Axe attack on sex worker described at trial
Murder accused Mauha Huatahi Fawcett tells of a gang member “whacking” sex worker Mellory Manning with a small axe in his seventh interview with the police investigating the case.
The High Court at Christchurch has spent days watching the video recordings of the interviews, many of them punctuated by long silences, before Fawcett says a few sentences. He gives different accounts of what he saw in some of the interviews.
In the early interviews Fawcett was regarded by police as a source of information, but in the later ones he was seen as a suspect.
In the one played to the jury and Justice David Gendall today, the 12th day of the trial, 26-year-old Fawcett tells of a Mongrel Mob gang member hitting Miss Manning with “a small axe or similar”.
The twenty-seven-year-old woman was lying on the ground by then. Fawcett said others present at the beating were barking and shouting the Mob’s “Sieg heil” salute.
He told the interviewers of a discussion about him then being told to “take the rap”.
He was told to clean out one of the cars. By then, Miss Manning’s body had been taken to the Avon River and dumped there. She was found in the river on December 19, 2008.
This interview was carried out after police travelled to Auckland where they interviewed him on January 28, 2010. During the interview, after another long pause, Fawcett told the officers: “I don’t feel safe at the moment.”
Fawcett said that after his release from prison he started helping out the Mongrel Mob in getting money off the sex workers on Manchester Street. Some of the girls were all right with it, and some weren’t. Some got a hiding. “I also used to sell drugs to the prostitutes,” he told the police.
He talked to Miss Manning’s boyfriend about a week before and told him to pay some money (for her) working on the street. Fawcett was also told that Miss Manning owed money for drugs.
Category: News
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