Murder-accused Julia DeLuney quizzed on blood spread around crime scene
Photo:
RNZ / Mark Papalii
Murder-accused Julia DeLuney's second video interview with police has been played to the court, with a detective questioning how so much blood was spread around the house.
DeLuney is on trial at the High Court in Wellington for the murder of 79-year-old mother Helen Gregory on 24 January last year, a charge she denies.
On Friday, the jury watched her second video interview, recorded at the Porirua police station on 27 January, 2024, three days after her mother's death.
During the interview, she told Detective Olivia Meares, who was conducting the interview, she might have put the bloody smears on the wall in the hallway and around the attic herself.
"I was trying to get it off me," she said. "There was a lot of it ... it looked like coagulated.
"Look, it just gave me ... it freaked me out, so I was just trying to get it off."
Meares asked her to explain further, saying, "There's a few things that aren't making sense to me".
The Crown's case is that DeLuney attacked her mother and staged it to look like a fall, but the defence says, in the 90-minute window when she went to get help after the fall, someone else caused fatal injuries to her elderly mother.
During this second interview, Meares asked DeLuney: "From what you've described to me, I'm struggling to understand how there is all this blood on the top of the ladder."
"I think that's my blood, I mean, mum's blood on me," DeLuney said. "I was trying to get it off." .
"Julia, that doesn't make sense," Meares said, questioning why she would go up into the attic to do that.
"I don't know what I was doing," DeLuney said.
"You've got to get over all this stuff [she gestures to a picture of the cupboard's contents strewn on the floor] and then climb up," Meares said. "It's not making sense."
DeLuney did not offer an explanation to this point.
When pressed for more detail about what had happened immediately after the fall, DeLuney explained her mother was struggling and trying to get up, so she had straddled her to try and keep her still.
Meares asked: "Julia, did you get angry at your mum when that was happening?"
"I didn't get angry. I was getting scared, I didn't get angry."
DeLuney explained she panicked she would be in trouble for letting her mother go up into the roof.
Meares told DeLuney that, according to the pathologist, her mother's injuries - "multiple blunt force trauma to the back of her head" - were not consistent with a fall.
"Can you tell me how that happened?"
"No, I can't," DeLuney replied. "I think we should stop now, I think I need a lawyer.
"I didn't hit my mum, I didn't hurt her at all, I was trying to help her."
The interview ended at 10.01pm.
The trial continues, with the defence expected to call its first witnesses next week.
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