After four hours of deliberation, a jury last night found both Anthony de Paul Hope and his co-accused Ralph Tyndall guilty of murdering Colleen Forrester, whose body was found in a septic tank of a William Street, Campbellville house for which she was the caretaker.
Justice Roxane George-Wiltshire, who presided over the trial, is expected to sentence the men next Tuesday afternoon.
Hope, Tyndall and another man, Kevin O’Neil, were committed to stand trial for the murder of Forrester, who they were accused of murdering between December 27th, 2007 and January 6th, 2008.
O’Neil was, however, acquitted earlier in the trial after the judge upheld a no-case submission made by his lawyer, George Thomas.
The jury returned the verdicts following deliberations that were preceded by a lengthy summing up of the evidence by the judge to a packed courtroom.
The judge urged jurors to take into consideration the evidence that each accused offered and added that they are expected to return separate verdicts for each man.
Additionally, she reminded the jurors that the burden of proving the men’s guilt rested on the prosecution. “It is only on the strength of the prosecution’s case that you are required to find them guilty,” she told them.
Justice George-Wiltshire went on to explain that the prosecution’s case comprises both direct and indirect evidence as well as circumstantial evidence. She also explained that in its case, the State has contended that Hope and Tyndall were the last persons in the presence of the deceased.
Therefore, she said, the question the prosecution has posed is “what happened while the deceased was in their company; since she was never seen alive again?” She added that the state is asking them to find that the only reasonable conclusion is that Hope and Tyndall are guilty of murdering Forrester.
On the other hand, Justice George-Wiltshire explained that the defence would like them to believe that in 25 minutes, while Forrester’s granddaughter Nikita Semple and Kevin O’Neil were away at a shop, the dead woman’s alleged male companion, Winslow Smith, came to William Street and she left in his company.
“You are twelve sensible Guyanese and it is your duty to apply your common sense and experience in assessing the manner in which the witnesses gave their evidence and the actual evidence which you heard in court,” she instructed the jurors.
At around 5PM yesterday afternoon, the jurors were sent to the deliberation room to comb over the evidence presented to them during the trial. Three hours later, they returned a guilty verdict for Hope.
Additionally, they took the opportunity to seek further direction on Tyndall’s case before heading back to the deliberation room once more. At 9PM last night, the jury returned a guilty verdict for Tyndall as well.
Throughout the trial, both Tyndall and Hope traded blame. Tyndall maintained that the only wrong he did was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He insisted that it was not him who killed Forrester but Hope, who is the woman’s nephew.
Meanwhile, having changed his story several times, Hope initially sought to blame Tyndall for the attack on Forrester.
As the trial progressed, it was revealed that Hope had told Forrester’s children that she had embarked on a trip to Trinidad on the night she was last seen alive. However, in what the prosecution had described as a long tale concocted by Hope to distract the court from what really happened that night, the accused claimed that the last time he saw his aunt alive was when she left the house in the company of Winslow Smith.
Hope denied that he had ever told Forrester’s relatives that she had left for Trinidad and that when he got her number he would have given it to them.
State Attorneys Stacy Goodings and Diana Kaulesar presented the state’s case during the trial.
