The married couple on trial for murdering Amber Haigh initially gave police investigators differing versions of their alleged final car journey with the teenager.
Haigh was 19 when she vanished without trace from the New South Wales Riverina in June 2002, leaving behind her five-month-old son.
Two decades later, the father of Haigh’s child, 64-year-old Robert Geeves, and his wife, Anne Geeves, also 64, are on trial for her murder. Both have pleaded not guilty.
As their murder trial began its seventh week, the NSW supreme court heard recordings of police interviews with Anne and Robert Geeves in June and July 2002.
Detectives focused on the alleged last sighting of Amber Haigh alive, on 5 June 2002.
The Geeveses told police in the recordings that Haigh wanted to visit her terminally ill father in a Sydney hospital so they offered to drive her from Kingsvale in the Riverina to Campbelltown railway station on Sydney’s southern outskirts.
They said in the recordings that Haigh left her five-month-old son in their custody and they last saw her around 9pm walking towards Campbelltown train station from a neighbouring car park.
Robert Geeves did not report Haigh missing until 19 June, a fortnight later.
The trial heard last week the delay in reporting Haigh missing meant critical evidence – such as CCTV footage, which would have confirmed her final movements – was lost.
In an interview with police on 25 June, Robert Geeves said the party travelling to Sydney – himself, Anne Geeves, Haigh and her baby – stopped at Sutton Forest, off the Hume Highway, to get fuel.
“Got fuel at Sutton Forest I think it was. Continued into Sydney to Campbelltown.”
The court heard that his wife, giving a separate interview on the same day to police, said they stopped twice for petrol at both Yass and Pheasants Nest.
In a subsequent interview about three weeks later on 18 July 2002, Geeves told police they had stopped in Yass for fuel.
In their initial interviews on 25 June, less than a week after reporting Haigh missing, both Anne and Robert Geeves told police they also stopped “just outside Yass” to tend to Haigh’s baby.
The court heard that Anne Geeves said in the interview that they had stopped to change the baby’s nappy.
Robert Geeves said they stopped for “in excess of 15 minutes” to warm up the baby’s bottle using a vacuum flask of hot water.
The police interviews, played before the NSW supreme court on Monday, canvassed the nature of Robert and Anne Geeves’s relationship with Amber Haigh, who had moved in with them from her neighbouring aunt’s property, before beginning a sexual relationship with Robert Geeves.
Anne Geeves told police they helped Haigh leave an abusive domestic situation.
“She was having trouble where she was living, her cousin kept having sex with her and she got pregnant and they made her have an abortion.
“Her aunty used to take all her money off her, used to make her do all the housework. She was just sick of it. She asked if she could come and stay with us for a while,” Anne Geeves told police.
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The court heard that Anne Geeves was asked by police how she felt about her husband impregnating a teenager who had an intellectual disability.
“At first I didn’t like the idea: she didn’t know any better, but he did,” she told police.
Robert Geeves said his wife’s language was more direct when she spoke to him.
“She said ‘I’ll cut it off if you go and put your cock in anyone else ever again’.”
Robert Geeves said in a police interview that his sexual relationship continued with Haigh, despite the warning.
Robert Geeves told police he and his wife wanted another baby after giving birth to a son – who has testified for the prosecution in this murder trial – followed by a stillborn daughter and a series of miscarriages.
But the court heard that he and his wife had no plan to take Haigh’s baby from her. Police put to him that they had been told he had said to Haigh: “If you don’t look after the baby, we’ll take it off you.”
“I deny that one hands down,” Geeves told police. “It’s a flat-out lie.”
Haigh’s unresolved disappearance has been an enduring mystery in NSW’s Riverina, where she was last seen alive more than two decades ago. She left behind an infant son whom, the court has heard, she “adored” and “never let out of her sight”.
Haigh’s body has never been found, but a coroner has ruled she died from “homicide or misadventure”.
The prosecution has alleged in court that Haigh – who suffered an intellectual disability and was described in court as “very easily misled” – was used by Robert and Anne Geeves as a “surrogate mother” because they wanted another baby.
“The crown case theory is that it was always the intention of the Geeveses to assume the custody and care of [the child] from Amber, but they knew that to do that, Amber had to be removed from the equation … so, the crown asserts, they killed her,” crown prosecutor Paul Kerr said.
Lawyers for Robert and Anne Geeves have argued the case against the couple – now more than two decades old – was deeply flawed, arguing that “community distaste” at Robert Geeves’ relationship with “a much younger woman with intellectual disabilities” fuelled “gossip and innuendo”.
“Everything they did was viewed through a haze of mistrust and suspicion,” the court has heard.
The judge-alone trial, before justice Julia Lonergan, continues in Wagga Wagga.