Harriet Wran: Inside the filthy drug den where drug dealer Daniel McNulty died

OUR exclusive police pictures reveal the hellhole that murder victim and dealer Daniel McNulty lived in — and where former NSW premier Neville Wran’s daughter Harriet was caught up in the brutal death.

The bloodstained sheets of a bed in the unit were Daniel McNulty died.

• HARRIET WRAN’S FULL STATEMENT TO POLICE
• How her dad illness and death triggered her ice drug addiction
• Sex and drug binge after murder of drug dealer Daniel McNulty

BRETT Fitzgerald was lying on the floor staring up at an Asian man armed with a knife when he heard the order yelled from the room next door: “Stab him again.”

“I remember looking at the Asian guy right in the eyes,” Fitzgerald would later tell police, referring to Harriet Wran’s ­boyfriend, Michael Lee.

“He just suddenly swung his arm towards me and stabbed me to the right side of my neck. Straight away I put my hand up to my neck. I could feel blood coming out.”

Fitzgerald was describing to police the moments on August 10, 2014, after Wran knocked on the door of his friend Daniel McNulty’s Redfern unit and set up the ­opportunity for Lee and Lloyd ­Edward Haines to storm the drug den. Wran gave the fake name of “Sarah”, he told police.

Daniel McNulty was killed in August 2014.

Harriet Wran’s murder charged was dropped last week.

He gave his first statement the following day from his bed in the ­intensive care unit at St Vincent’s Hospital where he was lucky to be alive after being stabbed in the stomach and neck.

McNulty, his drug-dealing ­flatmate, was not so lucky. He was stabbed and left to die on top of piles of clothes, garbage and debris covering most of a bedroom inside the housing commission flat.

The Wretched Drug Den

VIEW GALLERY

Fitzgerald, a drug addict who was taking ice, heroin and buprenorphine at the time, told police that what started as a robbery for drugs and cash became a murder scene.

The Sunday Telegraph has ­obtained never-seen-before police photos that show the unit was a squalid drug den, with rubbish and clothes strewn everywhere.

The shocking police pictures show the rooms and furniture in the apartment covered with blood stains and splatters.

Clothes and garbage were strewn across almost every room and covered almost every section of carpet. The small sections of visible carpet were covered in filth and debris.

The kitchen was putrid with dirty dishes and rotting food scraps.

Needles used for injecting drugs were piled on tables while police found a glass ice pipe on the floor.

Blood on clothes strewn in the apartment where Daniel McNulty was found.

The dirty and messy apartment in Redfern.

In his hospital interview, Fitzgerald told police the order to stab him was given by Haines after he failed to find drugs and cash inside the unit.

Stabbing victim Brett Fitzgerald photographed at St Vincent’s Hospital.

Moments earlier, Wran had coaxed Fitzgerald into opening the door after McNulty saw her through the window and told his friend, “Don’t worry, it’s just a girl,” court documents said.

“(Wran) vanished when the door was opened,” Fitzgerald said.

“The other guys made their way in and I don’t know what happened to her.

“I didn’t want to fight. Dan didn’t want to fight. We just wanted them to get out.”

Fitzgerald told police there was a pause between when they ­entered and the violence.

“Once they were all in the unit everything kind of stopped for a second. Like, everyone froze.

“The two guys were assessing the room, assessing us,” he said.

Drug paraphernalia inside the unit where McNulty was found dead.

McNulty ran to the bedroom ­because “he’s not a fighter”, Fitzgerald told police.

“As soon as they’re coming ­towards me … they’ve got the knife out,” he continued.

“One’s got the knife out, we just wanted to start throwing punches. I did anyway.”

He picked up a “tall … six foot tall” shoe rack to defend himself.

“I’ve tried to grab (the rack) and hold them off out the front of Dan’s room,” he told police.

But, he told police, Lee and Haines advanced on him, demanding to know “Where is it?”

Fitzgerald told police: “I think Dan was out cold or wasn’t co-operating or something” and said he was just “holding up the shoe rack”.

He was stabbed in the stomach. “I remembered being short of breath. I didn’t want to have them stab me again,” he said.

The filthy apartment where McNulty died.

They then overpowered him.

“I ended up on the ground. I ­remember Dan was beside me to my left. There was no fighting now. We were in a bad position.”

Haines hit Fitzgerald in the back of the head with a hammer. He then directed Haines to the lockbox containing cash from McNulty’s drug deals before Lee stabbed him.

After Lee and Haines found the cash and drugs under a mattress “they couldn’t get out quick enough”, he said.

Fitzgerald had been homeless and only moved into the apartment about six weeks earlier after meeting McNulty at the Rankin Court Methadone Clinic.

“We were just talking at the ­clinic one day and he goes, ‘I’ve got a spare room’,” he told police.

“When I first arrived the unit was very messy. I am a fairly clean person so I remember that I cleaned the kitchen.

“A couple of days later it was messy again (so) I cleaned it a second time,” he said.

“After Dan messed it up again I thought ‘I am nobody’s maid so I stopped cleaning.”

He soon helped with McNulty’s small-time ice selling operation by opening the door for drug buyers.