Summing up in suitcase murder trial

LAWYERS for both the prosecution and the defence in the trial of four people associated with the murder and burning of the body of Thea Zaudy, have today been presenting statements of their cases.
Nicholas Dean, for the prosecution, told the jury that they might think that the evidence they had heard from Jolanta Kalinowsica and her son, Adrian Lis, had “bordered on the surreal.”
Kalinowsica, he maintained, conjured up a picture of her alleged victim “as a woman of mystery, who entertained sinister visitors with envelopes stuffed full of cash, who had been losing a lot of money at Bridge and who had met a mysterious death.”
Someone, he continued, who generated “industrial amounts of laundry, including curtains, towels and bedding because she literally foamed at the mouth with blood, bathed her wounds in Katinowsica’s urine and ate bananas in bed which stained her bed clothes!”
Against this, he said, other evidence from Mrs Zaudy’s friends suggested that she was infact a tidy, fastidious person who only played cards for pennies.

Mr Dean suggested that what he called “this illusion” created by Kalinowsica “was designed to mislead the police and to distract them away from her.”

He asked the jury to consider, what he called, a number of coincidences, i.e. that Kalinowsica said that she had never travelled out of London before, but that the first time she did, to a spot in Oxfordshire on July 12, 2007, it is close to where her employer was dead in a suitcase – a suitcase that just happened to be vertually identical to one she, Kalinowsica bought, four hours earlier.

Kalinowsica’s defence statement included the questions:
Why would a woman, described as ‘clever’ by the prosecution, and someone with knowledge of the criminal courts, leave Mrs Zaudy’s body overnight in the old lady’s flat, where it could have been discovered?
Why would she wait until after her and Sienkiewicz had done another cleaning job the next morning, for which there is evidence, before going back to Mrs Zaudy’s and cleaning up?

Defence statements on behalf of the other three defendants, Monilca Sienkiewicz, Adrian Lis and Lukasz Gajda, included the following:

That Adrian Lis, aware that a trip had been planned for Legoland, had no reason to doubt his mother’s (Kalinowsica) explanation for buying the case and that there is no evidence to prove that he ever looked in the case, taking for granted his mother’s explanation that it contained washing.

That Monilca Sienkiewicz, who had, as the evidence presented suggested, “a toxic” relationship with Kalinowsica, was unlikely to be trusted by Kalinowsica to be told the truth about what she had done, and to be asked to help her conceal the body in a suitcase.

That if Lukasz Gajda DID know what he was being asked to transport, why would he not pick the others and the suitcase up from Mrs Zaudy’s apartment at Kelvin Court, making it unnecessary to drag the body around the London tube system? Also, if he had known, presumably he would not have turned up at Ealing Broadway with his boot already full and a car low in fuel?

The judge will give his summing up tomorrow before the jury retires to consider its verdicts.

Photo: Ealing Broadway tube station where defendant, Lukasz Gajda, is alleged to have picked up three friends and a suitcase containing the dead body of Thea Zaudy and driven it to a field near Thame, where it was set fire to.