Prosecutors in Eastman trial open on his 'murderous hatred of police'
David Harold Eastman murdered Canberra’s most senior police officer one night in 1989 in an act of revenge rooted in a deep hatred of police, prosecutors told a jury on Monday.
Just how a former public servant developed a "murderous hatred of police" was the subject of much of the Crown's opening in the case against Mr Eastman.
They should be taught a lesson, he told his doctor.
“The police were taught the harshest of lessons,” the prosecutor Murugan Thangaraj SC told the jury, “and Mr Eastman made good on those threats.”
The trial heard that Australian Federal Police assisstant commissioner Colin Winchester was shot dead in his car after he had pulled into his neighbour's driveway about 9.15pm on January 10, 1989.
He was killed with two bullets to the head, shot at close range.
Mr Eastman, 73, has pleaded not guilty to murder.
Mr Thangaraj painted a picture of a man rejected from the public service and desperate to return.
At 41 years old, Mr Eastman felt he had been left on the “scrap heap”, yet intelligent and still physically fit.
As his battles with the public service continued, Mr Eastman was charged with assaulting a neighbour.
The two paths converged, and Mr Eastman feared about the consequences for his return to the public service if he were convicted.
Mr Eastman, in dark pants, a red checked shirt and a navy sweater, sat alone at a desk behind his lawyers throughout the opening, taking occasional notes in a notebook.
The Crown case against Mr Eastman is circumstantial, and prosecutors drew out the threads of evidence that would make up their case against him.
They pointed to a motive — in his arguments with the public service and the fight with the neighbour, Andrew Russo.
There were his efforts to buy a gun in the months before the alleged murder, and Mr Eastman's eventual purchase of what prosecutors say was the murder weapon from Louis Klarenbeek, a Ruger 10/20.
The murder weapon was never found.
Prosecutors raised questions about Mr Eastman's unsatisfactory responses to police when asked where he was the night of the murder.
Mr Thangaraj said the Crown would also address the other potential suspects to the killing that were eventually ruled out, including the mafia.
Prosecutors will rely, too, on Mr Eastman’s own mutterings to himself, captured by listening devices planted in his flat during the police investigation.
The police investigation was, Mr Thangaraj told the jury, unsurprisingly the largest in Canberra’s history and one of the biggest in the country.
In the months before the alleged murder of Mr Winchester, Mr Eastman had told various people, including his general practitioner and lawyer, about his despise of the “bastard” police, the court heard.
And Mr Thangaraj said that weeks before Mr Winchester's alleged murder, Mr Eastman met with the police chief and shadow attorney-general, hoping they would drop the assault charges against him.
The meeting did not go well for Mr Eastman, the prosecutor said.
He came to believe police were to blame, that they had behaved corruptly.
The police should be taught a lesson, Mr Eastman told his general practitioner, the court heard.
“The Crown case is that Mr Eastman did teach police a very harsh lesson just four days later when Mr Winchester was murdered,” Mr Thangaraj said.
The trial continues.