“Not that I’m thinking of dying tomorrow or anything,” said 79-year-old Helen Gregory, who would be killed in her home in the Wellington suburb of Khandallah the following day.
The audio comes from a phone call to her bank, made on the evening of January 23, 2024.
It was played to the High Court on Monday, where her daughter Julia DeLuney is charged with her murder. The trial is now in its fourth week.
The court previously heard that DeLuney invested a large sum of money on her mother’s behalf into cryptocurrency, which she had been trading in for years.
In an email sent on January 22, two days before her mother’s death, DeLuney told her mother her money had made a profit of more than $268,000 – “not a bad investment for six months”, she wrote.
She recommended they withdraw the profit, and leave the initial investment of $100,000 there to keep growing.
DeLuney then told her mother she needed to pay $30,000 in exchange fees and tax liability to be able to withdraw the money. She said she could cover half, but needed her mother to pay the rest.
The following morning, Gregory wrote back that she agreed it was a good idea to cash up.
DeLuney urged her not tell anyone about the profit. “Please please please don’t show this to your friends, once people know that you’ve made some money they will change,” she said.
And in a later email: “Don’t tell the bank about your crypto profits, they won’t lend you a thing if you tell them that.”
On January 23, the day before her death, Gregory went to the bank and deposited $6000 cash into her daughter’s account, according to written evidence from the bank assistant who served her.
Later that day, she phoned up to take money out of her KiwiSaver.
“We’re pre-paying a funeral thing,” she explained. “Not that I’m thinking of dying tomorrow or anything.”
This part of the recording was met by a collective intake of breath from the public gallery.
But the Crown says DeLuney misrepresented her mother’s money having made a profit.
Attached to her initial email, DeLuney sent her mother a screenshot of her account’s profit and loss for the past three months.
But the screenshot was of someone else’s earnings, the Crown says.
Crown witness Detective Constable Tobias Weavers, who investigated DeLuney’s crypto accounts, told the court today the screenshot matched a graph of a different user’s account, publicly available on the leaderboard of crypto-trading platform WOO X.
Crypto-currency expert Nicolas Turnbull told the court this afternoon the withdrawal fees were “totally false”.
“This is just a common tactic we see, especially overseas, where Kiwis get manipulated… especially older people… into paying these fees,” he said.
The Crown’s case is that DeLuney attacked her mother and staged it to look like a fall, but the defence says, in the 90-minute window when she went to get help after the fall, someone else caused fatal injuries to her elderly mother.
DeLuney cried quietly in the dock while her mother’s voice played to the court.
The trial continues, with only a handful of Crown witnesses to go.
rnz.co.nz
