Accused 'watched Crown witness kill'

Murder accused Karl Nuku cried as he described seeing a drug-crazed and paranoid woman hitting Dean Browne over the head with a hammer.

"I woke up to a banging noise, yeah. I looked up and saw [Witness 29] standing beside the couch and she had a hammer in her hands. She hit him three times with a hammer," Nuku told the High Court in New Plymouth yesterday.

The fatally injured man fell off the left side of the pull-out couch, his face covered in blood, Nuku said, breaking down in tears.

"I jumped up and grabbed her arm and pulled it [the hammer] out of her hands and asked her `What the f... are you doing, you're killing him'.

"She started ranting that he had raped her."

She was wearing pink rubber gloves, Nuku said.

Nuku, 19, Mikhail Pandey-Johnson, 23, and Rhys (Tex) Fournier, 22, deny murdering Dean Browne, 38, at a Wellington flat on January 21 last year.

Nuku told the court that before the attack, Witness 29 was paranoid that Browne, who he called "Matty", would attack her because he knew that she had tried to drug him two days before.

She had earlier wanted to deliver him to an Auckland drug dealer in return for methamphetamine and money, Nuku said. "She was quite a heavy meth user and would inject morphine as well," Nuku said.

After the attack, she told him that she was giving him morphine because he was making too much noise and she didn't want her flatmates disturbed.

"She was trying to cover her own arse."

Fournier said they needed to call an ambulance but Witness 29 said they could not do that because they would all go to jail as a party to what had happened.

She took charge, checking his pulse and told them he was dead. She put the pink gloves back on, went to her drawers and got cable ties and duct tape and told them how to wrap him up.

"I wanted the situation to go away so I did what she told me to do."

She picked up Pandey-Johnson in central Wellington to help move the body. She told him she got up to go to the toilet and he grabbed her leg and told her to get into bed with him.

He told her she "wasn't complaining the other night they had sex". She told Pandey-Johnson she had never had consensual sex with him, Nuku said.

"She said she got back in bed. She was real angry. She said she waited for Matty to fall asleep then got her hammer out. He was shocked and disgusted. He couldn't believe she'd done something like that."

They put Browne's body in the back of Nuku's car and he and Pandey-Johnson arrived at the New Plymouth home of Pandey-Johnson's cousin Claire Davies about 3am the next day. She was still awake watching TV. She let them in, and they together discussed what they should do, Nuku said.

The next day Joseph Banks, Claire Davies' partner, offered to get rid of the body for them. He would leave it on a beach and make an anonymous call to police.

"But he said we would need to pay him because it was quite a big favour."

Banks asked for $2000 to be put in another person's bank account so it could not be traced. "We agreed straight away."

Banks helped them put the body in the shed and they padlocked it, leaving for Wellington.

To questioning from Crown solicitor Cherie Clarke, Nuku denied he was very loyal to Pandey-Johnson, as the head of the Killer Clown Fiends, who was his role model, and would do anything for him.

"In 2010, Mr Pandey-Johnson was in the throes of a meth habit. You were his right hand man, his protege."

Nuku said they loved each other and were like family.

Nuku said he did not use heavy drugs, because he saw what it did to people, and never saw Pandey-Johnson use methamphetamine.

Ms Clarke said to Nuku that he had killed Mr Browne on Pandey-Johnson's instructions and had received his KCF patch for doing it.

"You killed to get your patch," she said.

"No, it was [Witness 29]," Nuku replied.

The Killer Clown Fiends were not a gang, Nuku said. Their clothes were a "fashion statement".

In a letter to Nuku, Pandey-Johnson wrote from prison that Nuku was "a literal walking proof of the Killer Clown dream", Ms Clarke said.

Ms Clarke said Pandey-Johnson's pride in Nuku was because Nuku was the one who hit Mr Browne over the head with a hammer.

"No, I did not," Nuku said.

The trial, now in its fifth week, continues today.