Timothy Hunt found guilty Tony Rowe’s murder following 14-day Supreme Court trial
A year long mystery surrounding the disappearance of a Darwin fisherman has finally been resolved, with his murder trial exposing the ‘Underbelly of Darwin’.
A young hairdresser who swiped right on a mysterious Tinder profile became a “tourist” in the Underbelly of Darwin after witnessing a brutal drug debt murder.
After 14 days of evidence, it took the 12-person Supreme Court jury less than 90 minutes to unanimously find Timothy Hunt guilty of the murder of Tony Rowe.
The 31-year-old shook his head and closed his eyes as this verdict doomed him to spend at least 20 years to life in prison, under the Territory’s mandatory sentencing rules.
Mr Rowe vanished from the Hibiscus Tavern in May 2022, with investigators searching for 12 months until they discovered his skeletal remains dumped in bushland outside of Darwin.
Hunt pleaded guilty to manslaughter but not guilty to his murder, maintaining that he did not intend to kill Mr Rowe on May 28, 2022, saying it was a drug debt beating that went too far.
Prosecutor Deborah Mandie described Mr Rowe as a “hapless, vulnerable because depressed, suicidal and heavy drinking” man who found himself out of his depth in the world of drug running.
Over weeks of evidence, the jury heard Hunt and the 36-year-old Mr Rowe plotted to smuggle a commercial quantity of cannabis to a remote community.
The night before their planned “weed run”, rather than pick up the drugs Mr Rowe got drunk with his mate, Keith ‘Lumpy’ Waldock as well as Hunt and his date Jazmine Shier at the Hibiscus Tavern on May 28, 2022.
“I just broke up with my ex and decided ‘F**k it, let’s go on a random adventure with a Tinder guy’ which has ended with me being investigated for a homicide,” Ms Shier later told her close friend.
Ms Shier told the jury she was driving the trio to Palmerston, but Hunt started arguing with the intoxicated Mr Rowe, demanding he unlock his phone and blaming him for ruining their $10,000 “weed run”.
Ms Shier said she was directed to drive to a secluded road near the Robinson Barracks, and both Mr Waldock and Hunt took turns bashing Mr Rowe for 20 minutes.
Mr Waldock denied he took part in the assault, claiming he tried to “shake” and “slapped” his drunk mate to get him moving.
Ms Shier told the court that it was then her Tinder date went “into zombie mode”, taking an axe out of his car and swung it into the gravel near the bleeding man.
The jury found Hunt then pulled out a pair of pliers and snipped off the 36-year-old’s pinky toe, before slicing open his throat with a Stanley knife.
Mr Waldock said he heard the “horrible” sound of his mate “gasping for breath”, while Ms Shier said her date told her that he was “drowning in his own blood”.
The 41-year-old said he “pissed” himself in terror as Mr Rowe’s blood pooled on the ground.
“Mate, no one has made me piss myself,” Mr Waldock told the jury.
“I’ve swum with sharks and crocs from where I’m from, and that doesn’t fear me.”
Ms Shier told the jury that when she returned the next day to move the body, Hunt told her to leave the missing toe “for the dogs to sort out”.
At a second location they burnt Mr Rowe’s body, Hunt placed a cigarette in the dead man’s mouth to have “one last smoke with his mate.”
Ms Shier said she then helped Hunt clean his car, but they missed a splatter the killer later claimed to police was “kangaroo blood”.
When police told him 12 months after the murder that the DNA matched with the missing Mr Rowe, Hunt said: “That’s bullsh*t. There’s no way in hell”.
Both Ms Shier and Mr Waldock told the jury they were threatened and terrorised into silence for the next 12 months.
Ms Mandie said the 20-year-old apprentice hairdresser was terrified as she accidentally became a “tourist in that world” — the “Underbelly of Darwin”.
“Suddenly she finds herself drowning in that criminal community, unintentionally entangled in what became a murder in her presence,” Ms Mandie said.
Hunt warned her “go against me and you’re f**ked” and in a secretly recorded call with his mother, he said: “F**k the little dog. I’ll go there and cut her throat and put her in the boot too”.
But Defence barrister Marty Aust said the Darwin truckie was simply a “sh*t talker” with a “twisted sense of humour” from a rough background.
Ms Aust said both key witnesses had clearly lied, calling Ms Shier the “girl who cried wolf”.
Ms Mandie highlighted that Ms Shier and Mr Waldock were not the only ones who tried to deceive police, pointing to the “fanciful yarns” spun by Hunt during the 12 month search for Mr Rowe.
“Hunt’s conduct is not the product of confusion, grief or panic,” she said.
“It is a sustained pattern of falsehoods, omissions, deflections directed to family members, police and others.
“Each lie served a forensic purpose to distance himself from the events of Mr Rowe’s death, to delay or misdirect the investigation and to test what police knew.”
After the jury’s verdict, Ms Mandie confirmed to Justice Sonia Brownhill that she would be pushing for a sentence beyond the mandatory 20-years non-parole period.
Hunt will have his sentencing hearing on Friday, October 17.
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Originally published as Timothy Hunt found guilty Tony Rowe’s murder following 14-day Supreme Court trial
