Helen Gregory murder trial: How the investigation shifted away from accidental death

RNZ News

2 days ago

Julia DeLuney in the High Court.
Photo:
RNZ / Mark Papalii
Details of how the police investigation into the death of Helen Gregory began to shift from accidental death to murder have been revealed to a jury.
Julia DeLuney is accused of murdering her 79-year-old mother Helen Gregory at her Khandallah home in January 2024. She has pleaded not guilty to the charge.
One detective
told the High Court at Wellington on Wednesday
that he locked down the scene when he saw the amount of blood around the house.
Under cross examination by defence lawyer Quentin Duff, detective Luke Hensley said when he was called in, the death was not being treated as suspicious.
But he said the blood around the house struck him as strange - as did the fact DeLuney had left her mother on the bedroom floor after her fall from the attic, to drive back to Kāpiti to pick up her husband, rather than calling an ambulance.
In DeLuney's initial statement to police as a witness, she explained her mother did not like hospitals.
When she and Antonio DeLuney returned, there was far more blood than before.
The Crown's case is that DeLuney attacked her mother, and then staged it to look like a fall, but the defence's case is that while she was gone, a third person caused those fatal injuries.
The DeLuney's gave their statements in the early hours of the morning, at the Johnsonville Police Station.
But Julia DeLuney's status as a witness would change in the coming days.
On Wednesday afternoon, Detective Sergeant Guilia Boffa told the court about her notes from the time, regarding the results of the post-mortem - something experts are expected go into in more detail in the coming days.
"There were seven to nine lacerations on the scalp, and that there were defensive wounds, three skull fractures, two separate impacts, and that there was a brain bleed to the front and back, bruising, blunt force trauma, that was not consistent with a fall."
Meanwhile, other information was coming to light.
DeLuney had changed her clothing multiple times over the course of the evening, observed in different outfits by ambulance officers and on CCTV.
Police also discovered there were previous protection orders against DeLuney and record of a gambling problem dating back to 2015.
In the following days, police sought a search warrant under the offence of manslaughter.
But during cross examination, Duff for the defence asked Boffa whether she recalled a neighbour approaching a scene guard in the days following the death, to say someone had knocked on their door that same night, between 9.30 and 10pm.
On reviewing her notebook, Boffa confirmed she was aware of that happening.
Earlier in the week Duff accused the police investigation of tunnel vision when it came to pursuing the case against DeLuney, and failing to properly investigate whether a third person could have done it.
The trial continues today.
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