Pod Insights The Case Of 01 | Maree Crabtree | A mother tried for murder About this episode Maree Crabtree was accused of killing her son with a drug laced-smoothie, in a murder trial which ended this week.
Brisbane reporter Talissa Siganto joins Stocky to explain how the trial unfolded and why Maree's daughter was central to the jury's decision in this case.
If you have any questions you'd like Talissa and Stocky to answer in future episodes, please email [email protected] mailto:[email protected] .
The Case Of is the follow-up to the hit podcast Mushroom Case Daily, and all episodes of that show will remain available in the back catalogue of The Case Of.
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0:45 Speaker 05 In 2017, a panicked mother called Triple O after finding her son unresponsive in his room. She's then charged with his murder, accused of crushing up painkillers and putting them in a smoothie. I'm Stephen Stockwell, this is the first episode of the case of Marie Crabtree. The 59-year-old was accused of killing her son and staging it as a suicide. In photos, Marie Crabtree smiled and posed with her children, but police allege she killed to receive life insurance payments.
1:15 Speaker 06 She allegedly told a friend, "I want to put something in his drink so he won't be here." We will be alleging these are premeditated, direct acts of murder. All I'm willing to say at this stage is that Miss Crabtree intends on vigorously defending the charges.
1:31 Speaker 05 The murder trial of Marie Crabtree has just played out in Brisbane. This is a trial with so many twists and turns. There were over 60 witnesses, including her own daughter. And now this is finished, we're going to take you back to the start. This is a very sad story. It's a woman accused of killing her son. But there following the whole thing has been the ABC's court reporter in Brisbane, Tullis Saganto. To the start, thank you for joining us on The Case of.
1:58 Speaker 06 Stocky, thank you for having me.
2:00 Speaker 05 It's our pleasure. I'm really pleased that we've got someone with your experience joining us for this story because it's something that you have followed for, yeah, literally years and years. How did it start? Can you take us back to where this all began?
2:13 Speaker 06 Yeah, this case has been around for the better part of a decade. It was July 2017. On the Gold Coast, where Marie Crabtree lives, she makes a distress call to 000. Now, she tells the operator on the other end, she's just found her 26-year-old son, Jonathan Crabtree, unresponsive in his bedroom. Now, not surprisingly, the person taking the call, she asks if she can start resuscitating him, but Marie just continuously says no. At first, she says that she thinks her son is dead, and then she says she doesn't know how to do CPR. She's quite upset on the phone, you can hear it in the 00 call. She eventually says she has a bad back and she just can't do it, and neither can her daughter Tara Crabtree,
2:58 Speaker 06 who's there at the home with them. She eventually agrees to go next door and try to get a neighbour to help.
3:04 Speaker 05 Hmm, what, what happens?
3:07 Speaker 06 Well, paramedics, they were already on their way, and they arrive at the Maudslan house not too long after this call. They were the first ones on the scene, and they said that Jonathan had some pretty obvious signs of death when they got there, and he'd likely been dead for a number of hours. They chat to Marie briefly and try and get a sit rep on what's happened. They also chat to Jonathan's sister Tara, who lived at the house with them. They tell the paramedics that, you know, he has access to prescription medications. They do, the paramedics do a quick search of his room, and they find a bag near his bed. And in that bag, they discovered a really large number of open and used blister packs of prescription painkillers.
3:53 Speaker 05 Right. I mean, that seems, you know, like a kind of alarming discovery to make in a room of someone, you know, who's just passed away. What do the paramedics do then?
4:02 Speaker 06 Well, it does raise alarm bells and at this point, the police then get involved. So they come over to the house, they speak with her just as a witness to try and get a better idea of what's happened. And that's when Marie starts theorising about how her son may have died at times, saying that she thought it might have been a heart attack, but she also suggests that he might have overdosed himself on these prescription painkillers.
4:29 Speaker 05 Yeah, right. So this is as Marie Crabtree is talking to the police who've kind of rocked up at their Gold Coast home to have a chat with her following the death of her son. I mean, what is she telling them about Jonathan at this point?
4:39 Speaker 06 Look, she spoke at length with police. There was an interview that ran for over an hour and she talks about his various health issues. She tells them how he had brain damage from a car crash that he was involved in in 2015 and that almost killed him. That then led to an even worse prescription drug addiction, she said, and he had episodes of violent behaviour towards herself and her daughter. And she even spoke about some previous self-harm attempts. At times, she did say that she was shocked that she'd found him dead that morning and that she didn't see a suicide coming, but she also spoke about her son getting some pretty bad news the day before.
5:21 Speaker 05 What was, what was the bad news?
5:23 Speaker 06 So Jonathan and his mother, the day before, had gone to see a psychologist. He was going to get an assessment for a disability insurance claim. Marie told police that it was during that assessment that a psychologist actually told him that he was going to end up in some kind of geriatric nursing home and that that really had upset him.
5:45 Speaker 05 Yeah. I mean, you know, talking about his history, Jonathan Crabtree's history here, this kind of abusive painkillers, previous, you know, attempts of self-harm. I mean, what was going on there? What was this kind of decline like?
6:00 Speaker 06 So it was described by Marie in this interview with police that he had another sister who passed away a number of years earlier and this really set him into like a spiral because he was really depressed after her death. He also had these ongoing injuries from his 2015 car crash, as I mentioned, but he also had a car crash in 2009. So he's had a number of issues over the years. He began abusing painkillers after that first crash and it only got worse when he went into intensive care after the second crash. So Marie tells police that these violent outbursts got increasingly worse over the years and
6:44 Speaker 06 she was actually afraid that he was going to kill her.
6:47 Speaker 05 Yeah, right. Oh God, it sounds like, yeah, such an awful scene to be a part of. You know, there is a mother with your son, you know, dead in his room, the ambulance, the police there, kind of working out what's going on. Tulis, you mentioned there Jonathan's sister dying. What happened there?
7:06 Speaker 06 Well, it wasn't really spoken about, I mean, at any great length by Marie in this interview. It was just touched on as a reason for Jonathan having depressive episodes since her death in 2012. At the end of the trial, the jury were told that they shouldn't make any inquiries about how his sister died because it just wasn't relevant to this case.
7:33 Speaker 05 Thank you, Tulis. I mean, when we're talking about Jonathan, you know, the scene you've set, you know, what Marie Crabtree has kind of told police at this time, you know, it does kind of paint this picture of an accidental, maybe a deliberate overdose. I mean, at what point do police start looking into Marie Crabtree?
7:48 Speaker 06 Well, certainly from the get-go, a lot of people around the family thought Jonathan died of an overdose, given his history. Yeah, it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility, but police, as they often do, were investigating in the background. So they obviously had reason to believe the death was suspicious. They started talking to friends and relatives and really looking into the family's financial situation and ultimately they start to build a case against her.
8:15 Speaker 05 What do some of, like their friends and family say when the police are talking to them?
8:20 Speaker 06 So some people talk about some of the comments that Marie made over the years about Jonathan. Some neighbours during the trial gave evidence that she made off comments here and there about wanting him to die in a similar fashion to how he did die by just taking an overdose of pain medication. Marie also spoke about him being in hospital after that second car crash and referring to him as being a vegetable and a dud and a potato who wasn't going anywhere in life. These sort of things obviously are circumstantial in a case like this, but it pointed to her feelings, her ill feelings about her son.
9:04 Speaker 06 And these are the sort of things that weren't really denied by Marie. She had a really tough time parenting Jonathan. And that was very clear in a lot of the evidence from people who knew the family.
9:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, and Marie Crabtree is arrested for Jonathan Crabtree's murder. I mean, how long does that take, you know, after his death?
9:22 Speaker 06 So it wouldn't actually happen for another six months. It was January 2018 when they arrested her and they charged her with his murder. They also charged her with an earlier attempted murder and they charged her with fraud. Now, police were pretty open at the time about the allegations against her. They made public that she allegedly killed her son with prescription pain medication. They also gave details about the alleged fraud. They say that after his death, she made a claim on his death insurance through his superannuation, which they say that she didn't have legal authority to do so.
10:02 Speaker 05 Right, okay. So, you know, this all happens in 2017, Marie Crabtree charged in 2018. And there is actually a trial in 2024. But given we're at a point now where a trial has just concluded, that first one cannot have gone well. What happened?
10:19 Speaker 06 No, so as you say, a trial did get underway. There was a few days of evidence heard, but just before Marie's daughter Tara Crabtree is about to take the witness stand, there were some documents that were discovered. And that was related to her evidence. So the judge essentially decides that, no, he has to discharge this jury and the entire proceeding is aborted.
10:41 Speaker 05 And so that's an issue with what the defence not having access to these documents, the prosecution not having to these documents, is that what's going on here?
10:50 Speaker 06 Yeah, so it's a disclosure issue effectively. The Crown and the defence, they needed more time to explore what was in those documents and determine whether it contained anything of importance for the trial. At the time, it was believed that it might have been relevant to the credibility of Tara as a witness and it could have actually led to them exploring other avenues of inquiry. So following this mistrial, Marie made a bid for bail and she was successful. It was during that bail application, which wasn't too long after the mistrial was declared. There were a few questions actually raised over the quality of the prosecution's case
11:32 Speaker 06 against Marie. But ultimately, as we know now, the prosecutors did decide to crack on with the retrial.
11:38 Speaker 05 Yeah, I guess they've gotten to work after a scathing assessment of the quality of their case and pulled things back together. And yeah, we're finally back in court in April of this year. And I mean, we learn, Talisa, so much from opening arguments of a trial. It's where the prosecution's sort of laying out their case, telling us their version of what's unfolded and why person X is guilty of whatever they have been charged with. In this instance, with Marie Crabtree on trial for the murder of Jonathan Crabtree, what story were they telling?
12:07 Speaker 06 So the Crown painted a picture of a family who often had smoothies. They would make drinks in their blenders. And Jonathan Crabtree was someone who would always have a mixed drink. So. The allegation was pretty straightforward. The prosecution put it to the jury that she committed a premeditated murder against her son and the way she did that was by crushing up prescription painkillers and also using liquid form of the same type of drugs and putting it into a fruit smoothie and then serving it to him. They say she then staged the whole thing to look like a suicide and it actually wasn't the first time, they say she allegedly tried to do this.
12:52 Speaker 05 Right, what was the previous time? Because, you know, as you mentioned earlier, Marie Crabtree was charged with attempted murder. What was this other instance?
13:00 Speaker 06 So prosecutors alleged that there was this earlier incident in the same year, 2017, very similar circumstances. Marie allegedly puts the crushed up painkillers into a drink that she's mixed up in the blender. This time it wasn't a smoothie, it was described as a milkshake. The only difference here was that this time was during the day. So Tara Crabtree, who's one of the main witnesses in this case, she says that Marie actually starts panicking during this incident because Jonathan is reacting quite loudly after being given this drink and they're worried that neighbours are going to hear him because it's the middle of the day.
13:41 Speaker 06 What actually happens in this instance is that they call the paramedics themselves and they come out and they do treat him for the overdose.
13:49 Speaker 05 Right, okay. I'm interested in talking a little bit more about Tara Crabtree in this episode as well. Her role in this, someone who says they saw this unfold is almost kind of unusual in a trial like this. But before we get to that, what was the kind of the motive that the prosecution put forward? You know, why did they say that Marie Crabtree did this?
14:10 Speaker 06 Well, we know she was also charged with fraud, we touched on that a little earlier, and that was related to the death insurance claim. But the prosecution said that there was also some other things that pointed to a financial motive. It wasn't just that potential payout. We learned during the trial about the finances of the family. She was said, Marie was said to have full control over the children's government support payments. And both Tara and Jonathan actually owned that home that they all lived in on the Gold Coast. So it was put to the jury that she actually wanted to gain his share of the property. It was also suggested that Marie called Jonathan a financial burden that was allegedly said to Tara.
14:55 Speaker 06 He had actually been charged in recent years with an armed robbery of a pharmacy. So this was something that was touched on a lot during the opening addresses as well, about the fact that Tara claimed that her mother said that this was going to cause them financial ruin and that there was a possibility that that house was going to be taken away from them.
15:15 Speaker 05 Talisa, there are always two sides to these stories. Marie Crabtree has a legal team of her own. And the story that that team told the jury was a very different story to the prosecution, wasn't it?
15:27 Speaker 06 It was Angus Edwards was her defence barrister. And he made it very clear to the jury that they needed to really listen to all of the evidence. This was a very big trial. There were more than 60 witnesses. Obviously, that was going to be a lot of evidence for a jury to have to take in. He said that they should really think about her home situation. During the openings, the prosecution conceded Jonathan was a really troubled young man. They said he, you know, used drugs. But Mr Edwards, he went even further. He called him a violent suicidal drug addict. He asked the jury to think about a lot of the evidence in that context
16:10 Speaker 06 and to think about how difficult it would have been living in that home for both Marie Crabtree and Tara Crabtree. He said there was no dispute at all that Jonathan did die of a drug overdose. But it was going to be a question for them to determine how that actually happens, particularly if he did it himself or even the possibility of his sister Tara being responsible.
16:34 Speaker 05 Yeah, right. And I mean, talking about Tara here, the defence would have known that she's a key witness. You know, we have Tara Crabtree saying that she saw her mum putting these drugs in the smoothie, grinding this up, giving it to Jonathan. I mean, how did the defence deal with that? Was that something they flagged quite early on?
16:52 Speaker 06 It was a main theme in those opening addresses. Mr Edwards said that her evidence was really the only real issue in the trial. He put it to them very bluntly. He has, they have to determine rather, is she telling the truth? Is she a credible witness? And were there too many inconsistencies over the years with her stories? He is the one who introduces the fact that Tara didn't actually come forward to police with this version of events until years after her brother died. Initially, she was saying that he had also committed a suicide or had overdosed on the prescription drugs. So that was a really important part of the opening addresses for the defence
17:37 Speaker 06 to sort of paint the picture of, you know, how they should be looking at the evidence as a whole from Tara.
17:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, how important is Tara, or was Tara, I should say, to the prosecution case?
17:49 Speaker 06 Look, she was central. She is what we call an eyewitness. She says she was there and she saw what happened. She says that, you know, her mother allegedly kills her brother. She also says that she was there when she allegedly tried to do it in that earlier incident. All of the other evidence in this case is circumstantial without her.
18:09 Speaker 05 Hmm. And Alyssa, we know how this story ends. You know, the jury returned their verdict on Monday in the trial of Marie Crabtree. What did they decide?
18:19 Speaker 06 Not guilty on all three counts. So they deliberated for a little over two days before reaching that verdict. And yeah, after eight and a half years or so, two trials, the most recent one running for five weeks, Marie was free to leave court. She had these charges hanging over her for all this time. She was quite emotional when that verdict was handed down. And outside court, she didn't really have much to say, but I'm sure she was probably relieved.
18:50 Speaker 05 Yeah, and I mean, we've been talking about Tara for a lot of the end of this episode. You know, the importance of her as a witness. With the jury returning that verdict, does that mean that they just didn't believe her?
19:02 Speaker 06 Well, we don't know for sure and we never will. But there were a few things that happened during the deliberations that did make me think that they were really struggling with how to consider her evidence.
19:15 Speaker 05 Hmm.
19:16 Speaker 06 There was also another aspect to Tara's evidence that they had to consider. And they were told pretty early on about this, but she was given something quite extraordinary. She was offered a concession, which is very rarely given to people. And I've been doing court reporting for several years. And this is only the second time that I've seen this exercised here in Queensland.
19:40 Speaker 05 We're going to have all of those details for you in our next episode. I was, Talisa, so surprised by some of the things that happened during Tara's evidence. And I mean, if we've given away the verdict at this point of the story, you can only imagine what we've still got for you in episode two of this series. Talisa, thank you so much for joining us and taking us through this and look forward to having you back on Tuesday next week.
20:01 Speaker 06 Stockwell, always a pleasure. Thank you.
20:03 Speaker 05 Make sure you grab ABC Listen. It's the best place to listen to all of the episodes of The Case Of, but also the next episode in the series of The Case of Marie Crabtree. There's so much more to come from this. Tell your friends, drop this in your group chat and I'll be back in your feed on Tuesday.
20:24 Speaker 05 The Case Of is produced by ABC Audio Studios and ABC News. This episode was reported by Talisa Segunto and presented by me, Stephen Stockwell. Our supervising producer is Greg Muller and our executive producer is Claire Rawlinson. Thank you to senior lawyer, our legal queen, Jasmine Sims, to the ABC newsroom in Brisbane, and also to Audio Studios manager, Eric George. This episode was produced on the land of the Tuero, Yagura and Morunduri people.
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