A woman accused of murder sent her ex-boyfriend a phone message telling him: “You either meet me up the hill or not at all” the night before his mutilated and burned body was found near the town, a court heard yesterday.
Tamsin Glass, 20, Callum Davidson, 24, and a third co-accused from Kirriemuir, Steven Dickie, 24, are all on trial accused of the murder of 27-year-old oil worker Steven Donaldson from Arbroath between June 6 and June 7, 2018. They all deny the charge.
The High Court in Edinburgh was told iPhone messages between Glass and Mr Donaldson had ended shortly after 10.30pm on June 6.
At 9.29am the following day, around four-and-a-half hours after the discovery of Mr Donaldson’s body at Kinnordy Loch nature reserve, Glass sent another message saying: “Are u okay? Not heard from you and I’m getting worried now.”
Detective Constable Stewart Woodhouse told the court he carried out a digital forensic examination of phones belonging to all three accused, as well as another owned by Davidson’s girlfriend, Claire Ogston.
Jurors heard a “data dump” was completed on Glass’s iPhone 7 and a series of messages were recovered from early on the day of June 6.
In the initial stages of the exchange, Mr Donaldson had sent a message to Glass, who at the time was spending part of the week living in Glasgow, saying: “It’s be different if you were up here. Then we could have an actual relationship and everything else.”
The messages resumed just after 6.30pm and Mr Donaldson asked Glass: “You bringing my money.”
She replied: “I’m bringing everything, that ok?”
“So it must be over then, yeah”, responded Mr Donaldson.
Glass responded: “Not saying that but if we argue u can have all your stuff back.”
At around 10.22pm Glass sent a message saying: “Up the hill then”.
She said she did not want Mr Donaldson to go to her house because her parents would be in bed.
At 10.37pm, following further exchanges, she sent him a message saying: “You either meet me up the hill or not at all.”
DC Woodhouse said data from Davidson’s iPhone 6 had revealed a series of phone calls from 7am on the morning of June 7 from Steven Dickie and Claire Ogston.
Some were missed, but one was a six-minute call to his girlfriend’s number.
He said a search of Davidson’s web history from 10pm on May 29 had revealed the term “whepons”.
Results associated with it included a link to the Wish.com website with the details Cold steel Latin D Guard machete 24.
He told Crown prosecutor, advocate depute Ashely Edwards: “The search term would bring up a list of results.
“It would indicate that particular page has been visited.”
A police witness was cross-examined about the interview he and a colleague conducted with Dickie.
Sergeant Nicolas Searle agreed with a suggestion by defence advocate Jonathan Crowe, counsel for Davidson, that in the initial stages of the interview, Dickie was being “flippant and somewhat disrespectful” towards the officers.
“He wasn’t taking things seriously,” Mr Searle told the court.
The officer agreed that in his interview, Dickie said he saw Davidson lunge through the window of a white car parked at Kirrie Hill, but he did not see Davidson hit Mr Donaldson, and did not know where the BMW had gone from the car park.
The trial continues.