NOT GUILTY
Inside the Tinder trial
Gable Tostee is a free man after a Brisbane jury acquitted him of the charge of murdering New Zealander Warriena Wright (inset). Wright’s family was devastated after the verdict yesterday and pleaded for privacy so they could “pull the pieces of their life back together”. The judge in the nine-day trial criticised a juror who posted a series of Instagram pictures while serving.
To the world, Warriena Tagpuno Wright will forever be the tourist who died after falling from a balcony during a Tinder date in Surfers Paradise.
But to those who knew her, the 26-year-old was much more.
“Rrie” was a daughter, sister, friend and colleague and she was ripped out of their lives far too soon.
Gable Tostee was yesterday found not guilty of her murder and of the lesser charge of manslaughter following a nine-day trial in the Brisbane Supreme Court, four of them for jury deliberations.
Wright was born in Bulacan, a province in the Philippines about 35km north of Manila and one of the country’s oldest areas.
Her mother, Merzabeth Tagpuno, moved to New Zealand when Wright was about a year old and they settled in Wellington.
Tagpuno was a deacon at the Porirua Seventh Day Adventist Church and Wright and her younger sister Marreza were also members.
Family photos from the girls’ childhood show them smiling and happy — two sisters wearing matching dresses cuddling up to their parents.
As they got older, their relationship strengthened and they became best friends. They socialised together and photos posted on social media show their tight bond.
After Wright’s death, her younger sister described her as a practical joker with a soft spot for animals.
“She was a beautiful, intelligent, caring person, who was not only my sister but also my best friend,” she said.
Marreza Tagpuno travelled to Australia days after her sister died and spoke at a police press conference.
There, under the glare of television lights and cameras, she fought back tears as she told the world about Wright, who she said was a very private person who would have hated “all of this attention about her”.
“Rrie was the most important person in my world,” the younger sibling said. “Most of the time we only had each other to rely on. She was a very
beautiful, intelligent, caring person who not only was my sister, but she was my best friend.” Marreza Tagpuno said Wright had been really excited about her trip to Australia.
They had been exchanging messages during the trip via Facebook, including on the night Wright died.
“We were always in contact,” she said.
Wright had told her sister about Tostee and messaged her from his apartment during the fatal date.
“She was just messaging me that she met this guy,” Marreza Tagpuno told Tostee’s murder trial when she gave evidence last week.
Wright told her sister she thought Tostee looked like an actor from a television show she liked.
“I replied with thumbs up,” Tagpuno said. “She sent photos, they were quite fuzzy.” The photos were selfies of Wright and Tostee taken at 9.45pm — less than five hours before she died.
“Drinking with him, woot,” Wright wrote in her message.
Wright had travelled to Australia from her home in Lower Hutt on July 29, 2014. She had taken time off from her job in the credit card division at Kiwibank to attend a friend’s wedding and stayed afterwards for a holiday.
On August 6, after the wedding celebrations were over, Wright checked into a motel in Surfers. Two days later she was dead. On August 1, Wright was looking at Tinder on her cellphone. She came across a man she liked the look of and swiped her screen right — an action users take to show they like someone’s profile.
It was local man Tostee. He did the same and the app alerted her to their online match.
The pair exchanged text messages — some sexual — over the next few days and eventually arranged to meet for a date on the night of August 7.
At 8.45pm, street security cameras caught Wright meeting Tostee, then 28, outside a surf shop.
Three minutes later they were seen entering the Surfers Paradise Tavern’s beer garden, presumably to buy alcohol.
At 8.58pm, Wright and Tostee were captured on camera at his apartment building, walking up the stairs and into an elevator.
Wright was inside Tostee’s apartment for 321 minutes. Tostee told his trial that they drank — a claim backed up by tests that showed Wright’s blood alcohol level was three times over the legal limit. He said they had sex and then things soured and he asked her to leave, locking her on the balcony when she became “psycho”.
Police told the trial that after Wright had consumed a large amount of Tostee’s home-distilled vodka, he attacked her then locked the terrified woman outside.
Her fear of him, police claimed, was so strong that at 2.21am she climbed over his balcony in a desperate bid to escape, falling 14 storeys to her death in the process.
They charged him with murder, but a jury of six men and six women came to a verdict of not guilty after four days of deliberations.
Wright’s death left her family and friends reeling.
From New Zealand, her grieving mother wrote to a friend on Facebook. “I just can’t stop crying. Help me; I miss her so much.” She later spoke to the Filipino
Migrant News about her eldest child. “She was a good girl, she looked after me.” Wright’s friends at Kiwibank were also devastated. She had worked in the call centre for almost three years and was popular with colleagues and managers alike.
“She was well liked and good at her job,” a spokesman said.
“She was known for her love of animals and after her death the staff raised $1000 which was given to the SPCA in her name.”
Days before her fatal date, Wright had visited Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo on the Sunshine Coast.
She was photographed holding a python and appeared to be laughing despite the reptile wrapping itself around her neck.
Her passion for animals pushed her to write to Parliament in 2013, appealing for tougher penalties for people convicted of cruelty offences.
“This is something I strongly believe in, and seeing how people in New Zealand treat animals has truly made me ashamed of this country,” she wrote.
“If someone murders an animal or tortures an animal I believe their punishment should be the same as if they had done this to a child.” Wellington woman Edwina Ulberg went to church with Wright when the pair were teenagers.
Her friend was quiet but lovely, Ulberg said after learning of Wright’s death.
“She was really quiet, petite, and she was really nice. I’m just pretty shocked at the moment.” During the trial Wright’s family and friends heard, for the first time, audio recordings Tostee made of their date in his apartment.
Wright’s mother said she pleaded with the courts not to play or release the recordings, that she never wanted to hear her daughter that way.
But her pleas were rejected and the world effectively heard Wright’s last words — terrified pleading for Tostee to let her go home and the word “no” repeated over and over.
Wright’s death was not the first time Tostee found himself dealing with issues involving alcohol.
After he was arrested and charged with her murder in 2014, he admitted to a decade-long struggle with booze that began when he started drinking excessively as a teenager.
In a letter to the court, Tostee said alcohol lowered his inhibitions “far too much”.
“I found it helped me resolve my anxieties in interacting with others by improving my confidence,” he wrote.
“Without alcohol I am quite reserved and less talkative. I find that I am slow to think and do not feel as witty when I am sober.”
It was also revealed that Tostee had been seeing a psychiatrist since 2009 for treatment for “insecure social anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and depression”. He also has a history of attention deficit disorder.
The judge noted Tostee “was incredibly focused on himself”.