Inmate 'lured To Spin A Tale'
Newcastle Herald
Friday July 9, 2004
A MUSWELLBROOK woman accused of murdering her husband asked a fellow prison inmate to lie for her, giving her written instructions, a Newcastle court heard yesterday.
It is alleged Michelle Willard, 38, asked the inmate, Rachel Ross, to lie saying that a second woman had confessed to the murder. Willard has pleaded not guilty to the murder of her husband Michael Willard, who was shot in the head as he lay sleeping on a lounge in the family home on February 22, 2003. It is the Crown's case Willard did not pull the trigger but that she contracted someone else to do it. Mr Willard's parents, George and Shirley Willard, listened yesterday as Ms Ross told the Newcastle Supreme Court about a conversation she had with their daughter-in-law in jail. "She had asked me if I would lie for her and say that Danielle Wilkinson had told me all this information she was about to give me and that she had nothing to do with her husband's murder," Ms Ross said. "I wouldn't remember all that so I started writing it down and then I asked her to write it down."Ms Ross said that Willard told her she had given a person named TJA money to buy a gun and that Ms Wilkinson had driven that person to the Willard family's home in Hillview Avenue.Willard told her TJA had knocked on her bedroom window and she had let him in so he could shoot Mr Willard, the court heard."She could hear the blood running out of his head and she continued to clean the kitchen and threw, I think, a purse and a video camera on the floor to make it look like a robbery," Ms Ross told the court."She had no intentions of paying them the $20,000 each that they were promised . . . she said that no one would blame her because she went to church and that they were always going to get the blame."Ms Ross also told the court that Willard had told her Ms Wilkinson had approached three other Muswellbrook people to pull the trigger but they had wanted more money and she "wasn't willing to part with that much".Ms Ross denied in cross-examination that she was making up her evidence to benefit from a reduction on the sentence she would inevitably receive for her own offences.Ms Ross is awaiting sentence on a number of matters including theft and failing to appear in court. The trial continues.
© 2004 Newcastle Herald