Witness gasps at police re-enactment picture portrayal of fatal fall

THE photographs shown to Gabriele Collyer-Wiedner had, until that point, been relatively mundane. But the next photograph caused her to gasp. Image: Police re-enactment

A police photograph of Gable Tostee's 14th floor Surfers Paradise apartment. Picture: Queensland Supreme Court

THE photographs shown to Gabriele Collyer-Wiedner had, until that point, been relatively mundane.

She sat in the witness box and nodded along. Yes, that was her 13th-floor apartment, the one directly under Gable Tostee’s. Yes, that was her lounge room, her balcony. Yes, that was the view from her balcony, looking up to the one above, the place where Warriena Wright had tried to climb down.

A police photograph of a re-enactment of the circumstances leading to the death of New Zealand woman Warreina Wright, who fell from a Surfers Paradise apartment in August 2014. Picture: Queensland Supreme Court

The photograph that followed, placed under a projector by Prosecutor Glen Cash, remained there for only a moment.

Ms Collyer-Wiedner gasped, shocked, and Mr Cash took it away.

It was her balcony, the night sky beyond lit up by a photographer’s flash. And dangling from the balcony above was a pair of jean-clad legs, the feet bare.

“Sorry,” the prosecutor said.

“If you’d like to take some water?

“Let me know when you’re ready to continue.”

The photograph was taken during a police re-enactment, based on the recollections of Tostee’s downstairs neighbour.

They’d held it at 2am - the same time of night - using a female police officer dressed as Warriena had been dressed. She was photographed dangling between the balconies, 14 floors up, wearing a safety harness.

Ms Collyer-Wiedner had tried to help with the re-enactment but had screamed and run when she saw the officer’s legs appear.

She cried as she spoke of the night she saw the 26-year-old fall to her death.

She’d gone to bed about 11pm but woke at 2am to sounds of banging, furniture moving and the sound of something heavy hitting the ground.

“Then I heard the female voice screaming ‘no’ in panic, ‘no’!” a tearful Ms Collyer-Wiedner said.

“And then I heard a male noise, but I couldn’t understand. I got up. I wanted to check 100 per cent the noise is coming from upstairs.”

Ms Collyer-Wiedner told how she opened the sliding door and saw legs dangling from the balcony above.

“And I froze there,” she said.

“Then the body fell on my balcony railing. I screamed. And somebody else screamed. I don’t know.

“I stepped forward and I looked down and she was lying on the ground.”

The emotionally charged opening day of the Gable Tostee murder trial came with a warning.

The jury, defence barrister Saul Holt said, should look past the emotion, look past Warriena’s sobbing family, and have regard only for the evidence.

“It is a desperate tragedy that Warriena Wright died in the early hours of this day,” he said.

“You would not be human, none of you would be, if you didn’t feel enormous sympathy for her family and empathy for them.

“But that is not how this case, or any case, is decided.”

Tostee is pleading not guilty to the charges.