State attorney Diana Kaulesar yesterday urged a jury to find Anthony De Paul Hope and Ralph ‘Nick’ Tyndall guilty of murdering Colleen Forrester, while saying statements given by both men are inconsistent.
“You would’ve heard two very different stories about what had happened that night. But the one thing that is common, is the fact that they are both trying to escape liability by saying that they are somehow not involved in what happened that night,” Kaulesar told jurors, while delivering closing arguments in the High Court, where Hope and Tyndall are both on trial.
It is alleged that they murdered Forrester be-tween December 27th, 2007 and January 6th, 2008, at a William Street, Campbellville residence for which she was the caretaker.
Throughout Kaulesar’s address, both Hope and Tyndall sat in the prisoners’ dock with blank expressions on their faces.
“For her [Forrester], it was typical case of yuh sorry for ‘Magga dog’ and he turn ’round and bite yuh hand. Her own nephew, who she allowed to stay there when he had nowhere else to go, turned around and killed her,” said Kaulesar, who described the case as “one of betrayal, lies and cold-blooded murder.”
Kaulesar sought to highlight the inconsistencies in the account given by Tyndall in his statement to the court. She said that the only reason he gave a statement to the police was to remove blame from himself since he could not deny that he was present when the murder took place.
Additionally, the state attorney suggested that Tyndall knows more about what happened on the night of the murder than he is actually willing to disclose. She raised the question of how Tyndall would have been able to say that it was Hope who lashed the woman in her head if he had not witnessed it, especially since the post-mortem examination had not being conducted until two days after the body was discovered.
Kaulesar asked the jurors to disregard what Tyndall has said in court and to go back to the prosecution’s case, which she told them can safely be relied upon.
Kaulesar also highlighted Hope’s claims that he was beaten to give a statement although he later said the statement presented to the court was not the one he was beaten to give.
Kaulesar suggested that the reason why Hope is saying that he never gave the statement was to afford himself the opportunity to go into the witness box and concoct a new story to avoid appearing inconsistent.
“Even in the early stages of his testimony, he could not keep his story straight,” she said.
She further related that Hope’s lawyer, Melville Duke, tried to create the impression that the state tried to conceal Winslow Smith as a witness.
However, Kaulesar reminded the jury that it was Duke himself who objected to Smith giving evidence before the court. Hope had claimed that Smith, Forrester’s pastor, left with her on the night she was last seen alive.
“The State is asking you to believe what Smith had told you and reject the lies you’ve been told by Hope. It’s a desperate attempt to distract you from what the focus in the matter is, which is what they did to Forrester that night,” she said.
She emphasised the inconsistencies in Hope’s story and stated that “he chose to go in the box and give and one long story and can’t even keep it straight. He should’ve stuck to the truth ladies and gentlemen, he might have been better at that.”
Kaulesar said, “They showed utter disregard for the life of Colleen Forrester.
They burst her head, they sat on her chest, they choked her, they murdered her and to add insult to injury they disposed of her body in the most demeaning way possible. By wrapping it up and putting it in septic tank. A structure built to hold human waste.”
In closing, she asked the jury to find Hope and Tyndall guilty of the murder of Forrester.
The trial is expected to conclude today as Justice Roxane George-Wiltshire will be summing up the case for the jurors, after which they will be given the opportunity to deliberate and return a verdict.
