David Benbow’s ex-partner’s 111 call: ‘I am thinking he’s hurt Mike’

Months before Michael McGrath vanished, his alleged killer’s ex-partner called police the day she left him to “cover her bases”, a jury has heard.

The Crown alleges David Charles Benbow, 54, invited his friend McGrath, 49, to his home on Candys Rd in Halswell, Christchurch, on May 22, 2017 to help him move railway sleepers, after he suspected McGrath began dating his ex-partner Joanna Green.

It’s alleged he then used his .22 semi-automatic rifle to kill McGrath. He is facing a charge of murder.

The weapon has never been found, nor has McGrath’s body.

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Green was unable to get hold of McGrath all day on that May 22, she told the Christchurch High Court on Friday.

She called him at least 22 times, saying: “I just kept trying and trying.”

Green tried again the next day at 7.42am and many more times, with no luck.

She then went past his Checketts Ave home on the way home from work, stopping past Benbow’s home on the way “just to see what he was doing”.

No one answered at McGrath’s home. The radio was still on inside but the doors were locked.

She said she became “very concerned” but knew he was due at his mum’s house for dinner, and decided to see if he showed up there.

When she rang his mother Adrienne McGrath’s home that night and he wasn’t there, the alarm bells started ringing, she said.

She immediately called Benbow, asked him when the last time he saw McGrath was, and what he’d done with him. Benbow said McGrath was supposed to come around the previous morning to help move the railway sleepers but didn’t show up.

Green and McGrath’s brother Simon then went to Michael’s home and broke in to look for him.

Green called 111 – a call that was played to the jury.

She told the call handler McGrath had been missing for a day and half, and that her ex-partner David Benbow was supposed to have been the last person to see him.

“I am thinking he has hurt Mike”, she said when prompted.

Panicked, Green could be heard telling the call handler that Benbow had a gun on his property.

“All of these things are very red-flaggish.”

Green previously called police when she moved out almost three months earlier on March 3, because the relationship with Benbow had become “toxic” and she wasn’t sure how he would react.

Green informed police she was moving out with their two daughters, and a report was filed. She’d told Benbow she wanted to split up with him in February, but moved out without telling him at the start of March.

McGrath helped her move out and immediately afterwards, she said she proposed intimacy with him for the first time, asking him if he’d show her “how to kiss and how to be touched”.

She denied any overlaps in the relationships.

“I always adored (McGrath) and respected him, and now I had the chance to have the icing on the cake.”

McGrath told Green that he’d fancied her for years and that “we could be soulmates”.

“I’d do anything for you, bar rob a bank,” McGrath told Green, she said.

Green initially moved into her parents’ home and then to a rental property after a couple of weeks.

McGrath would visit her at the rental, sometimes to have dinner, and other times later to be intimate.

He would ride his bike and kept it in the kitchen so they “wouldn’t get busted,” she said.

“We didn’t want to hurt Dave.”

On one occasion, Green’s 7-year-old daughter saw her and McGrath kissing, and told her father.

Benbow phoned and visited Joanna’s sister Toni Green to speak about their kiss.

“Toni lied, she didn’t want to hurt Dave either,” she told the court.

It was at this point that Benbow became “much nicer” to Green then he had been previously, she said.

Having control over their finances, he transferred $10,000 into her bank account out of the blue.

Before this, “our family came second to money”, she said.

He wrote her a letter penned “Dear Jo”, where he detailed how he’d been struggling without her, had lost 16kg and had started seeing a counsellor and taking medication that made him feel weird.

“What I guess I’m trying to say is I still love you,” the letter concluded.

Green said she phoned police again after the letter because she was worried about Benbow and knew he had a firearm. “It just wasn’t him,” she said.

Benbow and Green were together for 17 years, and he was devastated when she left him.

He called in sick to work, lost weight rapidly and told friends he’d “lost everything”. He went to a counsellor and told her he felt “shafted” and wanted to “annihilate” McGrath for what he’d done.

But the defence said Benbow saying he wanted to “annihilate” his childhood friend for dating his ex-partner was taken out of context, and was tunnel vision on the Crown’s part.

The Crown also alleges that a part of Benbow covering his tracks included him buying grass seed the day of McGrath’s disappearance.

The Crown’s case is largely circumstantial due to the absence of forensic evidence, including McGrath’s body and a murder weapon.

The trial is expected to call 130 witnesses and is set down for seven weeks.