WHO killed Carly McBride?
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It is a question that had become one of the Hunter's enduring mysteries.
And nearly seven years after she left a home at Muswellbrook and disappeared without a trace, the mystery has been solved.
Earlier today: Jury deliver verdict in seven-year murder mystery
Ms McBride, the 31-year-old mother-of-two whose disappearance devastated her loving family and captured the attention of the Hunter, was murdered by her boyfriend, Sayle Kenneth Newson, who in a jealous and ice-fuelled rage bashed her to death.
Nearly seven years after he reported her missing, triggering a three-year investigation that ultimately focused on him, Newson, now 43, was on Thursday found guilty of murder, the jury left with no doubt he was the person who intercepted Ms McBride after she left a visit with her daughter at Muswellbrook on September 30, 2014, and inflicted a number of brutal blows to her head and back before dumping her body near the side of a lonely stretch of road outside Scone.
"Youse have got it wrong," Newson told the jury after the verdict. "I'm innocent. "I didn't do it."
Later, Newson turned to Justice Mark Ierace, SC, again to profess his innocence.
"I understand the verdict's been the verdict," he said. "Your Honour, I'm innocent. From the day I reported Carly missing to this very day I've been compliant with the police, with the courts, with the jails, everything, and I've been found guilty of a crime that I did not commit. Someone out there has committed this crime and it wasn't me. It wasn't me and now I've got a big struggle ahead of me to try and clear my name through the courts after this."
Newson will be sentenced in September and is looking at decades behind bars for what was a brutal and callous domestic violence murder.
In a statement, Newson's solicitor, Mark Ramsland said: "Mr Newson is desperately disappointed in the verdict and will be appealing the matter."
The verdict, which came at the conclusion of an eight-week trial and after the jury had deliberated for more than nine days days, triggered overwhelming relief and emotion for the family of Ms McBride, her mother, Lorraine Williams, and father Steve McBride and her two children.
After Ms McBride went missing on September 30, 2014, her family had to endure a more than two-year wait before her body was found. It was another year before Newson was charged and after an initial trial was aborted and another vacated due to COVID-19, the wait for justice had stretched to nearly seven years.
Newson was charged in 2017 by investigators from Strike Force Karabi, who without any direct evidence tying Newson to Ms McBride's disappearance and murder had worked for years to build an entirely circumstantial case.
And he was prosecuted by Crown prosecutor Lee Carr, SC, and DPP Trial Advocate Kristy Mulley who turned those pieces of circumstantial evidence into an overwhelming case against Newson.
During his closing address, Mr Carr told the jury that motivated by "jealousy and possessiveness", Newson had the opportunity to intercept Ms McBride after she left the home at Muswellbrook on September 30, 2014 and the skills in "combat sports" to inflict the fatal blows to her head and back before dumping her body in remote bushland outside Scone
But the case against Newson was an entirely circumstantial one. There was "no smoking gun"; no eye-witness to the murder, no CCTV footage showing Ms McBride being grabbed off the street, no murder weapon and no blood or DNA.
Mr Carr said the prosecution did not know how the injuries that killed Ms McBride were inflicted; whether the murderer used kicks, knees and punches, a piece of wood or some other object.
But Mr Carr said what the prosecution did have were pieces of a puzzle that when placed together began to reveal a picture that he said eventually became an overwhelming circumstantial case eliminating any other potential explanations for how Ms McBride disappeared and how her body came to be dumped about 25 metres from the side of the road at Owens Gap.
The jury, after carefully reviewing the evidence, agreed, and after seven years of waiting, put an end to the mystery of who killed Carly McBride.
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