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High Court, Christchurch - Source: ONE News -
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Dean Cottle, who evaded a summons to appear as a David Bain defence witness by leaving New Zealand, had his statement read to the High Court at Christchurch.
Bain is on trial for murdering five members of his family in Dunedin in 1994.
Cottle said he met Laniet Bain about August 1993, that they got on well and became friends. She had told him that her father had been having sex with her for years, and it was still going on.
It was one of the reasons she had left home. She was also fed up with her mother hassling her, and that the family sat around and had turns talking to God.
She told him her older sister Arawa had been involved in some prostitution, but didn't think much of it. She said she had done some jobs herself. She was involved in cannabis use, he said.
On the Friday before the deaths he phoned her home and spoke to her mother.
She gave him a phone number for Laniet and when he rang he was surprised when he thought her father answered, as he didn't think she would be back with him.
Later that day he saw Laniet coming out of coffee shop.
He stopped and spoke to her and she told him she was going to make a new start of everything.
She was going to tell her family everything, she said. She was scared of her parents finding out what she was doing.
He said she told him she wanted to go back to Papua New Guinea, but said that something had happened to her there.
She started crying and told him about what her father had done to her, he said.
On June 26 1995, he added more detail to his statement.
Laniet was agitated on the Friday afternoon before her death, he said.
She said she was going to put a stop to everything, She was sick of everyone "getting up her".
She told him the incestuous relationship with her father had started in Papua New Guinea.
The video link to Britain used today was not very successful.
Crown prosecutor Keiran Raftery was cross-examining Carl Lloyd, a British independent fingerprint consultant, who gave evidence for the defence in Christchurch last week, and then had to fly home to Britain.
He was shown photographs on a screen in front of him, but could see no detail in them.
When shown a fingerprint photograph he said "it looked like something swimming about in a pond".
He said he met with David Stedman, who was the police photographer who took the fingerprint photographs.
He looked at the photographs and negatives he had taken, and checked with him about which light he had used.
He said with the white directional light used he would still expect to see dark ridges on them if they were made in blood.
They were white, which made them a latent, or positive print for sweat or other substances.
When defence counsel Michael Reed QC told Mr Lloyd that no human DNA was found under where the fingerprints were on the rifle, he said that meant there was no blood.
The case for the defence has finished and the jury was released until 2pm for legal argument.
Justice Graham Panckhurst said they should see an end to all evidence this afternoon and Thursday and Friday would be used for closing addresses.
He expected to do his summing up on Tuesday.
