Killer’s evidence on Backmoore a lie, defence says
A lawyer has told the High Court that nothing at the scene of Angela Blackmoore’s murder in 1995 indicated his client was present when she was killed by confessed murderer Jeremy Powell.
Powell confessed to murdering Blackmoore in a police interview on October 25, 2019, after he was identified by information from Witness X, who had responded to a $100,000 police reward offer.
Blackmoore, 21, was bludgeoned and then stabbed in a brutal attack on August 17, 1995 in her home in Wainoni, Christchurch. The young mother was pregnant at the time.
Peter Hawken, 50, and Rebecca WrightMeldrum, 51, deny a charge of being parties to Blackmoore’s murder.
Powell, the star witness for the Crown, has told the court he was assisted in the murder by his then girlfriend WrightMeldrum, and that he was acting on orders from Hawken, who was to pay the pair $10,000.
Phil Shamy, representing WrightMeldrum, said yesterday Powell was untrustworthy for many reasons, but one was lack of support for his account in the forensic scene evidence and the autopsy report.
Powell had talked about WrightMeldrum mopping up the blood, but nothing at the scene supported that scenario.
The kitchen where Blackmoore died was full of fingerprints, but not those of WrightMeldrum. Powell said he had hit Blackmoore with a baseball bat which had broken. Yet Blackmoore remained conscious to fight for her life, Shamy said.
The jury could not trust someone who could murder so brutally, he said.
Powell had lied again about titles and clips of extreme pornography involving rape and violence found on his electronic devices by forensic examiners. He initially said the material must have already been on the devices because they were second-hand, but later said he might have accidentally received the objectionable videos and looked at them. “He’s a liar, a murderer and, to use an old word, he is a pervert. He is a very odd man,” Shamy said.
Powell had received the benefit of a lighter sentence for his confession and information, the lawyer said. By blaming others and painting himself as the victim he made himself look better in the eyes of others like his parents, Shamy argued.
It didn’t make any sense that Hawken should choose Powell and his stripper girlfriend to carry out a murder. He was taking a huge risk.
It defied common sense to think Hawken would get Powell to have “another crack” after he had apparently chickened out the first time.
Phone calls in which Wright-Meldrum was said to have made veiled admissions had to be seen in context, Shamy said. She was being accused of murder and was panicking.
Not everything the police said to her was recorded, including what Detective Superintendent Tom Fitzgerald had said to her during a cigarette break in her police interview on October 25, 2019.
Justice Rachel Dunningham will sum up today, after which the jury will retire to consider its verdict.