June 11, 2009

The evidence that convicted Cameron of teen's murder

By David Clarkson

One of the frustrations of the trial ? of the whole system really ? was that Dean Stewart Cameron never had to explain himself.

He said little to the police as they went about their inquiries over Marie Davis? disappearance in April last year.

He clung to his right to silence in the month-long murder and rape trial.

The jury, as usual, was told not to take any notice of his reticence.

Thirty-nine-year-old Cameron was entitled to say nothing and keep himself away from any probing by the crown prosecutors.

But the jury really must have wanted some attempt at an explanation once they heard that his blood had been found in Marie?s house, and his DNA was identified in semen found on her body.

What was he saying? Was it that the 15-year-old had embarked on some sexual liaison with him that night?

Did he claim that she had bundled up bedding and headed out in the early hours on a cold April morning in Christchurch, for an encounter on the banks of the Waimakariri River.

The defence case was that after such an encounter she could then have jumped, or fallen, or collapsed into the river, naked, and remained there for 11 days until her body washed up and was found.

The crown said the scenario was nonsense and Cameron has never tried to make it sound plausible by filling in the details.

The crown case took a very much darker view than a riverbank tryst gone wrong.

It put the events together in detail from the night before Marie?s disappearance when it alleged that Cameron overheard a conversation between Marie and her young friends.

Marie stayed over with one of her girl friends that night. The girl friend was a relative of Cameron?s, and in the conversation he probably heard that she was likely to be home alone the next night.

He got her phone number off the caller identification unit and apparently phoned her during the evening the next night. The implications, the crown said, were that he wanted to make sure that she was there, and her elder sister was out.

We don?t know whether he arranged all the bedding then, or the rope that was found with it or whether that happened later when he realised that the teenager was dead.

The crown case was that he was up all that night. Perhaps he was watching.

It says that in the early hours of the morning, he made his move.

He would have knocked on the door and Marie would have let him in because she knew him. There was no sign of forced entry nor a struggle at the Morrison Avenue home.

She was still up. She had been listening to music on the computer and she went back to sit at it in the study.

Among the suggestions from the scientists, and the forensic evidence, is the implication that he attacked her from behind as she sat at the chair, crooking an arm around her neck in the carotid or ?sleeper? hold.

It would have quickly rendered her unconscious, and it could also have caused her death.

But in those seconds, Marie put up a fight.

She got one hit in.

No-one noticed any injuries on Cameron the next day, so it seems unlikely that she scratched his face.

I think she punched him on the nose.

It bled and drops of blood fell onto the seat and onto the wooden floor where the scientists found them, and analysed them. They had come from Cameron.

But the blow did not loosen his grip and she would soon have been deeply unconscious or dead.

There was a visit to the Waimakariri in the morning when the crown says a car similar to Cameron?s was seen speeding along the riverbank.

The crown was intent on establishing that Marie?s body had been wrapped and tied inside layers of bedding.

The defence had to try to convince the court that the bedding had simply been tied and weighted and thrown into the river when the sexual encounter on the riverbank went wrong.

If she was wrapped and tied inside the bundle then there could be no defence that the death had been an accident or suicide.

It was a circumstantial case, but that does not mean it was a weak one.

In the end, the jury accepted the crown?s contention that it was irresistible that all the factors linked back to Cameron.

And we now know how he must have stuck out when the police began their investigation into Marie?s disappearance.

In 2004, he was sentenced to four years? jail in the Christchurch District Court after pleading guilty to a charge of sexual violation by unlawful sexual connection.

He pleaded guilty partway through a retrial. The retrial was ordered because there had been an error at the first trial.

He pleaded guilty after the complainant had to give her evidence for the second time.

Judge Stephen Erber criticised him for forcing her to do that.

He said there would have been an extra year on the jail term if the crown had not asked for a rehabilitative sentence.

The prosecution?s attitude had been ?pretty decent?, unlike Cameron?s, he said.

That 2004 conviction was behind the crown?s bid to have an open-ended preventive detention sentence imposed on Cameron with his record now as a repeat sex offender with a murder conviction as well.

That will be considered on August 24.