Jamie Lee Warn (55) is accused of killing Zsuzsanna Besenyei – a Hungarian woman who had been living in Jersey for seven years – in May last year. He denies murder and two counts of perverting the course of justice.
Yesterday, the six women and six men of the Royal Court jury were taken on site visits to key locations in the case.
The jurors walked down the small stone slip to Le Pulec Bay in St Ouen – colloquially known as Stinky Bay – where it is alleged that Mr Warn dumped the 37-year-old’s body. They were also taken to Mr Warn’s flat at Pomme d’Or Farm Estate and to the car park where Miss Besenyei’s blue Ford Fiesta was kept until the defendant allegedly drove it onto the beach at St Aubin in the hopes of making her death look like a suicide.
Opening the case for the prosecution, Crown Advocate Simon Thomas said Miss Besenyei had known Mr Warn for a number of years, as they had both worked together at Les Charrières Hotel in St Peter.
While Mr Warn had a long-time girlfriend and Miss Besenyei had an on-again, off-again relationship with another man of many years, the defendant was secretly seeing Miss Besenyei, Crown Advocate Thomas contended.
And he pointed to numerous suggestive text messages between the two in addition to a nude photo that Miss Besenyei sent the defendant.
Crown Advocate Thomas said that on the day of the alleged murder, Miss Besenyei was last seen leaving her shared accommodation at Maufant by her landlord on 10 May.
The prosecution’s case is that she drove to Mr Warn’s house to collect money from him and that he had texted that she should park around the back of the property.
Miss Besenyei had also been receiving messages from her estranged ex-boyfriend that day and at 7.30pm she replied to him for the last time, asking him to leave her alone.
The prosecution say that she was killed sometime between then and when the defendant was seen buying hand sanitiser in the Checkers Express at First Tower at 8.20pm.
The prosecution allege Mr Warn then engaged in an ‘elaborate’ cover-up in the hopes of ‘literally getting away with murder’.
Crown Advocate Thomas admitted much of the evidence was circumstantial.
‘There is the question of precisely where Miss Besenyei was killed,’ he told the jury. ‘The prosecution is not in a position to place before you conclusive evidence as to location.’
He suggested it was ‘likely’ she was killed in her car.
‘What makes it abundantly clear that the defendant did kill her is the way in which he acted in the hours and days that followed,’ he added.
The jurors were shown CCTV images from 11 May of the accused leaving Miss Besenyei’s car in First Tower car park and buying parking cards, although he had no car of his own.
He then went to work as normal, but later made a stop at his bank and phone records showed that at the time he was walking there he was searching for tide times and the weather forecast.
Later that evening he went out to the Earl Grey pub with his girlfriend, the court heard.
That same day, no one saw Miss Besenyei, who first missed a hair appointment and then a booking to get her eyebrows done.
‘There was a very obvious reason why she did not turn up for either of those appointments: she was dead,’ Crown Advocate Thomas said.
The court also saw footage of Mr Warn typing on a phone the following day, Saturday 12 May, as he walked through town.
The prosecution claims this was to compose a message to himself from Miss Besenyei’s phone asking whether he was at home.
Crown Advocate Thomas said this was supported by mobile phone tower activity logs.
While Miss Besenyei’s phone was never found, some of her messages were able to be recovered by the service provider, the court heard.
Over the course of that day, the Crown says he continued to send messages from her phone ‘to give the impression this was ongoing communication with someone who was still alive’.
Over the following days, Mr Warn continued sporadic communication from Miss Besenyei’s phone, Crown Advocate Thomas said, to give the impression she was still alive.
In the early hours of 14 May, it is alleged that he moved her car with her body to Stinky Bay and then left the car on the beach at St Aubin.
Police began a missing-person search for Miss Besenyei after he car was found on the beach and two days later her body was found ‘lying on top of a body of seaweed’ at Stinky Bay.
It had not been carried away by the tide.
However, the level of decomposition of the body made it impossible for a forensic pathologist to determine the cause of death and no evidence could be recovered from the car as a result of the water damage sustained on the beach, the court heard.
‘The defendant may not have achieved what he set out to do, namely to dispose of Miss Besenyei’s body so that it would never be found,’ Crown Advocate Thomas said. ‘What he managed to achieve, however, was to ensure that her body was in such a state when it was recovered that it was not possible to say conclusively what the cause of death was. This is the final and most important aspect of his cover-up.’
The trial continues.
