A neighbour of murdered Victorian woman Kelly Thompson has described how in the weeks before her death, he found her distressed and walking down a street while her then partner, Wayne Wood, pursued her.
Thompson, 43, was found dead in her Point Cooke home in February last year. She was murdered by Wood, who then killed himself.
Giving evidence at the inquest into Thompson’s death on Wednesday, Steven Hall said he and his wife were driving near their home when they saw Thompson “walking quickly” down the road.
“She was shaken and upset,” Hall told coroner Ian Gray. “I could tell something was not right so I decided to turn back and ask if she needed my help. She replied, ‘my partner tried to strangle me’.”
At this point Wood turned up, driving his car on to the nature strip, “wedging” Thompson between both of their cars, Hall said.
“He said something like, ‘Get the fuck out of here,’” Hall said. “I knew this guy was violent by the way he was carrying on.”
As Hall tried to pacify Wood, Thompson pleaded with Hall’s wife who was sitting in the passenger side of the car to call the police, he said. Thompson then walked away while Wood chased her in his car.
Hall told the court he called emergency services and saw police outside the home Thompson shared with Wood a short time later. His distressed call to 000 was played to the court.
Earlier on Wednesday the court heard Thompson had taken out an intervention order against Wood on 23 January last year that barred him from her home. Wood frequently breached the intervention order and stalked her, the court heard, something police were aware of, with Thompson calling them 38 times in the weeks before her murder.
Over eight days, the inquest will examine what, if anything, could have been done differently by the services that interacted with Thompson that may have prevented her death.
Statements from friends and colleagues of Thompson and Wood were also read to the court, painting a picture of Wood as an uneducated and jealous man dependent on his partner.
The violence seemed to escalate around the time the couple went overseas with their business partners to explore prospects for an import/export business they had established, the court heard.
One of those business partners, Shawn Donnelly, told the court that while in China in late 2013, Wood nearly got evicted from the hotel they were staying at because of his threats and violence towards hotel patrons.
Once, Donnelly recalled, when Thompson left a bar they were at to get paracetamol for her headache, “Wayne was going off his tree” because she was out of his sight.
On another occasion Donnelly said Wood had physically attacked him, accusing him of touching Thompson’s head.
On 8 January last year, the business partners held a meeting to discuss what to do about Wood’s violent and aggressive behaviour, Donnelly said.
They decided they would order him to get psychological help, or he would be removed from the company. Hours after informing Wood of this decision, Donnelly said he received a call from Thompson to say Wood had attacked her and tried to strangle her. At this point, Donnelly said, she left him and took out an intervention order.
Another witness, Julie Dibella, told the court that she spoke to Wood after Thompson had ended their relationship and that he told her he had been sexually abused when he was a teenager.
During this conversation Wood threatened to kill the person who abused him as well as his business partners, who he suspected had ripped him and Thompson off. He also said Thompson would “get hers”, Dibella said, though she told the court she did not interpret this as a threat to kill her.
“Wayne liked to do everything as a couple, he was totally lost without her,” Dibella told the court.
On Wednesday morning Wood’s mother, Wendy Thompson, told coroner Gray her daughter had been her “little ray of sunshine”.
She believed there was a conflict of interest in local police investigating her daughter’s case, she said, because they were the same officers who had failed to adequately respond when Wood breached intervention orders.
“It feels like police are covering for what they did not do, from the senior command down,” Thompson said. “Wayne was aware he was offending and doing the wrong thing and each time he did the wrong thing, he went a little further, and still there were no consequences to his offending.”
The inquest continues.
