Ricardo Barbaro on trial for Ellie Price murder in South Melbourne apartment
The man accused of murdering his girlfriend was seen dumping her car on a Diggers Rest farm in the hours following the woman’s death, a court has heard.
Police & Courts
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Ellie Price told police she was “scared” of boyfriend Ricardo Barbaro months before the exotic dancer was found dead on her bedroom floor with six stab wounds to her body and throat.
Her mother, Tracey Gangell, said the last time she saw her daughter alive in March 2020, she planned to leave Mr Barbaro, who now faces a Supreme Court trial for her murder.
“She said she was going to come back and stay (in hometown Tasmania) and not return (to Melbourne) until Rick was out of her life,” Ms Gangell told the court on Tuesday.
But Ms Price, 26, never got the chance to return to Hobart and her young son Mossie.
Police conducting a welfare check found her body in front of a flickering TV at her South Melbourne apartment on May 4, 2020.
Prosecutors believe she was dead for almost a week before being discovered at the bloody scene.
Crown prosecutor Patrick Bourke KC said crime scene experts would say Mr Barbaro’s fingerprint was identified in blood, and that some bloodstains were “a billion times more likely” to be his.
He said six months before her death, she called police and reported Mr Barbaro “yelling at me about his own children” and punching her car window.
Mr Barbaro, 36, concedes he was with his on-off girlfriend on April 29 – what police say was her final day alive.
He left her Park St home in her Mercedes Benz at 4.30am and was allegedly captured on CCTV three hours later, dumping her car at a Diggers Rest farm along with his dad, Giuseppe “Joe’’ Barbaro.
CCTV also depicted an injury to Mr Barbaro’s upper arm.
He hired a van and drove it north on May 5, the day police issued a press release about Ms Price’s alleged murder, and was arrested in NSW nine days later.
But defence barrister Rishi Nathwani told the jury of 14 that Mr Barbaro “did not cause the death of Ellie Price”.
“He was not the last person to see her alive,” Mr Nathwani said.
“Were there any other people in the world in which she lived that wanted to harm her?”
On the first day of his murder trial, Mr Nathwani quizzed Ms Gangell for 75 minutes about her family’s relationship with a man called Mark Gray, who the court heard had a business interest in brothels, one of which Ms Price was interested to work in.
Mr Gray was one of Ms Price’s only friends in Melbourne, and would give her a $1000 allowance each week.
But their friendship soured when she extorted $100k from the older man to buy a salon, “or she would tell police that he raped her”.
When she died, the court heard Ms Price had received $25k of the promised $100k in installed payments from.
Mr Nathwani questioned whether there were others who had reason to harm Ms Price.
But Mr Bourke told the jury “the evidence will satisfy you beyond a reasonable doubt that (Mr Barbaro) did commit the offence of murder”.
The trial, before Justice Lex Lasry, continues.
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