Jurors deliver not proven verdict in Annalise Johnstone trial

A verdict of “not proven” has been delivered by jurors in the Annalise Johnstone murder trial.

The 22-year-old’s brother was accused of killing her by repeatedly slashing her throat with a Stanley knife.

A jury at the High Court in Livingston found a murder charge against Jordan Johnstone, 25, not proven.

He had denied cutting his sibling’s throat at the Maggie Wall’s witch’s memorial near Dunning, Perthshire, on 10 May last year.

The unemployed builder – who like Annalise is a member of Scotland’s Traveller community – had denied committing what the prosecution described as the “ghastly” crime.

Jurors heard that Annalise’s horrific injuries would have caused her death within minutes as a result of massive blood loss.

A pathologist said the deep gashes in her neck which severed the main arteries and blood vessels to the brain were “unsurvivable”.

During a week-long trial at the High Court in Livingston, the jury was shown CCTV footage from a private house showing car headlights and what appeared to be light from a torch or a mobile phone at the memorial between midnight and 2am on the morning Annalise disappeared.

Johnstone admitted in evidence he had been driving Newlands car when he stopped at the monument to let Annalise out to take photographs in the dark.

He also admitted carrying his dead sister in his arms “like a child” for two miles before dumping it behind a stone wall on the B8062 road.

However, he blamed his ex-girlfriend and former co-accused Angela Newlands, 28, for the murder, claiming she had threatened to have him charged with raping her and sexually abusing her daughter if he did not cover up her alleged crime.

He also said he had placed his sister’s body where it could be seen by passing motorists because he feared Newlands’ relatives would have cut her up and disposed of the body parts so she could never be found.

Newlands, who had denied murder and attempting to defeat the ends of justice, was acquitted of murder after judge Lady Scott ruled there was insufficient evidence to convict her. The Crown then withdrew all other charges against her.

Following the jury’s verdicts on Tuesday Johnstone was released from custody after advocate depute Alex Prentice said he was not moving for sentence because the accused had already spent the equivalent of a two year sentence on remand.

The jury heard conflicting accounts of Annalise’s last hours, with Johnstone and Newlands each blaming each other.

Giving evidence in his own defence Johnstone, an unemployed builder, confessed that he had changed his appearance, burned blood-stained clothes and buried the weapon which could have linked him to the death.

He admitted he and Newlands had cleaned bloodstains off her Ford Galaxy, which was caught on CCTV in the area of the memorial on the night of the killing.

The jury also heard a recording of him falsely reporting Annalise as a missing person to police in the early hours of 10 May last year, less than 12 hours before hill-walkers found her remains.

The grim discovery was made by a middle-aged married couple who thought at first her body was a mannequin, because its hands were colourless.

Elaine, 55, and Stephen, 59, Bailey, from Nairn, said they believed that Annalise might have been the victim of a road accident until they saw the heavy bloodstains around her neck.

Johnstone pretended to police, friends and relatives that he had dropped his sister off at their uncle’s in Auchterarder on the night she died.

However, his uncle Walter Johnstone, 48, gave evidence that he and his partner had moved out of their flat in Ruthven Park to a new address in Broxburn before the night of the murder.

And, when asked if Annalise had ever visited him in Auchterarder, he told the jury: “No, never.”

Newlands, 28, who had lodged a special defence of alibi, told detectives Johnstone had left her and her four children in Inchture, Perthshire, before he drove to Auchterarder with Annalise on the night she died.

She also said in police interviews that Johnstone had told her the same false story that he had dropped Annalise off at her uncle’s flat.

When asked where Annalise might be she told cops: “She won’t be at the caravan park because certain people don’t like her going there because she’s gay.”

Johnstone, however, claimed in evidence, that Newlands and his sister had both travelled with him to the site of the monument and the two women had got out of the car together, leaving him to look after Newlands’ four sleeping children.

A few minutes later, he said, Newlands got back into the car alone, burst two sachets of washing detergent and began to wash her hands with the liquid.

He said he went to look for Annalise in the dark and found her lying face down on the steps of the monument.

He told the jury: “I thought at first she’d been knocked out so I’ve turned her round. I felt what I thought was water on my hand but a couple of seconds later I realised it was blood.

“It was bad. She was severely struggling to breathe, extremely gasping for air. By that time I’ve got my T-shirt off and I’ve put pressure on it. I didn’t know the wound was on her neck.”

He said he had run back to the car and said to Newlands: “What the f**k did you do that for? Phone an ambulance!”

He continued: “I went back to my sister thinking she (Newlands) is phoning an ambulance.

“I don’t think she was even breathing at that point. My sister died in my arms.”

After he dumped the body, he said, he and Newlands returned to her parents’ home in Inchture where they both stripped naked outside the front door and put their bloodstained clothes into a bin bag.

They then washed with bleach before showering and he later burned the clothes and, he said, buried the murder weapon on Newlands’ orders.

He claimed that if Newlands had carried out her threat to accuse him of rape he would have been ‘disowned’ by the Traveller community even if no charges were brought and his friends and family would no longer have talked to him.

If he had been accused of sexually abusing one of her children he said: “Somebody would have taken my life – especially her father”. He insisted: “I didn’t do harm to my sister. I didn't kill her.”

However, the jury also heard that during a prison visit Johnstone had earlier told his father Gordon Johnstone a different version of events.

Mr Johnstone, 44, said his son had claimed he had left the two women alone at the memorial and walked back to a house in Auchterarder where he and Newlands had been living.

When Newlands later arrived home alone in her car she started washing blood off her hands, he said, and the accused told him he had sprinted back to the monument and found his sister bleeding from a neck wound and cradled her in his arms as he vainly tried to stem the flow of blood.

Under cross-examination by Mark Stewart, defending Newlands, the accused Johnstone admitted that it would have taken him 12-15 minutes to run back from the house to the witch’s memorial at Dunning.

Mr Stewart told the jury: “It is an agreed piece of evidence that Miss Johnstone expired from her injury in a few minutes. We can see how that makes his story impossible."