The brutal and disturbing murder of Renee Duckmanton
Yesterday, Sainey Marong was found guilty of the murder of Christchurch sex worker Renee Duckmanton. Sam Sherwood reports on the case.
Sainey Marong drove up and down Manchester St in his silver Audi for 30 minutes. He was waiting for the right moment, for the right woman. It was May 14, 2016 and since January, the former cab driver from Gambia who worked in Christchurch as a freezingworks butcher, had visited the street up to 10 times a day. Sometimes he’d pay for sex, other times just being in the area was enough to satisfy his newfound ‘‘hypersexual’’ desires.
The desires had led to some bizarre online searches. The father of three had been searching how to kidnap a girl and how to have sex with a dead body. He had been poring over stories about the murders of Christchurch prostitutes Suzie Sutherland and Mellory Manning.
Earlier in the day of his cruise looking for the right women, he’d helped slaughter a sheep at a property in Rolleston. He dropped some of the meat off at a friend’s place in Hornby, keeping the ‘‘marvellous’’ tongue for himself.
His friend, Abdellih Rharrabti, asked him to stay but he appeared to be in a rush and stayed only five minutes.
Around 9pm Marong turned right into Peterborough St and parked. Seconds later Renee Duckmanton, wearing a black jacket, white top and white shorts walked in his direction from the same corner Manning occupied before she was murdered in 2008.
Duckmanton’s stint as a sex worker had not been long. Over the previous 12 months, the 22-year-old’s earnings covered her and her boyfriend’s rent, food and drugs.
Marong would later say he and Duckmanton agreed he would pay her
$100 for sex in the back seat of his car at an isolated location. She would normally charge that rate for about 20 minutes of her time so the price increased to $300 when Marong told her he wanted to visit Rharrabti before they would head back to a friend’s house for sex.
About 20 minutes later Marong pulled over his car on Riccarton Rd to withdraw
$300 and Duckmanton called her boyfriend Sam Doak. The couple had said goodbye about an hour before when Duckmanton was picked up by her minder and taken to Manchester St.
Doak kissed Duckmanton before she left for the night dressed for work. Around her neck were two necklaces, one with her name on it, the other a love heart.
During the phone call Duckmanton told Doak her client was withdrawing money and was the same client who had left her stranded three weeks earlier, leaving her to walk home.
To a query from Doak, she said she felt safe. ‘‘I love you,’’ she said.
Marong and Duckmanton then headed towards Rolleston. He would later tell the court that on their way Duckmanton asked him to park somewhere so they could have sex.
He claimed that after the sex Duckmanton wanted to go back to Manchester St but he was still focused on heading to Rolleston.
According to his testimony before a jury in the High Court in Christchurch this week, Duckmanton grabbed his shirt and began to yell at him to take her back.
‘‘That screaming, that voice, that yelling was agitating me. The only method I could use to stop it was to compress her neck.’’
He claimed it wasn’t until the following day he realised she was dead.
‘‘Her mouth and eyes were open. It reminds me of the animals that normally get slaughtered at my workplace. That’s how I understood she was not alive.’’
Marong left Duckmanton’s body inside his Audi for most of the next day. In the afternoon he drove south towards Ashburton and turned into Main Rakaia Rd, a country road leading off the main highway. He dumped Duckmanton’s body near the roadside, doused it with petrol and set it alight.
‘‘I couldn’t resist myself. I struggled to stop it after the ignition.’’
The following morning Marong Googled ‘‘can fire destroy DNA?’’. He then read an article titled ‘‘Crime experts say fires at murder scenes can’t destroy all clues’’.
The breakthrough
Detective Inspector Darryl Sweeney arrived in the office at the Christchurch central police station about an hour after Duckmanton’s body was discovered by a Rakaia man on his way home from Hanmer about 7pm.
There was little that could be done while it was dark except secure and protect the scene.
The following day police identified Duckmanton from a tattoo of a cross with the date of her Aunt Robyn’s birth and death dates on her wrist. Police traced the death through births and marriages and linked it back to the family.
Police soon discovered Duckmanton was a sex worker and that presented difficulties.
‘‘In what we know about previous homicides of working girls in Manchester Street, all of a sudden you’ve got a large population. They’re at risk and they’re in a high traffic area.’’
Sweeney said the breakthrough came when police began looking at the phone call Duckmanton made to Doak saying she was with a client.
From the data police could see she had made the call in Riccarton Rd. Detectives then scanned every financial transaction made in Riccarton Rd at the time and found the withdrawal made by Marong.
The crucial withdrawal enabled police to find Marong’s car and CCTV footage of the Audi in Peterborough St about 9pm on the night Duckmanton went missing.
The DNA
Police had a strong suspect but needed a stronger link between Marong and Duckmanton. They had obtained DNA samples from the sex worker’s body, a lighter and a blue beanie. Some of the DNA was clearly Duckmanton’s but other samples needed identification.
‘‘It became quite a point of tension for me. We had established he was the likely offender and our real concern was to get him into custody before he did anything,’’ Sweeney says.
‘‘There was real pressure on detectives to drop everything they had to get the job done.
‘‘Hour by hour we were assessing whether we could arrest him or not.’’
It was now six days after Duckmanton’s murder and Marong persuaded Rharrabti to help pick up his Audi from another address in Hornby and to clean it at Rharrabti’s property. Rharrabti vacuumed the inside of the car unaware he was sucking up some of Duckmanton’s hair while Marong cleaned out the car, dumping his victim’s cellphone and clothes.
His attempts to cover his tracks would prove pointless as police had been granted a search warrant to covertly examine the house where he lived on Barlow St, Riccarton.
Two detectives went undercover as a couple looking to buy the large boarding house where Marong had a room. One carried a black handbag with disposable gloves and plastic evidence bags.
They eventually identified Marong’s bedroom and confiscated a black comb and a white NYPD cap for forensic testing. The tests showed a definite link between the DNA found on Duckmanton and Marong. Police could now arrest their chief suspect.
The trial
Twenty months later Marong stood in the dock of the High Court at Christchurch and pleaded not guilty to murdering Duckmanton.
The Crown argued it had ‘‘overwhelming evidence’’, including his DNA on a lighter and beanie left at the scene as well as his web search history. Sweeney says it was ‘‘the most sophisticated’’ court package he’d ever seen.
Marong’s defence cited ‘‘mental imbalance’’.
Each day Duckmanton’s family sat in the front two rows to the left of the courtroom. Her mum, who held a cushion made out of one of Duckmanton’s cardigans, was flanked by her husband and her other daughters. Behind them sat the victim’s father Brent McGrath.
Marong, usually dressed in a white dress shirt and dark pants, showed little emotion over the two weeks of the trial as he sat in the dock between two guards. He heard the Crown’s evidence, how they got his DNA, the extensive CCTV footage they had of him driving and how Duckmanton’s body was found.
On the seventh day of the trial Marong took the stand to say he was ‘‘definitely’’ insane when he strangled Duckmanton to death.
A diabetic, Marong told the court that from January of 2016 he noticed a change in his blood sugars despite using insulin. He later stopped using his medication.
Defence counsel Jonathan Krebs asked Marong if he noticed any other health issues.
‘‘Yes, between myself I knew I was going off-track. I was not the same Sainey . . . I couldn’t sleep, I lost the appetite to eat and sleep.’’
He said he also became ‘‘hypersexual’’ and his ‘‘delusional’’ state of mind compelled him to drive to Manchester St and engage in sexual activity.
‘‘Basically it would cause me to be restless, sometimes just getting myself into [the] red-light district even though I didn’t engage in activity, just by seeing them made me feel comfortable.’’
However, two medical experts who assessed the 33-year-old poured scorn on his insanity claims. Psychiatrist Dr Erik Monasterio said Marong’s proposed defence was ‘‘farcical’’.
‘‘In my opinion this proposition is preposterous. I have no evidence of what’s being proposed here.’’
Forensic psychologist Ghazi Metoui told the court Marong had ‘‘exaggerated symptoms’’ and was ‘‘somewhat histrionic’’.
Marong reported a ‘‘settled mental state’’ over the period leading up to, during and after Duckmanton’s death, he said.
He said Marong’s underlying personality structure was ‘‘highly entitled’’ and he had a high inclination to manipulate others, including the court, if he perceived doing so would be to his advantage.
Shortly before midday yesterday the jury returned to the courtroom to also deliver a rejection of Marong’s defence.
‘She was my best friend’
Brent McGrath’s home is full of mementos of his daughter. His fridge is covered in photographs and a funeral sheet is also attached.
On the wall of his lounge, her face beams from a large framed photograph taken a week before her death. The photographs help him cope.
When he comes home from work he talks to her and gives her photograph a kiss, on the forehead.
Occasionally he visits her mother’s home, where her bedroom remains untouched, and just sits down to think of her.
‘‘We were best friends, she was more my friend than my daughter.
‘‘When I saw her she always gave me big hugs. When she went out, she’d say, ‘I love you dad’. She knew I had her back.’’
Growing up his daughter was ‘‘really sensitive and happy’’.
‘‘She was just constantly happy and smiling, nothing was a problem. She had a lot of love in her life.’’
She planned to have a baby.
The week after her death was a blur, McGrath says.
‘‘I drunk a lot and I smoked a lot.’’ His work quickly became his refuge. ‘‘When I’m at work I’m safe. All my mates are there. I go out there and I sweat, we all do.’’
McGrath recalls Marong’s first appearance in court when he charged at him before being restrained by court security staff.
‘‘You f…… maggot. Now I know your face, you piece of s…’’ he had yelled.
Duckmanton’s aunt, Sue McGrath, also lunged at Marong. ‘‘You’re f…… dead,’’ she had screamed.
‘‘When I nearly got to him he looked as scared as anything,’’ Brent McGrath recalls. ‘‘I thought, I wonder how Renee looked.’’
Brent McGrath admits having thoughts of assaulting Marong during the two-week trial but says he couldn’t risk ruining the court process.
Going forward he says he’s glad New Zealand has no death penalty.
‘‘I want him to live. I want him to live every f…… day. I want Renee to come to him in his nightmares, I want him when he’s having a shave in the daytime to see her face.’’
Now with a guilty verdict he has some closure. ‘‘It’s horrific losing a daughter, it doesn’t matter how or why or the circumstances. It’s the same thing – you’ve lost them, you can’t get them back.
‘‘Just got to stick with all memories and stuff. Got to keep trucking on.’’
‘Stranger attack’
Sweeney looks back at the investigation of the case with a ‘‘huge sense of satisfaction’’.
‘‘It looks simple but it wasn’t. The thing that stands out is detectives got it right. Everybody involved in this produced to the gold standard. It was extremely busy, extremely dynamic. It took working 100 hour weeks for two to three weeks.’’
He was also struck by the impact on Duckmanton’s family.
‘‘I’m very cognisant of her family, they lived through a terrible lifechanging event.’’
He describes Marong as ‘‘a dangerous man not thinking the same as the rest of us’’.
‘‘This was a stranger attack. When you’re looking at how she was found, it was totally disrespectful.’’
‘‘Hour by hour we were assessing whether we could arrest him or not.’’ Detective Inspector Darryl Sweeney