Maree Crabtree | The murder charge the jury didn’t hear

Gold Coast mother Maree Crabtree was tried for murder in relation to her son's overdose death, and acquitted in May. The jury didn't know she also was facing a murder charge for her second daughter, Erin. In this episode, Brisbane court reporter Talissa Siganto joins Stocky to explain why Maree was accused of killing Erin, a dramatic morning in court and why we had to keep this secret from you. If you have any questions you’d like Talissa and Stocky to answer in future episodes, please email [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. You can listen back to The Case Of Maree Crabtree, starting with episode one - 01 | Maree Crabtree | A mother tried for murder - ABC listen https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/the-case-of/01-maree-crabtree-a-mother-tried-for-murder/106677762 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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  Tammy Shipley believed someone was out to hurt her.

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  I thought someone was after me and I wanted to just be safe.

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  She's put under 24-hour surveillance.

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  I tried to get in contact multiple times.

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  I think I made a phone call, nobody knows where I am.

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  And then something strange happens.

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  She just drank and drank and had something like 20 litres of pure water.

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  Ambulance emergency. I've got a woman unconscious.

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  Tammy's story. Search Background Briefing on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  The story we've told about Marie Crabtree revolves around her children. Jonathan, the son who she was found not guilty of murdering, and Tara, the daughter who was a key witness in that trial. But until now, we couldn't tell you much about her third child, Aaron. She died in 2012. Marie Crabtree had also been charged with her murder, a charge we can finally tell you all about. I'm Stephen Stockwell, this is The Case of Marie Crabtree.

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  The 59-year-old was accused of killing her son and staging it as a suicide.

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  In photos, Marie Crabtree smiled and posed with her children, but police allege she killed to receive life insurance payments.

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  She allegedly told a friend, "I want to put something in his drink so he won't be here."

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  We will be alleging these are premeditated direct acts of murder.

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  All I'm willing to say at this stage is that Miss Crabtree intends on vigorously defending the charges.

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  Last week, just over a month after being cleared of her son's murder, Marie Crabtree's name appeared on the Brisbane Court List. Now, this had been something we had been waiting for, and calling me in the evening when she noticed this was the ABC's court reporter in Brisbane, Talissa Siganto. Welcome back, Talissa.

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  Good to be back, Stocky. Thank you.

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  Last week, as I was getting home from yoga and you were about to go and watch The State of Origin, you called me in the evening. Why?

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  Well, it started like a normal night for me as a court reporter in the sense that I do a check of the following day's court lists to figure out, you know, who's going to be in court and what I'm going to be covering the next day. And yeah, right there, listed for a review in the Supreme Court was one Marie Crabtree. Now, this was not a shock to me and not really for you either. And I would like to point out that I don't make a habit of calling you late at night time, you know, when you're at home. But this was something we'd been waiting for. And I wanted to talk through just what might happen in that review.

• 2:40Speaker 05

  Yeah. And Talisa, the reason that we were so interested in following these developments is because Marie Crabtree had been charged with the murder of her daughter as well. Erin, can you tell us a bit about those charges?

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  So we already know Marie was charged over the death of Jonathan several months after he died in 2017. But what we couldn't say was at the same time, she was also charged with the death of her daughter Erin. Now Erin was 18 years old when she died and it was five years earlier, so in 2012. And at the time Marie was arrested, police alleged that Erin's death was under the exact same circumstances as her brother's death. So almost identical in terms of the allegations. Investigators accuse Marie of giving her daughter, just like she was accused of giving Jonathan, a lethal dose of prescription pain medication.

• 3:36Speaker 06

  And then, yeah, leaving it to seem like she overdosed.

• 3:40Speaker 05

  Hmm. Yeah. And, you know, with her name popping up on the court list, you know, in relation to these, these charges, this is obviously something that is, you know, has the potential to be a very big deal. We didn't know what was going to unfold when you got there. I mean, what happened when you, when you got to court that morning?

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  So reviews are usually very procedural, really brief as well. So there's no real fanfare.

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  So on this day late last week, there were multiple matters listed in the same courtroom. There was a little bit of waiting around. The first thing I noticed is Marie herself wasn't there. And that's not completely unusual. They don't usually need to appear at reviews. So she was represented by her lawyer and the matter gets called after a little while of waiting. And the DPP gets up and simply asks the judge for all of her remaining charges in the Supreme Court. That was the alleged murder of Erin and some associated fraud charges to be completely discontinued.

• 4:43Speaker 05

  That is a kind of a huge part of this story. You know, we mentioned Erin briefly in one of our episodes when we were talking through the case of Marie Crabtree. But because this charge was hanging over and we weren't sure where it was up to, we couldn't go any deeper than that. Talissa, you know, you mentioned that we had been waiting for this. But there was potential for this to kind of go other ways. What else may have happened on that day? Why didn't we know for sure this is what was going to go down?

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  Well, effectively, straight after Marie was acquitted of her son's murder, her lawyer indicated that they were going to be making submissions to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and that they were pretty confident that the second murder charge would be finalised. Now, in legal terms, the word finalised doesn't always mean the charge will be dropped. So that can sort of translate to potentially there being a plea deal. There could have been a situation where she may have pleaded guilty to some downgraded charges in other murder cases. This often translates to a manslaughter guilty plea.

• 5:50Speaker 06

  It could also mean that things may still be progressing in the sense that they're trying to have the charges thrown out. But the DPP may not accept that. So. We weren't too sure if everything was going to come to a head on that review. We definitely knew we were going to hear something about the case. The whole point of a review is to get an update on where things are at pre-trial. Um. It was sort of one of those things that, you know, people weren't directly saying it, but everyone knew that is what the defence were pointing to, that this charge was going to be dropped. So ultimately, that is what happened.

• 6:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. And I mean, to this, when we were talking about the death of Jonathan Crabtree, you know, the prosecution was saying in that case that Marie Crabtree had crushed up, uh, painkillers, put them in a smoothie that she prepared for Jonathan. So that's what had unfolded in that case. Now, again, she was found not guilty of those charges. With the charge that she had been facing against Erin, her, her other daughter, why were they dropped?

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  So the official lines from the DPP were that after the acquittal at trial last month of Jonathan's murder, they carried out a review of all the outstanding evidence in this second murder charge. They ultimately decided there were no longer any reasonable prospects of conviction uh, if they were to take this second murder charge to trial.

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  Right. What does that actually mean, though?

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  Well, we don't know the exact evidence that was going to be presented at this second murder trial, but based on what was brought up at an earlier committal hearing, we do know that a lot of the witnesses were the same in terms of friends and family members who would be acting as scene setters and talking about, um, what Marie may have said to her daughter before and after her death, or how she may have acted around her. There was one thing that did set the two cases apart. Uh, for Jonathan's murder, we spoke about the fact that there was this claimed eyewitness, Marie's daughter Tara Crabtree. We've already gone through just how that evidence was pulled apart during the first trial. And in the end, that wasn't enough to convince a jury that she was guilty.

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  So when it came to Erin's case, there was no alleged eyewitness. So prosecutors would have just been solely relying on circumstantial evidence, which can be tricky, not impossible, um, by any means. But in a setting where they've already failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt uh, that a murder occurred in, with one child, with Jonathan. They've determined it was probably going to be the same outcome if they took the second murder charge to trial.

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  Right, okay, so they're probably, they're probably looking at this and going, actually, we've probably got a harder case to run in the, you know, in the case of Erin and the charges that they brought against Marie there. So they've just gone, look, if we don't have, you know, what we considered a kind of star witness in this instance, someone who can talk through what happened, they've just, well, the prosecution, the EPP is thinking, oh, we're probably not going to win this?

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  Effectively. I mean, you have to remember, there's so many different things that a jury has to take on board when it comes to a trial. We just talked about having to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. And in the case with Jonathan, it was put to the jury that, you know, he was a depressed suicidal addict of pain medication. So there was still a likelihood that he may have killed himself intentionally or accidentally. And in the case with his sister Erin, there were some similarities there where she was also someone who had spoken about self-harm before and was also someone who was taking prescription

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  pain medications for illnesses that she had. So it was very likely that Marie would take the same, if not similar, defences to another trial.

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  Talisa, this seems so relevant to the story we have just told of Jonathan's death. You know, if you're thinking about this and you, you know, we're telling the story of one child dying and the woman that we're talking about has also been charged with the murder of a second child. I mean, why wasn't this something we could talk about when we were telling the story of Marie Crabtree being accused of Jonathan's death?

• 10:05Speaker 06

  So what it comes down to is legal fairness. Marie was committed to trial on Erin's murder at the same time she was committed to trial for Jonathan's murder. And at one point, those two trials were severed, so we had to treat the two charges separately. We've already spoken about the fact that Marie has vigorously denied these allegations since the moment she was arrested. During her son's murder trial, we obviously couldn't report that she was also facing another set of charges that were almost identical, because that jury could have taken that to mean she must be guilty. It would have completely prejudiced those proceedings. And it should be no surprise, she was intending to plead not guilty to Erin's murder as well. So this was one of those things that...

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  Could have also tainted a jury.

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  Talissa, look, it's a fascinating story. It's a kind of incredible development as well in the case of Marie Crabtree. You know, hearing that, you know, she had been charged with the murder of another one of her children. Charges that have now been dropped as well. And of course, Marie Crabtree was found not guilty of the murder of Jonathan, her son, as well. And the case we've covered recently, if you want to go and check that out, you can jump back into the Case of feed and listen to the case of Marie Crabtree for the full story with Talissa. Talissa, thank you so much for joining us for this and for calling me in the evening to make sure that we don't miss stories like this.

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  No worries. Thanks, Stocky.

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  We'll be back in your feed tomorrow. We've got a series on the court proceedings of the women who've returned from Syria recently. You may have heard them described as the ISIS brides. And we're going to be looking into what's happened, what they've been charged with and where their proceedings are up to.

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  The Case of Marie Crabtree is produced by ABC Audio Studios and ABC News. This episode was reported by Talissa Siganto and presented by me, Stephen Stockwell. Our supervising producer is Greg Muller and our executive producer is Claire Rollinson. This episode was produced on the land of the Turrbal, Yagura and Morundri people.