The Crown's motive for why an Archibald Prize finalist and her two sons wanted to murder the family matriarch is tenuous, vague and weak, a defence barrister has told a jury.
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While prosecutors contend Melissa Beowulf, 61, wanted control of Katherine Panin's considerable wealth when she and her sons Thorsten, 33, and Bjorn, 31, agreed to murder the woman believing she was about to change her will, defence barrister Ken Archer told the jury it was not an all or nothing situation.
The three accused have pleaded not guilty to murder.
Katherine Panin, 82, had some $2.7 million in assets and even if she had purported to change her will as the Crown alleged, the change was only to include an extra two members of the family as opposed to just Mrs Beowulf and her four boys, Mr Archer said.
![Katherine Panin (pictured) was allegedly murdered by her daughter in law Melissa Beowulf and two grandsons Thorsten and Bjorn Beowulf. Katherine Panin (pictured) was allegedly murdered by her daughter in law Melissa Beowulf and two grandsons Thorsten and Bjorn Beowulf.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/fdcx/doc7487vyvj4no91zmks9.jpg/r0_0_2448_3264_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Mr Archer asked the jury whether it was realistic that the three accused would have killed the woman for what was a trivial amount of money in the circumstances, a split of the $2.7 million between seven people as opposed to five.
He warned the jury if they were looking for motive to fill the gap in the cause of death of Mrs Panin that in this case it was tenuous, weak, vague and ultimately very nuanced.
Mr Archer questioned how likely other parts of the Crown case were.
He said the allegation was that the three accused murdered Mrs Panin on October 12, 2015, and then went for coffee and croissants, during which time they sent an email to their lawyer as a type of insurance policy to suggest Mrs Panin was still alive. Mr Archer said that was a serious allegation and a fanciful one.
"Do you really think they have the sophistication to do this?" he asked the jurors, "Do you really think that's likely?"
He pointed out that the three accused had not made any mention of the letter in the months that police listened in on their conversations.
Mr Archer turned to the phone tap and bugging evidence and said the Crown had cherry-picked the conversations. He conceded that if the jury zoomed in on one line in the transcripts of the conversations they might think it suspicious. But with a broader view of the conversations there was nothing consistent with their guilt, he said.
Instead, they continued to protest their innocence, Mr Archer said.
"They continually say this is insane, this is crazy."
Mr Archer said if the three accused were in cahoots on the murder as alleged by the Crown they had no reason to protest their innocence when speaking to each other, because they were in on it together.
He gave the example of the rug, which the Crown contends Mrs Panin bled on during an altercation with the accused and so held incriminating evidence of murder.
The rug was also at the centre of an acrimonious civil litigation between the Beowulf family and Mrs Beowulf's late husband's defacto partner Dianne McGowan, who had been demanding the rug's return.
The court has heard Thorsten Beowulf had been sick on the rug on the day Mrs Panin died.
In the recorded conversations, the family refer to the rug more than once but Mr Archer argued there was never any acknowledgement of anything on the rug except for vomit.
On the day she died on October 12, 2015, Mrs Panin was due to move into a retirement unit in Deakin, paid for with money from the sale of the Woollahra home.
She had moved from the Woollahra home in Sydney so the family could sell it and had been living at Red Hill, though the living situation had caused some tension within the family.
It was Mrs Beowulf who called emergency services, telling the operator she and her sons had come home to find Mrs Panin at the foot of the Red Hill home's back stairs and "completely dead".
Prosecutor Margaret Jones said the Crown would rely on the alleged motive to kill as well as Mrs Beowulf's tendency to become enraged at Mrs Panin's moves to restrict the artist's power of attorney over her affairs, as well as alleged lies about when the three accused had left home the day she died.
The trial continues.