A jury has begun listening to conversations secretly recorded as a woman confronted a friend she says once told her he had shot a man on the day Hawkes Bay farmer Jack Nicholas was killed almost four years ago.
The start of the recording was played yesterday, just
minutes before the end of the 12th day of evidence in a trial in the High Court in Napier, where Murray Kenneth Foreman, 51, denies murdering Mr Nicholas, 71, at his home near the Kaweka Ranges in 2004. The rest will be played today.
Former Haumoana woman Donna Kingi said she decided to meet Foreman while wearing the recording device, because it meant a lot to her that police would believe what she had already told them Foreman, her neighbour, said to her on the morning of the killing.
Ms Kingi said she heard Foreman's car leave late on the night of August 26, and she didn't see him again until about 7.30 the next morning.
She said that, looking "clammy" and pale, with moisture on his face, he came up to her fence and said: "I think I just shot someone." She said she saw him take a gun from his car, put it in his truck and leave, and he later told her he had hidden it at a friend's home.
Ms Kingi also told the court that about two weeks earlier Foreman had taken his son on a trip into the hills, but returned home a few hours later highly agitated and swearing about an old farmer who had stopped them passing a gate into the area where he was planning to go.
- NZPA
