Claim Gordon Wood asked to see Caroline Byrne's breasts 'totally false', court told
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Version 0 of 1. The former chauffeur Gordon Wood denies he asked to see the breasts of his dead girlfriend Caroline Byrne as she lay in a morgue and only went there to say a final goodbye, a court has heard. Wood, once a driver for the high-profile stockbroker Rene Rivkin, was charged over Byrne’s death after her body was found on rocks at the base The Gap in Sydney in mid-1995. He was found guilty of murder in 2008 but the conviction was quashed four years later. He is now pursuing damages in the New South Wales supreme court over the wrongful conviction. It was alleged in 2007 by a morgue attendant that Wood had asked police, “Do you mind if I see her tits?”. But his lawyer, Bruce McClintock SC, said on Tuesday that a counsellor said Wood had instead held her hand. “Of all the things that were said about my client … this was probably, in a sense, the most damaging and it was totally false,” he said. On the second day of his opening submissions, McClintock told the court the police investigation into Wood had been “flawed”. He again attacked the evidence of retired University of Sydney physicist, Assoc Prof Rod Cross, who was writing a book at the time of the trial about how physics contributed to the police investigation. McClintock told the court that Cross, who has a background in plasma physics, was not qualified to give such advice. “To call it junk science is to do a disservice to the word ‘junk’,” he said. Part of the original case against Wood was that he had thrown Byrne off the cliff. Cross ran tests of throwing speeds and trajectories but McClintock said they were not thorough and did not match what he said in evidence. He read an excerpt from Cross’s book that said: “The fact that I didn’t have experience in investigating a cliff fall didn’t worry me in the slightest.” Wood is expected to give evidence on Thursday. |