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Some were white, some were porky. There were little ones and there were big ones. Many had a sinister reek to them.
Whatever was made of the multitude of lies told in the trial of slain Wollongong solicitor Katie Foreman, they all amounted to one, inevitable conclusion: murder.
Bradley Max Rawlinson and Michelle Sharon Proud sat atop the web of deceit that formed their two-month murder trial.
They fibbed and schemed and lied, hoping to diminish their involvement in Ms Foreman’s death by muddying the waters with false stories.
But their efforts were ultimately in vain, as they failed to convince the jury of their innocence, and were instead called murderers.
The two – Rawlinson in particular – were ultimately brought down by their prolific use of technology, with text messages largely responsible for exposing their otherwise plausible stories.
Rawlinson spent months before Ms Foreman’s death painting himself as her devoted lover, willing to embrace their tumultuous relationship and seemingly oblivious to her at times intense distain for him.
After her death, he was the picture of grief, pouring his heart out to her friends and family about his lost love, saying his life would never be the same.
But in the records of his mobile phone lay the truth – that he was in love with another woman, sick of his girlfriend treating him poorly, and wanted her ‘‘ended’’.
His lawyers tried to dismiss the text messages as something other than what they blatantly appeared to be.
‘‘Gone’’ didn’t necessarily mean ‘‘dead’’, they said.
‘‘She was thinking of relocating her business,’’ they said.
But jurors ultimately believed Rawlinson did want Ms Foreman gone – by that, he meant dead – and he had willingly paid for it.
Proud’s own boasting became her ultimate undoing, with a bug planted in her home capturing her speaking to a friend about her involvement.
She tried to claim they weren’t her words and she was simply recounting what had been said to her in an earlier conversation, but no amount of lies could balance the sheer weight of that uninhibited confession, leading jurors to cast aside her claims.
The pair remained stony-faced as the jury delivered its verdict, much as they had been for the course of the trial.
For the Foreman family, who endured weeks of harrowing evidence, there was finally some closure.