Venod Skantha (32) has spent the last three weeks on trial before the High Court at Dunedin accused of the murder of 16-year-old Amber-Rose Rush and four counts of threatening to kill.
Defence counsel Jonathan Eaton QC this morning confirmed he did not elect to call evidence and Crown prosecutor Robin Bates made his closing address for the 10 men and two women of the jury.
They would, he acknowledged, have found the trial “difficult and confronting” and they now had more than 1000 pages of evidence and numerous exhibits before them when they came to consider their verdicts.
Mr Bates stressed to the jury that circumstantial evidence should not be viewed as inferior.
An online exchange of messages between Skantha and Amber-Rose was an example, he said, and it formed an important piece of the Crown case.
That social-media exchange reached its climax just minutes before Amber-Rose's death.
Mr Bates said there was no question the teenager's threats immediately jeopardised the doctor's career and lifestyle.
“He took a knife, gloves, beanie, old clothes,” he said.
Skantha, Mr Bates told the court, needed a driver to take him to the victim's Corstorphine home because “it was going to be a bit messy, cutting somebody's throat”, so he contacted 16-year-old friend.
Blood, however, was left in the passenger side of the defendant's silver BMW, where the prosecutor said there was no doubt the man was sitting.
While the teenage driver was key to the Crown case, Mr Bates said there were many other pieces of evidence that showed Skantha was guilty.
The defendant's police interview two days after the incident was packed with lies, he told the court.
Skantha immediately tried to distance himself from Amber-Rose and claimed his position at the hospital was not precarious.
Mr Bates said not only was his job important to him but he was on a final warning for misconduct.
“Amber alone could bring his career to an end; years of training, costs involved – down the drain, all over rover,” he told the jury.
Skantha would have known there were other teens who could have come forward with sexual allegations of their own, Mr Bates said.
“It's not only his job that's at stake, it's his liberty,” he told the court. “A rooster to a feather duster overnight.”
It was no coincidence, Mr Bates submitted, that Amber-Rose was dead within 30 minutes of her last message to Skantha and that her phone was taken.
The Crown prosecutor said whoever went inside the Clermiston Ave home in the middle of the night was taking “a massive risk”.
“The person who took that risk had to have a very compelling and immediate reason to be there,” he said.
He also pointed to marks in the dust on the BMW's dashboard, which the teenage driver said he drew to direct Skantha to the victim's bedroom.
Mr Bates questioned whether the boy could have somehow orchestrated that to frame the defendant as the killer and fit his story.
“Criminal mastermind,” he quipped.
He conceded the teen was “unusual” and became fatigued by the end of his testimony but said he generally gave a clear version of events which was ultimately corroborated by the evidence.
“He's not a person who would viciously kill a friend, a person who was good to him,” he said.
Mr Bates said the person who stabbed Amber-Rose, severing her carotid artery and trachea, knew what they were doing, consistent with Skantha's training as a doctor.
“[It was] a focused attack . . . to shut Amber up with one quick incision,” he said.
“The person who did this was really really angry.”
Amber-Rose sent her last message to her boyfriend at 11.55pm on February last year.
She was killed some time between then and 12.01am when the phone took a burst of hazy photos when it was being damaged, the Crown said.
Mr Bates told the jurors there were three rules for trials: “common sense, common sense and common sense.”
The trial continues.
