Danielle Easey murder charges: Justin Dilosa, Carol McHenry trial date set
Friends accused of murdering a young mother and wrapping her body in plastic before dumping it in a muddy creek have had their trial date set down in the Supreme Court.
Central Coast
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Two friends of a young mother who was allegedly stabbed then wrapped in plastic and dumped in a creek have had their trial dates set down for November, a court has heard.
Carol Marie Dawson McHenry, 32 and Justin Kent Dilosa, 33, appeared in the NSW Supreme Court on Friday after pleading not guilty to the grizzly murder of ‘Quaker Girl’ Danielle Easey, 29.
Ms Easey’s body was found wrapped in plastic and dumped in a muddy creek near Killingworth, west of Newcastle, on August 31 in 2019 by a passing motorist after it lay there for a fortnight.
An autopsy revealed she had allegedly been seriously assaulted and stabbed.
Lawyers for both Mr Dilosa and Ms McHenry asked to have separate trials, and to have them in Sydney rather than Newcastle.
However, Justice Robert Allan Hulme said the witnesses, police involved in the investigation and Ms Easey’s next of kin live in the Newcastle or Central Coast area and it would be “a far way to go”.
He set down a trial date for November 1 at Newcastle with an estimated length of six weeks.
Mr Dilosa’s lawyer told the court her client “in essence did not commit the offence and was not involved in the death of the deceased”.
“He was simply not involved, I can’t take the matter much further than that,” she told Judge Hulme.
Both Mr Dilosa and Ms McHenry remained silent as they appeared via AVL dressed in their prison greens.
Police allege Ms Easey was stabbed in the back and neck, and beaten to death with a hammer at a home in Reeves St, Narara, on August 17.
Mr Dilosa, of Cardiff, was the first person arrested in September 2019 during a raid at an old chicken processing plant at Cardiff where he was living in a caretaker’s cottage.
Strike Force Furzer investigators also seized a Mitsubishi Delica at the processing plant which police allege was used to transport the young mother’s body.
Charge sheets allege he murdered the young mother two weeks before her body was found.
Mr Dilosa has pleaded not guilty to one charge of murder.
His former partner Ms McHenry, a mother of four, pleaded not guilty to the charge of murder but has pleaded guilty to one count of accessory after the fact to an offence – murder and dishonestly obtain financial advantage by deception.
Police allege Ms McHenry had impersonated Ms Easey on social media in the weeks following her gruesome death and defrauded Ms Easey’s mother of $50 on August 30, the day before the body was found.
Ms Easey made national headlines in 1989 and was donned ‘Quaker Girl’ when she was born on a grass nature strip after the Newcastle earthquake shook the city.
When the hospital was evacuated, her mother Jennifer Collier was forced to give birth in a makeshift tent made of sheets.
Ms Easey was born just 90 minutes after the 5.6 tremor struck the city and was given the nickname ‘Quaker’.
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