A jury has been informed that a jealous and domineering lover murdered his spouse and left her body in her Melbourne public housing townhouse bathtub for eight months.
Although prosecutors claim Sarah Gatt was murdered eight months earlier, in April 2017, police discovered her remains during a welfare check in January 2018.
Gatt’s body was covered in domestic goods such as a hairdryer, a lamp, and power cords while also being partially exposed.
Her on-again, off-again boyfriend of more than two years, Andrew Baker, has entered a not guilty plea to a murder charge.
The Supreme Court was informed that it is impossible to ascertain Gatt’s cause of death due to the length of time between when she passed away and when her body was found.
In his opening statement to the jury on Tuesday, prosecutor John Dickie stated that Baker is accused of intentionally harming Gatt, or at the the least, intending to kill her.
Dickie characterised Baker as possessive, jealous, insecure, and domineering. Gatt’s further on-and-off relationship with Leona Rei-Paku, according to Baker, was something he didn’t like.
Dickie claimed that relationship was also tumultuous and violent. Both entailed several calls to triple zero, recordings of which will be shown to the jury.
Gatt was living on a disability support income, struggling with mental health and drug problems.
A month before Gatt turned 40, according to the prosecution, Baker killed her out of unrequited love and jealously.
Gatt was last seen by Rei-Paku on April 19, 2017. The jury was informed that the electricity was manually turned off at her Kensington townhouse on April 23, providing investigators with a chronology for the suspected murder.
The power was reportedly restored in August 2017, when Baker acknowledged going to Gatt’s house with others and discovering the body in the bathtub.
The body might be Gatt’s, Baker said to a friend. Rei-Paku was later invited to the residence, according to Dickie, and when Baker pulled back a blanket, she could make out a foot.
According to reports, Baker declared that he and his companion would clean the house and “dump the body out.”
Jurors were advised not to judge Baker and his buddies for being at a home with a body and not alerting the police by defence attorney John Saunders.
Those people did not live a normal lifestyle, he said.
Many, if not all, had mental health issues and battled drug and alcohol abuse, Saunders said, describing them as people who live “on the outskirts of our society”.
“Andrew Baker did not murder Sarah Gatt. He is not responsible for her death,” he said.
It wasn’t until January 2018, eight months after Gatt’s alleged murder, that police discovered her remains while doing a welfare check. They had left a calling card for her in December 2017 and when they returned on January 3 it was untouched.
Saunders said there was no direct evidence Baker killed Gatt, nor was there evidence about her cause of death.
“In those circumstances, how can you exclude, as a reasonable possibility, that Sarah Gatt didn’t die as a result of injuries she sustained in an accident, such as falling down the stairs?” he said.
Additionally, he noted that Rei-Paku couldn’t be completely ruled out and that she had attempted unsuccessfully to divert monies to her own bank account in May 2017 by posing as Gatt at Centrelink.
Later on Tuesday, footage from the house and crime scene will be given to the jury.
