morgan had been spending time with Harris on the evening of February 6, and had begun sourcing methadone, methamphetamine and GHB for the murder, which she carried out with Baillie in the evening of February 7, Webber said.
In his opening statements for Morgan, lawyer Michael
Vesty said Harris’s death had simply been caused by a tragic drug overdose. He said events leading up to her death had made her life extraordinarily difficult, ‘‘an evolving tragedy’’ which pushed her to stronger and more serious drug use.
As well as this, there were three other ‘‘foundation stones’’ that the defence case rested on: the lack of evidence of Morgan being in the Marlowe St house after dawn on February 7; false statements about Morgan made by witnesses in their testimony; and the unreliable nature of the testimony from those involved in Nelson’s underground drug scene.
In a brief opening statement for Baillie, defence lawyer Steven Lack said Baillie had ‘‘absolutely no involvement’’ in Harris’s death. He was only in court due to statements made by informant witnesses, which were ‘‘entirely unreliable’’.
Several witnesses gave evidence on the second day of the trial yesterday, about the abusive and intimidating messages sent to Harris in the time leading up to her death.
Ngareta Campion said she had known Harris since late 2014, in her capacity as a social worker. She said Harris had confided in her about the abusive messages sent to her by the woman, which had been caused by Harris’s relationship with the woman’s exhusband.
Campion said it seemed to be a constant and escalating situation, with Harris’s children being threatened.
‘‘Tracey was petrified. She felt the threats were genuine – that the safety of her and her children were at risk.’’
Salvation Army worker Adrienne Fry, who helped Harris find accommodation in Stoke during 2015, said that at one stage Harris was receiving two or three texts per day.
‘‘It was a relentless barrage . . . she changed her number four times but the texts kept coming.’’
Close friend Denise Moore, who lived near Harris in Stoke, said the relationship between Harris and the unnamed woman had been toxic ever since she met Harris in 2015.
She said the woman would phone and sent texts to Harris of an abusive nature, some of which she heard herself on speakerphone.
‘‘[It was] very hurtful. All the swear words, all the putdowns, that she’d kill her.’’
Moore had been a witness on January 30, 2016, a week before Harris’s death, when Harris and the woman got into a fight at Nelson Hospital.
Justice Susan Thomas is presiding over the trial, which is scheduled to last four weeks, with the Crown expected to call more than 50 witnesses.
It follows a two-year investigation by police into the death, which was initially treated as unexplained. Baillie and Morgan were arrested and charged in February 2018.