A Peterborough man who admits killing an antiques dealer at his home in Oxford has claimed he was defending himself after the dealer attacked him with a knife when he made a bad joke.
Michael Danaher, 50, is accused of murdering Adrian Greenwood on 6 April after drawing up a “hitlist” of celebrities and businesspeople to rob and kidnap. A jury at Oxford crown court has heard that Greenwood died as a result of 16 stab wounds, 20 further knife wounds and multiple blunt force injuries.
Danaher told the court that he killed Greenwood during a struggle, but denied he had gone to his home intending to rob him of a £50,000 first edition of The Wind in the Willows, which the dead man had listed for sale on eBay eight months earlier. He denies the charge of murder.
Rather, the defendant said, he was visiting the dealer to discuss buying cheap secondhand books. After an “interesting conversation”, he said he made a limp joke about another man whom Greenwood had been expecting. At this point, Danaher told the jury, the dealer had suddenly called him an “obese tosser”, his face like “the angriest man in Britain”, before shoving him to the ground and going to fetch a knife.
He told Amjad Malik QC, defending: “My jokes are not necessarily funny but I have never had that effect on anyone.”
He wrestled with Greenwood on the floor of his hallway in an attempt to defend himself, he said, before the other man “just stopped” and lay motionless on the floor.
Danaher said he was unsure if Greenwood was alive or dead, but he had decided to rob him of a number of items including the copy of The Wind in the Willows, a camera and his wallet, because, “I wanted to pay him in some way for attacking me”.
Danaher has previously told the court that a “hitlist” found on his laptop entitled “Enterprises”, which listed a number of targets for robbery and kidnap including Greenwood and celebrities Kate Moss and Jeffrey Archer, was not created by him but by a mystery man whom he would not name.
He said the unidentified man was also responsible for repeated searches on his laptop for the home addresses of other celebrities including Eamonn Holmes and Rio Ferdinand, and that it had been this man, not him, who had earlier attempted to force his way into the home of Adrian Beecroft, a wealthy businessman, before being foiled. The unnamed man had taken Danaher’s car and mobile phone, which is why they were traced to the Beecroft family’s Hampstead home at the time of the attempt, he said.
But Oliver Saxby QC, cross-examining for the crown, said the reason Danaher was not prepared to name the other man was that “he doesn’t exist”. “Your counsel called him ‘Unknown man’. He’s ‘Made-up man’, isn’t he? Utterly made-up man.” Danaher said: “No, he’s not.”
Saxby listed 20 coincidences in the accused’s account of the other man which he said were “too far fetched to be true”. One was the fact that Greenwood’s name appeared on the “Enterprises” list, which Danaher says the other man drew up, Saxby said. “He seems to have been plotting to rob by any means necessary somebody whom you ended up killing and then stealing from. And that person wasn’t a well-known figure, he was a 42-year-old rare book dealer from Oxford.
“That’s a whacking great coincidence, isn’t it?” the barrister asked. “Potentially, yes,” said Danaher.
Saxby asked the defendant why he had not mentioned the unidentified man when he was arrested on 10 April or at any point until 4 October, at the start of the trial, when he was first shown the full timeline of the prosecution’s case.
“It’s a complete and utter fabrication,” he said. The accused said he had mentioned the other man to his solicitor “ages ago”.
The case continues.
