Christchurch builder Michael Craig McGrath, 49, was last seen at his home in Halswell, Christchurch, in May 2017.
Christchurch builder Michael Craig McGrath, 49, was last seen at his home in Halswell, Christchurch, in May 2017.
The distraught mother of a man missing feared murdered has today revealed that the ex-prison guard accused of killing him used to call her “Mum”.
Former Corrections officer David Benbow, 54, denies murdering Christchurch builder Michael McGrath who disappeared on May 22, 2017.
His body has never been found – and nor has a murder weapon - despite widespread searches of properties, rivers, waterways, and the city dump.
Benbow’s defence team has warned the jury at the High Court in Christchurch of “investigative bias” and “tunnel vision” from police early in its investigations.
The Crown alleges he lured McGrath to his semi-rural lifestyle property in Halswell on Monday, May 22, 2017 and used his .22 semi-automatic rifle, with suppressor and sub-sonic ammunition, to shoot him dead and then dispose of his body, just weeks after learning he was seeing his ex-partner Joanna Green and telling a counsellor he wanted to “annihilate” him.
Today, the court has heard from McGrath’s mother Adrienne McGrath who recounted a loyal, reliable private son who would “anything for anybody”.
She told how McGrath and Benbow had been friends and they would occasionally come to her Halswell home.
“He always seemed pleasant enough,” she said, and when they were younger, Benbow would sometimes knock on her kitchen door and say, “G’day Mum, how are you?” the court heard.
David Charles Benbow denies murdering Michael McGrath and is standing trial at the High Court in Christchurch. Photo / Kai Schwoerer, Stuff, Pool
After Michael McGrath told his mother that “Dave’s having a family”, his mother decided to do some knitting for the Benbows and gradually got to know Benbow’s partner of 17 years, Jo Green.
But at the time Michael McGrath disappeared, she had not known that her son had been in a new relationship with Green, who had left Benbow earlier in 2017.
Every Tuesday evening, she would have her two sons, Michael and younger brother Simon, over for dinner.
But when Michael didn’t show up on Tuesday, May 23, 2017, she was concerned as he’d only missed the family appointment “once or twice” in 20-odd years – and he would’ve phoned ahead if he couldn’t make it, she said.
The week earlier he’d been “fine... nothing that gave me any concern”.
Dishing up for dinner with just her son Simon on May 23, she had a phone call from Green who had been trying to contact Michael.
The mother said he hadn’t arrived for tea and Green said she’d come straight over.
She burst indoors, Adrienne McGrath recalled to the court, and said, “I hope David hasn’t done anything to him.”
The trial is ongoing at the High Court in Christchurch. Photo / Kai Schwoerer, Stuff, Pool
When Green and Simon McGrath went to his house and found he wasn’t home, they phoned police and reported him missing.
Adrienne McGrath also told the court that when her perfectionist builder son was forced out of his construction job after a varicose veins’ operation, depression gradually set in.
“He was really quite low and it lasted for a wee while,” Adrienne McGrath said but after three years or so, he “gradually got better until he was his normal self”.
“There was never any thought of him taking his own life,” she said.
Michael’s father Kevin McGrath knew his son had been doing some building work for Benbow and used to “grumble a bit about him”.
After his disappearance, the concerned dad often searched areas around Greenpark and Lake Ellesmere, often returning past Benbow’s Candys Rd property, out of “curiosity I suppose”, he told the court.
Long-time friend Terry Wilson spoke of a conversation a few weeks before the disappearance where McGrath told him about the Benbows splitting up.
“I think his exact words were, ‘Oh Dave is a bloody mug, he’s let the relationship go,” Wilson told the court.
Wilson, who had also grown up in Halswell and was part of the social group that met at the Craythornes Hotel and which involved the McGraths, had always believed that McGrath and Benbow had been “best mates”.
McGrath believed that Benbow had been too fixated on money and had been limiting the amount that Green had access to.
But once she’d left, Benbow had gone to the stage of “promising her everything to get her back”, Wilson relayed to the court.
He believed that McGrath and Green had been “sounding boards” for each other during hard times.
McGrath reportedly told Wilson that the estranged couple had spoken but Green had said “no way are we getting back together”, the court heard.
While the Crown accepts there is no body, no murder weapon, and little forensic evidence in the case, it says there is a strong circumstantial case consisting of many threads that, when taken together, show Benbow is guilty of McGrath’s murder beyond reasonable doubt.
Lead defence counsel Marc Corlett KC earlier said that “within hours” of McGrath’s disappearance, Green had pointed the finger of blame at Benbow “and the police duly obliged”.
But despite teams of police spending thousands of hours investigating “trying to find any evidence they could to fit their theory”, they could not find any, Corlett said.
The trial, before Justice Jonathan Eaton, continues.
