‘Overwhelming hatred’
Nelson woman Tracey-Anne Harris was murdered for meth and money, according to the Crown, at the behest of a woman with an overwhelming hatred for her. Tim Newman reports.
In the months before her murder, Nelson woman Tracey-Anne Harris was caught up in a love triangle she couldn’t seem to escape.
For about a year the 43-year-old mother of three had been in a relationship with Ricky Brookes, and during that time had suffered the wrath of Ricky’s ex-wife, Vicky.
This was no ordinary love triangle though – Vicky Brookes was Tracey’s aunt.
No-one disputed the obsessive and overwhelming hatred Vicky held towards Tracey, something that been made abundantly clear to just about anyone who knew either of the two.
A court heard that ever since news of their relationship had become known, Tracey endured a barrage of verbal and physical abuse from Vicky, ranging from intimidating texts and phone calls, stalking, death threats and physical altercations. There was even a voodoo doll Vicky reportedly told a witness she had put strands of Tracey’s hair on and stabbed it in the face with a pin.
About a week before Tracey was found dead in her home, the tensions came to a head as the pair fought in the carpark outside Nelson Hospital.
The fight on Sunday January 31, 2016, had been over Ricky, who had crashed Vicky’s car while driving in the Rai Valley, and ended up at hospital.
Both women turned up to see him, with a couple of Tracey’s friends tagging along to support her.
Tracey arrived first, and brought Ricky outside near the entrance to the Accident and Emergency department, where they shared a cigarette.
Soon afterwards Vicky pulled up in her car, yelling and screaming at Tracey.
A witness said she got out of the car and went straight for Tracey. ‘‘She just said ‘‘you slut’’ and lunged at her. Pulling hair and scrapping, yelling at each other – both of them.’’
Tracey gave as good as she got, and the two were eventually separated by Ricky after wrestling each other to the ground.
Later that day Vicky called up Tracey again. The line, ‘‘Welcome
to your funeral, bitch’’, was overheard by one of Tracey’s friends listening in to the call on speaker phone.
This altercation, the Crown argued, was the trigger that sent Vicky Brookes over the edge. It argued the hatred was so intense it became ‘‘overwhelming’’. A contract killing was set up, using her nephew Tyler Baillie and his associate Rose Morgan to do the job, in exchange for meth and money.
The pair were found guilty of Harris’s murder on Thursday, after a four-week trial at the High Court in Nelson. Vicky Brookes has not been charged by police in relation to the murder.
It was a trial that shone a light on the seedy underbelly of the Nelson drug scene as well as the extraordinary feud over Ricky, a lanky, quietly spoken man.
SCENE OF THE CRIME
Just over a week after the hospital carpark fight, on Sunday February 11, it was Ricky who found Tracey dead in her home on Marlowe St in Stoke.
She was face down in the spare room and covered by a blanket. Drug paraphernalia had been scattered across Tracey’s usually neat and tidy lounge.
No one had seen Tracey since the Sunday of Waitangi weekend. She wasn’t responding to texts and calls, her house was locked but the windows were open.
On that Waitangi weekend the house was emptier than it had been for a while. During 2015 Ricky had been staying at the house, along with Tracey’s 16-year-old daughter Annaleise, and her infant grandson – who she had been given custody of.
By the end of the year Tracey’s grandson had gone back to stay with his parents, who had sorted out their family situation.
In the week before Tracey’s body was found, Annaleise had been staying with her cousin Tyler Baillie at a house in Brunner St in Bishopdale – the address of Rose Morgan.
After the hospital incident Tracey had told Ricky he couldn’t stay with her any longer, and had let Vicky know it was over.
Tracey’s friend Robyn Moore had been checking her house every day since Sunday.
On Wednesday Ricky came with her, and threw the unopened mail crowding the letterbox into one of the open lounge room windows.
Ricky was at Robyn’s house the next morning, where she was holding a bible study with two church friends.
She told Ricky it was time to go to the police, but he said he was going to find out for himself what was going on.
Louise said Ricky returned after about an hour later ‘‘looking like someone had ripped his heart out’’.
‘‘She’s gone,’’ Ricky said. ‘‘She’s dead.’’
METH AND MURDER
For the next two years Nelson police attempted to unravel the cause of Tracey’s death, taking the investigation deep into Nelson’s underground meth scene.
A blood sample from her autopsy showed Tracey had multiple drugs in her system, with a combination of methamphetamine, methadone, diazepam (valium), and potentially GHB – a central nervous system depressant with a dubious reputation as a date rape drug.
With no other signs of injury or disease evident, the pathologist ruled the cause of death as multiple drug toxicity.
Tracey had struggled for a long time with drug addiction, and as a result knew several people within Nelson’s drug scene.
Police suspicion began to fall on two people in particular, 28-yearold Rose Morgan and 24-year-old Tyler Baillie.
Baillie had been staying at Morgan’s house in Brunner St in Bishopdale, where the use and sale of controlled drugs was a daily habit.
Along with Morgan and her three young children, there were a group of teenagers floating in and out of the house to socialise and take drugs together – with meth and cannabis the drugs of choice.
Baillie was in a relationship with one of the girls boarding at the house, with other witnesses saying he also had a casual relationship with Morgan and some of the other girls.
A syringe cap was located on the blanket near Tracey’s body during the scene examination, but there was no syringe to be found.
The cap also had Rose Morgan’s DNA on it.
The police pulled data from Morgan’s cellphone, gaining information about the texts she sent and received, along with the polling data from the nearest cellphone tower (at the time texts were sent or received).
It appeared Morgan had been in regular contact with Tracey on the Saturday and Sunday of Waitangi weekend, and had been over to her house on several occasions. After the evening of Sunday February 7, there were no more messages sent until her body was found on February 11.
Over the same time period there were several cryptic texts sent to Baillie, referring to ‘‘getting the job done’’ and ‘‘home kill’’.
In her statements to police, Morgan appeared to have no memory at all of seeing or contacting Tracey during that time.
When interviewed by police at her home in February 2016, Morgan said the last time she saw Tracey was Thursday February 4 – a chance encounter while shopping at Countdown in Stoke.
She remembered texting Tracey a couple of times that Sunday evening, arranging to bring Tracey’s daughter Annaleise back home the next day.
During a video interview with police a month later Morgan maintained the same story, before being confronted with the text message data.
She struggled to explain the texts between her and Tracey, maintaining she could not remember seeing Tracey or visiting her, either in the early hours of the morning or later in the afternoon.
Detective Neil Kitchen asked Morgan why the texts showed the two had been in regular contact.
‘‘The whole thing looks ... oh this is shocking. I’m sorry my mind’s just, just trying to grasp the concept of everything right now.’’
‘‘I’m not denying I sent those texts, I can understand what you mean and where you’re coming from, I just couldn’t believe this. I feel sick.’’
As the investigation progressed, police began to gather more statements from witnesses which implicated Morgan and Baillie.
They suggested Morgan and Baillie had been keeping Tracey’s daughter Annaleise from seeing or talking to her mother, while she stayed with them at Brunner St.
Baillie had confiscated Annaleise’s keys after he found her driving without a licence. The two were close and Annaleise was happy to spend some ‘‘cuzzie time’’ with Baillie – but felt she was being ‘‘fobbed off’’ when she asked to ring or see her mother.
Other witnesses talked of Morgan sourcing drugs at different times on the Sunday.
One mentioned going with Morgan to collect a pill container from Richmond in the early hours of Sunday, and being asked to crush them up into a fine powder. ‘‘Would you ever kill someone?’’, Morgan was alleged to have asked.
Morgan had also been sourcing methadone in the afternoon, purportedly for relatives who had lost theirs while crossing the Cook Strait on the interisland ferry.
There were also alleged admissions from both parties about drugging and killing Harris. Witnesses told the trial these included being contracted by Vicky to do the hit in exchange for meth and money, injecting Tracey with a ‘‘hotshot’’ of different drugs, suffocating her when the plan went awry, and offering payment for others to clean up the scene.
Just over two years to the day from when Tracey’s body was found, Baillie and Morgan were arrested on February 14, 2018.
EVIDENCE FOR MURDER?
The Crown case was that Tracey had been murdered on the evening of February 7, 2016, with a contract to kill made between Vicky Brookes, Tyler Baillie, and Rose Morgan.
The case relied heavily on circumstantial evidence – sourcing of the same drugs found in Tracey’s body, admissions to witnesses, cell phone data, and a seemingly murderous motive.
There was however, no direct evidence to show Tracey had been suffocated after the drug overdose went wrong.
Tracey’s body showed no sign of trauma from an injection or injuries from suffocation – although the pathologists involved said death by suffocation would not necessarily leave any visible markers.
Baillie’s DNA was not found at the scene, and while Morgan’s was found on the syringe cap, the defence argued it could have got there by accidental transference – something the experts could not rule out. And while there were people who said the pair confessed their deeds to them, there were no witnesses there at the time.
The defence argued the simplest explanation was probably the correct one – that Tracey Harris had suffered an accidental, tragic overdose by her own hand.
In his closing address, Baillie’s lawyer Ron Mansfield said the police investigation had ‘‘made a murder victim’’ out of Tracey.
As soon as the police started investigating the death as suspicious, rumours and theories began to spread like wildfire within the Nelson meth scene.
Mansfield said opportunists, knowing about Vicky Brookes’ hatred of Tracey and the theories surrounding her death, seized on the rumours and gave the police statements they hoped would help them out of their own legal predicaments.
He said many of these witnesses were unreliable in the extreme, drug users who would do or say anything that served their selfinterest.
He argued how much more likely was it that a woman with a history of drug addiction, anxious and depressed from constant harassment, might make a fatal mistake while consuming drugs ‘‘on a bender’’?
No one was disputing that Vicky did not hold an obsessive grudge against Tracey, but contracting a hit on her own niece was an entirely different matter to consider.
Morgan’s lawyer Cameron Lawes said rather than the fight at the hospital being the trigger for a contract killing, it was simply another link in the chain of unhappy events in Tracey’s life.
While Tracey seemed to have got over the worst of her addictions, she could not completely break free of drugs.
In court, Ricky described her as a ‘‘social smoker’’ of cannabis and methamphetamine, and she had been taking prescription diazepam and citalopram for her anxiety.
Unknown even to those closest to her, she had also been consuming methadone again – a drug she previously been addicted to.
During the autopsy three segments of Tracey’s hair were tested for methadone, traces of which could be transferred through the blood to the hair follicle.
The test showed during three two-month periods leading up to her death, Tracey had consumed the drug – but there was no way of knowing how much or how often.
After 17 days of evidence and two full days of deliberations, ultimately the jury sided with the prosecution – that the combined weight of evidence put the probability beyond reasonable doubt.
Baillie, as he had done throughout the trial, showed little emotion at the verdict, while Morgan broke down in tears.