Backpacker tells jury she feared she would never see her family again
Alone, naked and chained to a couch on an isolated property, a European backpacker thought of her beloved family, fearing she would never see them again, a court has heard.
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Alone, naked and chained to a couch on an isolated property, a European backpacker thought of her beloved family, fearing she would never see them again, a court has heard.
The woman, 26, continued giving evidence on Friday in the District Court trial of accused kidnapper and rapist Gene Charles Bristow, 54.
The woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, told the jury of her fear while she was held captive in an old, dirty pig shed on Bristow’s cattle farm near Meningie.
“I was feeling terrible and I would think about my family a lot,” she said.
She worried it would “take a long time” for her family to discover she had been abducted.
“I thought I wouldn’t see them again,” she said.
“(I thought) I was going to die there.”
The woman, who began giving evidence on Thursday, has already told the jury she feared Bristow would shoot her if she attempted to flee.
“He placed something on my back and said it was a gun, so then I didn’t struggle anymore because I was afraid that he will shoot me,” she told the jury on Thursday.
Prosecutors have previously said the woman was lured to the 40ha hobby farm 150km south of Adelaide after Bristow responded to an ad she posted on Gumtree, and had her hands and feet shackled to a couch in the former pig shed.
They allege Bristow repeatedly sexually assaulted the woman over two days in February 2017.
On Friday, the backpacker said she had asked him to let her go, but he said it “was not up to him”.
“I asked him to let me go but he said he couldn’t, that he had bosses and he worked for someone.”
She said he had also warned her about “very dangerous” snakes which would bite.
“I think he told me that so I wouldn’t run off.”
The woman, sitting beside an interpreter, described to the jury how she escaped her shackles and used her laptop to send Facebook messages and emails saying she was “afraid” and had been “kidnapped in South Australia”.
“I’m afraid to run away or they will chase me and shoot,” she explained one of her emails said.
She told the jury she had again chained herself back up, too scared to escape and hoping she would be found.
“I knew my friend called the police, so that they knew,” she said.
“I hoped they would find me and if I wasn’t out there the next day I would unscrew (the chains) again and then see if I could run off somewhere.”
The next day, the woman said she heard “plane noises” overhead, which made her captor nervous.
“He told me that there were police everywhere and that he had been stopped twice and so that we needed to go.”
He said the woman was then rushed to the cover of nearby trees before he returned with a car and ordered her to “lay flat in the back”.
Nicholas Healy, for Bristow, said there was no dispute the woman had stayed overnight in his client’s old pig shed, but the allegations against him were “an invention” which “simply did not take place”.
The trial, before Judge Geraldine Davison, continues.
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