Jury says guilty in quarry attack case
Truck driver Colin Jack Mitchell has been found guilty of abducting a woman off the streets of Auckland and taking her to a quarry with the intent of sexually violating her.
Mitchell has been on trial for the past three weeks at the High Court in Auckland over the attack in February 2017.
The jurors returned their verdict just before midday on Thursday.
During the trial, the Crown painted a picture of Mitchell as a predator who preyed on the young woman while she was drunk and trying to hail a cab on an innercity Auckland street.
The defence argued it wasn’t Mitchell who abducted the woman, claiming he was bathing his legs at a beach in Onehunga.
Mitchell was convicted on charges of abduction, wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, and assault with intent to commit sexual violation.
Throughout the trial, the prosecution claimed Mitchell abducted the woman and took her to a Riverhead quarry with a sexual motive.
At the quarry, however, the woman managed to escape.
The woman’s memory from the night is foggy – she only remembers being in Ponsonby Rd earlier in the evening before waking up at the quarry with a man standing over her.
She has no recollection of being in a car, or how she escaped.
‘‘There was a man with a mask and so I think it was some kind of softball or baseball bat and I was crunched up on the ground and I thought he had an accent, but because of the mask it might have been muffled,’’ she later recalled.
A large part of the Crown case was built around two gloves found at the scene in Riverhead, north Auckland.
They contained DNA which was eight hundred million times more likely to be Mitchell’s than anyone else in New Zealand.
The defence claimed the gloves were not Mitchell’s, but that he had tried on a similar pair at The Warehouse weeks earlier – possibly explaining how his DNA ended up in them.
‘‘The Crown says it is a fanciful suggestion . . . the Crown would say he is one of the unluckiest men in Auckland,’’ Crown prosecutor Kirsten Lummis said on Tuesday.
‘‘The one pair of gloves he chooses to pick up, the one pair in a three-pack, happens to be the very same pair [smack] bang in the middle of a crime scene. A crime scene where a Ford Mondeo, just like the one driven by Mitchell, is seen entering the quarry.’’
Mitchell has always claimed he was at home the night the woman was attacked, watching a movie.
He said he left home later in the evening to bathe his legs in the salt water at Onehunga beach, before going for a drive to West Auckland.
The Crown claimed cell phone polling showed Mitchell was not in West Auckland, but in Auckland city and then later at the Riverhead quarry at the same time the woman was abducted and attacked.
CCTV footage also showed a car similar to Mitchell’s near where the woman was abducted, and later at the quarry.
However, defence lawyer Mark Ryan pointed out the victim’s DNA was not found in Mitchell’s car.
‘‘There is no evidence whatsoever to support the claim [the woman] was in Mr Mitchell’s car,’’ Ryan said.
Mitchell, a former Onehunga RSA President, turned 60 on Thursday – the day he was found guilty.
The Crown indicated it would apply for preventative detention.
Mitchell is likely to be sentenced in May.