Distress overcomes Olivia's mother

By Alison Horwood

WELLINGTON - The sobs of Olivia Hope's grieving mother stopped the double-murder trial of Scott Watson in its tracks yesterday.

Janice Hope turned her face from the court and cried quietly into her hands after she gave evidence of the special relationship she shared with her younger child.

"She was very loving," she said before breaking down in tears.

She was handed a box of tissues by court staff and asked crown prosecutor Kieran Raftery to pause for a few minutes.

After she swivelled in her chair to face the wall, the packed public gallery in the High Court at Wellington maintained a respectful silence as she fought to compose herself.

Earlier, Mrs Hope told the court her 17-year-old daughter had just left school and was working part-time at Farmers and Wairau River Wines in Blenheim.

Mrs Hope, who also works at the winery, let Olivia leave work early in the afternoon of December 30. Olivia went grocery shopping and home to pack for a charter-boat trip with sister Amelia and friends in the Marlborough Sounds.

Mr Raftery: Is that the last time you ever saw Olivia?

Mrs Hope: Yes.

Olivia and her 21-year-old friend Ben Smart disappeared after boarding a yacht with a stranger in Endeavour Inlet early on New Year's Day 1998.

Scott Watson denies killing the pair and the trial is now in its fourth week.

Mrs Hope said Olivia was due back at the winery on January 2, and therefore expected home on January 1.

When she did not turn up, Mrs Hope rang the Smart family, other friends and "as many people as I could think of," she told the court. By January 2, the family were distraught.

She said Olivia planned to study law, music and politics at university. She tossed up between Wellington or Dunedin, but enrolled at Otago University, where her sister was studying, because she was fearful of being homesick.

Mr Raftery produced a diary of engagements Olivia kept and asked Mrs Hope to read a few entries. Olivia planned to attend the Radiohead concert in Wellington on January 29 and, later, the Blenheim Food and Wine Festival.

Mrs Hope said Olivia planned for the future and always kept in contact with her parents. "She was a great communicator, she always kept in touch. She rang me at Wairau River every day to say she had just got home from school."

Mrs Hope said she gave a blood sample to a doctor on January 20.

In January and again in April police came to the Hopes' house in Blenheim to collect hair samples from Olivia's bed, dressing table, clothes and a hair tie.

Under cross-examination from defence lawyer Bruce Davidson, Mrs Hope said Olivia took her hairbrush to the Marlborough Sounds with her, and it did not return. She could not remember whether police took another brush from the house.

Olivia normally kept her nails trimmed to play piano, but she had let them grow because she did not practise in the school holidays, she said.

The Crown alleges that the inside of the forward hatch from Watson's boat, Blade, is gouged with 176 fingernail scratchings.

Earlier, Ben Smart's mother, Mary, told the court how Mrs Hope phoned her on January 2 to say the pair were missing.

"I wasn't alarmed at that stage. I thought they would have gone on to someone else's boat. Ben had a lot of friends in the Sounds."

The family later began to panic when they learned Olivia was due at work on January 2.

She said Ben had been a keen guitar player, and left the fingernails on one hand slightly longer than on the other.