Former Corrections officer David Benbow, 54, denies murdering Christchurch builder Michael McGrath who disappeared on May 22, 2017.
His body has never been found – and nor has a murder weapon - despite widespread searches of properties, rivers, waterways, and the city dump.
Benbow’s defence team has warned the jury at the High Court in Christchurch of “investigative bias” and “tunnel vision” from police early in its investigations.
The Crown alleges he lured McGrath to his semi-rural lifestyle property in Halswell on Monday, May 22, 2017 and used his .22 semi-automatic rifle, with suppressor and sub-sonic ammunition, to shoot him dead and then dispose of his body, just weeks after learning he was seeing his ex-partner Joanna Green and telling a counsellor he wanted to “annihilate” him.
Today, the court has heard from McGrath’s mother Adrienne McGrath who recounted a loyal, reliable private son who would “anything for anybody”.
She told how McGrath and Benbow had been friends and they would occasionally come to her Halswell home.
“He always seemed pleasant enough,” she said, and when they were younger, Benbow would sometimes knock on her kitchen door and say, “G’day Mum, how are you?” the court heard.
But at the time Michael McGrath disappeared, she had not known that her son had been in a new relationship with Green, who had left Benbow earlier in 2017.
Every Tuesday evening, she would have her two sons, Michael and younger brother Simon, over for dinner.
But when Michael didn’t show up on Tuesday, May 23, 2017, she was concerned as he’d only missed the family appointment “once or twice” in 20-odd years – and he would’ve phoned ahead if he couldn’t make it, she said.
The week earlier he’d been “fine... nothing that gave me any concern”.
Dishing up for dinner with just her son Simon on May 23, she had a phone call from Green who had been trying to contact Michael.
The mother said he hadn’t arrived for tea and Green said she’d come straight over.
She burst indoors, Adrienne McGrath recalled to the court, and said, “I hope David hasn’t done anything to him.”
Adrienne McGrath also told the court that when her perfectionist builder son was forced out of his construction job after a varicose veins’ operation, depression gradually set in.
“He was really quite low and it lasted for a wee while,” Adrienne McGrath said but after three years or so, he “gradually got better until he was his normal self”.
“There was never any thought of him taking his own life,” she said.
While the Crown accepts there is no body, no murder weapon, and little forensic evidence in the case, it says there is a strong circumstantial case consisting of many threads that, when taken together, show Benbow is guilty of McGrath’s murder beyond reasonable doubt.
Lead defence counsel Marc Corlett KC earlier said that “within hours” of McGrath’s disappearance, Green had pointed the finger of blame at Benbow “and the police duly obliged”.
But despite teams of police spending thousands of hours investigating “trying to find any evidence they could to fit their theory”, they could not find any, Corlett said.
The trial, before Justice Jonathan Eaton, continues.
-By Kurt Bayer
