Man pretended to be 26yo girlfriend after strangling her to death: court
A man who strangled his girlfriend to death wrote a lie in her family group chat as her body lay dead on a mattress for days, a trial heard.
A man who fatally strangled his 26-year-old girlfriend pretended to be her in a family group chat while she was lying dead on a thin foam mattress in his house.
The Supreme Court of Victoria on Monday was played a crime scene video of the house in which Mai-Yia Vang took her last breaths, before being choked to death by her boyfriend Adam Margolis.
One of her family members left the Supreme Court public gallery sobbing while footage of Ms Vang’s body, facedown in a white T-shirt and printed sleeping shorts, was played.
The trial has previously heard the former chemical engineering student had moved towns to be with her boyfriend.
She joined him in his Bendigo home after they met on chat website Omegle.
One week later her body was turning purple on his floor while he messaged her ‘Sisterz’ chat from her account, claiming to be sick and sending ‘thumbs up’ emojis.
He then attempted to take his own life on February 26, 2018, after taking hers on the night of February 24.
Mr Margolis, 41, admits choking Ms Vang to death but says he was having a “flashback” related to PTSD and should be found not guilty of murder.
The court on Monday heard he sent a 12-page-email to three men with the “primary point” of asking them to look after his cats.
The email had a seven-hour delay timing it to arrive in their inboxes when he intended to be dead.
Ms Vang’s family members cried quietly in the public gallery of the court as the full email was read out.
He asked the three email recipients, all of whom he met through church program, to go and collect his cats before police set up a crime scene.
“Her body is in the back room with the door closed,” he wrote. “They (the cats) will not be in there.”
Instead the first of the men to receive the email immediately called police.
Mr Margolis told associates he came to with his girlfriend in a chokehold after blacking out during an argument.
But he chose to continue strangling her because he didn’t want to “have her hysteria explode to something involving screaming” which could cause police to come, he wrote in the email.
Margolis wrote that the one-month-old relationship was “rocky” but that she had “enough high-level intelligence” for him to think her fighting with him was an “elaborate test”.
He said that he began making audio recordings of her and made one video.
She was “truly not afraid of me” despite being 5ft 2 and “half my weight”, he wrote, alleging she would insult him and was “occasionally violent”.
On the night she died they argued because she was jealous, the email alleged.
“I told her I would marry her if she would control these breakdowns,” he wrote.
“With the sole exception of her random paranoia she was the perfect woman.
“She truly was intelligent when she wanted to be.”
During the argument Ms Vang left the room in what Mr Margolis wrote was an “adult hissy fit” and he followed her, where she began to physically run into him and hurl insults at him, the email alleged.
“I told her I was suicidal,” he wrote, “She said, ‘I don‘t care … go and do it, it has nothing to do with me’.”
He wrote he then went into a flashback and thought he was 19, before coming back to present and realising he was choking his girlfriend.
“Whilst I know in my soul that I loved her, found myself facing two choices,” he wrote.
The first was to let her go and risk having the police come and “perpetrate abuse” on him.
“Or B, continue and end my life after as I was already pushed to that point,” he wrote.
The trial continues Tuesday.