Burden of murder lifted but weight of public disgust lingers

Tostee has emerged from trial a loathed figure and will likely have to live with the label ‘that Tinder guy’, writes Phil Vine

It’s been all too easy to hate Gold Coast lothario Gable Tostee, to be shocked by his macho boasting: “I’m a porn star after a couple of drinks.”

To be disgusted at his chat lines. “Can you be a freak in the sheets,” he asked his Tinder date, New Zealander Warriena Wright.

Too easy to revile his seemingly casual attitude to her death — slipping out and getting pizza as Wright’s body lay broken on the concrete below his apartment. There’s a lot to dislike.

Now the trial is over. The jury found Tostee innocent of murder.

Just before the jury went out, Tostee’s lawyer Saul Holt, a former Palmerston North prosecutor, asked them to forget the pizza, ignore everything that happened afterwards, to see his client as a real person, not a “cartoonish villain”.

But that’s exactly how we’ve consumed Tostee as an audience over the past eight days. Our appetite for villainy easily whetted by the huge amount of personal detail laid bare.

This was truly a modern murder trial. A pair of Gen Ys who met on Tinder, their date recorded on devices. From the awkward hug outside a surf shop in the mall caught on CCTV at 8.46pm, through to Wright’s final scream as she fell from Tostee’s 14th-storey balcony at 2.20am. The six men and six women of the jury got to hear much of it.

Tostee chose to secretly record their increasingly violent encounter on his phone.

His friends didn’t find this documentation out of the ordinary. Neither did the nightclub owners who banned him from their premises for his approaches to single women.

The last six minutes of that recording are crucial. Tostee refuses to let Wright leave with her belongings, telling her: “You’ve been a bad girl.” There’s a struggle where she hits him with ornamental rocks and a metal telescope clamp.

Tostee has Wright in a stranglehold, which restricts her breathing.

What the audio failed to capture was the discrepancy in their size. He’s a carpet layer who works out. She was slight, probably half his weight.

Tostee shut her out on the balcony. Wright told him “no” 33 times. Then she tried to climb to the balcony below. Tostee was inside. As Wright’s legs went over the edge, a neighbour woken by the screaming told her to go back.

Two years ago, Gold Coast detectives said they were pretty confident of a conviction. They brought the harshest charges available, relying on a 1986 precedent when a New South Wales woman fleeing her violent boyfriend climbed out her apartment window and fell to her death. Her partner was successfully prosecuted for murder.

One of the last questions asked by the jury gave a glimpse into their thinking. They wanted to know whether Wright’s decision to try and climb to the balcony below might have been influenced by alcohol.

“Could Ms Wright’s intoxication and state of mind have a bearing on whether her actions were reasonable and rational?”

The reply came back: “A jury of your accumulated experience of life scarcely needs a judge to point out that excessive consumption of alcohol can impair . . . judgment.”

And so begins the process of rehabilitating Tostee’s battered character.

Image consultants would probably advise a name change. It’s far too cartoonish. Gable Tostee will always be known as “that Tinder guy”.

Phil Vine filmed a story on Warriena Wright for TV3’s 3D programme in 2014.