IT all started with a car accident on a windy stretch of road at Mount Hutton.
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The driver, a young woman, had taken a Xanax and fallen asleep behind the wheel, driving off the road and into a ditch with a young child in the back seat.
Fortunately for the young woman, the girl was unharmed and the car suffered only minor damage.
Unfortunately for her, the girl's mother was Kyna McAuley.
It was a situation that, perhaps, could have been relatively easily resolved.
But a number of unpredictable factors - rage, drug use and love - were in play that meant a minor car accident bled into the 24-hour abduction and torture of the driver and then haemorrhaged into the interference and stabbing of a Crown witness in the case.
McAuley's rage at the crash, the drug use of everyone involved and the young woman's decision to return to the house at Mount Hutton despite all of that, quickly led to her being detained, tortured and threatened.
She gave evidence that she was tied up, struck in the head with what she thought was a hammer, had her teeth knocked out, burnt with a cigarette and had boiling water poured over her head during the 24 hours she spent in the shed in Kestrel Avenue in May, 2021.
The young woman was terrified she was going to be killed and wet her pants when someone pinned her down and held out her arm while McAuley started a grinder and approached "as if she was going to cut off her arm".
"She had said: "take her arms off"," the young woman said of McAuley. "I thought she was going to cut my arm off and I peed my pants, urinated in my pants because I was so scared. "[The grinder] was close and then all of a sudden it just stopped."
On Tuesday, after a three-week trial that focused on what exactly happened inside the shed and who was present, a jury found McAuley guilty of detaining and assaulting the young woman and interfering with a witness.
The verdict means the jury must have rejected McAuley's evidence that she fought with the young woman in the shed on the morning after the crash but then left and had no idea she was being detained for the rest of the day.
McAuley was acquitted of stabbing the same young woman in the face with a blood-filled syringe during another incident in the shed months before the abduction.
Meanwhile, Madden Paynter, who had been accused of holding the young woman down during the grinder attack, walked free from the dock after he was acquitted of any involvement in the abduction and torture.
But there were a few details the jury did not hear during the trial, including that one of the key witnesses - a man who pleaded guilty to his role in the abduction and agreed to give evidence - was stabbed three times outside his house and told to say: "I am not a dog", while he lay bleeding on the ground.
The attacker then stole his mobile phone - which the police suspected contained messages from McAuley attempting to convince him to change his story - and fled.
The Newcastle Herald can now reveal that last week Daniel Chilcott-Anderson, 26, of Windale, pleaded guilty to the stabbing. He remains behind bars and will be sentenced in October.
McAuley has not been charged over the stabbing of the witness and there is no suggestion she was behind the attack.
The detail about the stabbing formed part of legal argument in McAuley's trial but was ruled inadmissible by Acting Judge Megan Latham.
That witness was too scared to physically come to court during the trial and if he had not been allowed to give evidence via audio visual link had indicated he would scrap his agreement to testify and potentially risk losing his discount.
Meanwhile, another man who admitted to his role in the abduction and also agreed to assist the prosecution, found himself face-to-face with those he was giving evidence against while they were being transported to and from jail and court.
Ultimately, four out of the five people present in the shed during the abduction gave evidence in the trial.
But by the end, the jury had heard so many versions - many extremely self-serving - that we may never know exactly what happened to the young woman during those 24 hours.
She was undoubtedly subjected to inhumane and terrifying acts, tortured and held against her will.
She was tormented by McAuley, who she remembers thinking aloud about the differences between burning someone with hot coffee and hot water.
She recalled at one point drifting in and out of consciousness when she heard the whistle of a kettle and then felt "indescribable pain" as someone poured boiling water over her head.
She told the jury that at one point, McAuley said: "I need some pliers so I can pull some teeth out".
She said McAuley then struck her in the mouth with something and can remember thinking: "please God just let her knock some teeth out. Because I knew if she didn't knock them out she was going to pull them out".
"I looked at my hand, my teeth were in my hand," the young woman said in her evidence. "I was so relieved. I spat them out."
And she said she made sure to spit blood on the floor so that if she was murdered someone would find some trace of her.
She was repeatedly threatened with death, "a lobotomy", to be put in hydrochloric acid, or to be injected with drugs and all the while McAuley was telling her she wanted her to be as frightened as her daughter was during the car accident, the not so minor event that started all this.
"And she said are you frightened," the young woman said in her evidence, speaking of McAuley.
"I was. So I said: "Kyna I pissed my pants I'm so terrified". "I need to go to hospital". "I was trying to convince her I was scared because I thought maybe she would stop. But she didn't."
Eventually, the young woman was threatened a few more times that she would be killed if she told anyone what had happened and then she was dumped in bushland at Eleebana.
It was the early hours of the morning and she managed to stumble to a house and knocked to get help.
The young man who answered the door took one look at her and screamed.
His dad later made some observations about how she looked.
"Her left eye was closed right over," he said. "She had a fair bit of blood coming out of her nose and mouth, blood coming out of her ears. "She was pretty rattled, nervous. She had been bashed up pretty bad."
And it all started with a car accident on a windy stretch of road at Mount Hutton.
McAuley remains behind bars and will be sentenced in October.
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