Littlehampton shooting case: Love-triangle woman denies plot to suffocate her tetraplegic ex-partner
An attempted murder trial has taken a different direction. The ex-partner of the accused has been questioned on any romantic involvement with her female housemate – and denied any discussion of killing the wheelchair-bound man.
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A woman at the centre of a love triangle which sparked an Adelaide Hills bloodbath has denied she spoke to her lesbian housemate about suffocating her tetraplegic ex-partner so the pair could be together.
The wheelchair-bound accused man is on trial in the Supreme Court charged with one count of attempted murder after allegedly shooting the woman’s new male lover in her garage at Littlehampton, in the Adelaide Hills, in October 2017.
The court has heard the alleged victim, 26, retaliated by attacking the accused man with an axe, rendering him paralysed from the neck down.
But the trial took a different direction yesterday, when the accused’s ex- partner gave evidence about a woman she met on a dating and friendship app.
She said she knew the woman had previously been in a same-sex relationship when the pair began living together at the Littlehampton house after the shooting incident.
Under cross-examination, she said she had confided in the woman that she thought she might be bisexual before she came to realise the woman had romantic feelings for her.
But she said the feelings were not reciprocated and the pair was at no point in a relationship.
Following a question from defence counsel Marie Shaw, she said she never told the woman if her ex-partner was “out of the way” they could be together, and they never discussed the woman suffocating the tetraplegic man.
When asked whether she was ever told that the other woman had been to the Hampstead Rehabilitation Centre – where the tetraplegic man was living – in the early hours of the morning on New Year’s Day 2018, the woman replied: “I don’t recall. No, I don’t think so.”
She also denied that the other woman told her she had been looking through the door at the accused man asleep in his bed before she was interrupted by staff.
The trial continues before Justice Anne Bampton and a jury.