DOZENS of white folders, vast volumes of evidence, ran the width of the back bar table and were stacked up high in the corner of courtroom 6.1 during the eight-week murder trial of Sayle Kenneth Newson.
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More than just an aide-memoire for the parties to call upon, they were a dominant presence in the courtroom and a physical representation of the hard work detectives had put into the case over the last seven years.
The thousands of man hours, the nearly 300 witness statements, the crime scenes, the extensive searches, the listening devices and telephone intercepts.
The leads and tip-offs, false sightings and dead ends. The potential suspects and inquiries that led detectives to Tasmania, Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria, as well as contacting authorities and making inquiries overseas. Every one chased up and documented.
Throughout the eight-week trial, that brief of evidence - something like 36,000 pages filing those white folders - were an ever present indication of what exactly was stacked against Newson.
It was a case based solely on circumstantial evidence that began about 9.25pm on September 30, 2014, when Newson walked into Muswellbrook police station and reported his girlfriend Carly McBride missing.
A few days later - on October 3 - Newson gave his first police interview.
By October 7, after reviewing that interview and some of the concerning or bizarre comments made by Newson, detectives knew they were dealing with more than just a missing person case.
That day detectives established Strike Force Karabi to investigate the disappearance of Ms McBride.
The core of that strike force - Detective Inspector Ian Wright, Detective Senior Constable Simone Bottrill and Detective Senior Constable Daniel Robins - spent the next three years working tirelessly; chasing down leads, knocking on doors and sifting through hundreds of tips and hours of telephone intercepts to build a case strong enough to charge Newson with murder.
It is impossible to calculate the number of hours those detectives put into the case.
Investigators took a little under 300 statements from people, spoke to many, many more and knocked on hundreds of doors in Muswellbrook, Scone and Owens Gap. Not to mention all the information that came through Crime Stoppers that needed to be followed up.
In late 2014 and early 2015, while Ms McBride was still missing, specialist police and other emergency services conducted multiple searches of bushland and dams.
Then there were the crime scenes at Muswellbrook, Scone, Owens Gap and on the Central Coast and trips interstate to speak to and ultimately eliminate potential suspects. Throughout the investigation, police were granted warrants to listen in on about 10 phones and the man hours it took to sift through all the calls became almost overwhelming. But among the useless conversations were bits of circumstantial gold that became crucial parts of the prosecution case. Finally, among all the old fashioned police work, was an inventive investigative technique; the "fake crime scene".
When Ms McBride's skeletal remains were found on August 7, 2016, detectives delayed publicly announcing the discovery for four days. And when they did break the news, police circulated footage and images of a "fake crime scene", a different location on the other side of Bunnan Road at Owens Gap.
It was essentially a trap. Detectives were intercepting Newson's phone calls and hoped he would slip up and reveal something that only someone who had been to the real crime scene would know.
It worked. Newson later called Ms McBride's father, Steve McBride, and said "he had heard that somebody was in possession of [Carly's] hand". The only people who knew about the condition of Ms McBride's skeletal remains were the police, her parents and those at John Hunter Hospital.
Later, Newson told Mr McBride he knew the exact location where his daughter's remains had been found. "I've hunted that area, I know that area like the back of my hand," Newson said. "It's not something I would admit to anyone else because it sounds incriminating."
The thoroughness of the investigation made it clear that police had not simply focused on Newson.
Instead, they had followed the evidence where it led them. And while others were gradually being eliminated, Newson's comments and behaviour after Ms McBride's disappearance kept him a suspect until there was no one else left.
During his closing address, Crown prosecutor Lee Carr, SC, sought to cut-off any criticism the defence might aim at the police investigation.
"You sometimes wonder, did the police have tunnel vision in this? "Did they from day one go, he's our man we're just going to focus all our resources on this bloke. "I would suggest to you that is so far from the reality in this case and you might even find it amusing. "Suspects were not ignored, they were eliminated."