Watson remark shocks friend

By Eugene Bingham and Alison Horwood

WELLINGTON - Scott Watson told his ex-girlfriend that Olivia Hope hated her father and could not wait to get away from him, the High Court at Wellington heard yesterday.

The woman said she was shocked by Watson's statement and asked how he knew.

"He said [Olivia's] friends had told him that," she told the double-murder trial.

The witness, who has name suppression, had a relationship with Watson between July and November 1997, and allowed him to stay at her home in Whangarei in early 1998.

Watson, aged 28, denies murdering Olivia Hope and Ben Smart in the early hours of January 1, 1998, following a party at Furneaux Lodge in the Marlborough Sounds.

At the start of the 11th week of the trial, his ex-girlfriend gave evidence of conversations she had with Watson about the disappearance of Olivia and Ben, including his theory on the 17-year-old's relationship with Gerald Hope.

Crown prosecutor Paul Davison, QC, asked the woman about the comments Watson made when he visited her in late March 1998.

The woman said she was shocked because it was the first time Watson had talked of knowing anything about Olivia.

She dropped the conversation because she did not want to take it any further.

Defence counsel Bruce Davidson asked the witness whether Watson told her he had spoken directly to Olivia's friends, or whether it was information he knew because it was circulating at the time.

"My impression of what he said was that he had been talking to Olivia's friends."

Later she admitted she could have just interpreted his comments.

Following a question from the trial judge, Justice Heron, she said it was possible Watson might have just picked up gossip from around town.

The woman told the court how she and Watson made several overnight trips on his boat when he moored at Whangarei and Tutukaka to see her.

In March 1998, police accompanied her to his seized vessel, Blade, and asked her to point out any differences in its appearance.

She noticed scratch marks on the rubber lining on the forward hatch, above the berth where she and Watson had slept together.

"The hatch had a rubber mat on the underside of it and when I closed the hatch I liked to run my hand along the rubber because it was smooth and the rubber reminded me of jandals I wore when I was a kid."

Following her visit to the boat, Watson made an out-of-the-blue comment to explain the gouges.

"We were sitting on the couch and out of the blue he brought up the subject of the hatch and the scratch marks on it and that his nieces had made the scratch marks."

She had not told him she had seen the marks on the hatch.

Under cross-examination, the witness admitted she kept in contact with both Watson and a police officer on the inquiry team, Detective Sergeant Dave Landreth, in early 1998.

She agreed that police faxed her a series of questions to put to Watson by telephone in April last year.

But there were also questions she wanted to know the answers to herself.

At one point she asked Watson whether he had committed the murders.

"He was agitated and said to me I shouldn't have to ask him that question. He then went on to say, 'No, I didn't do it'."

She had earlier asked him what he had done on New Year's Eve and whether it was true he was hitting on women.

"He said he was at the pub, he had been drinking and that is the kind of thing you do ... try and pick up a woman."

After publicity about a young woman being assaulted at Furneaux, Watson told the witness he wished the victim would go to police.

"He wanted her to come forward because he thought that would prove he had not done what he was being accused of."

Watson told the woman he thought the Blenheim couple were on board a yacht that sank in Cook Strait on January 1. She said his theory came about following news of an emergency beacon signal detected that day.