A two-minute video – once lost but brought back by the wonders of modern software – has offered a grim glimpse into the final days of Mangerton man Mark Dower.
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The one-time English language teacher is visibly frail, semi-conscious and bleeding, having lost control of his bodily functions, as the camera finds him in the bathroom of a Mangerton public housing complex the afternoon of March 22, 2015.
Twenty-five days later, police would discover the 56-year-old’s badly decomposed remains concealed inside a surfboard bag in the common laundry downstairs.
The Crown alleges it was Mark Kenneth Jenkin behind the camera phone, angrily berating Mr Dower for his messy state and directing another man to physically position him in front of the lense.
“Let’s take a look at this dirty c-nt,” Jenkin allegedly says in the recording, filmed inside his Crana Place unit and played for the NSW Supreme Court in Wollongong on Wednesday as part of his murder trial.
“You filthy little f-cking animal ...
“Turn him round, turn him round …
“You sh-t on my f-cking bathroom you dirty [unintelligible] – I’m gonna kill you.”
The Crown alleges Jenkin learned Mr Dower was the recipient of two pensions and repeatedly assaulted him and detained him, with the intention of extracting his money.
Jenkin was arrested for an unrelated matter on April 13, 2015 and was an inmate at MRRC at Silverwater when police investigating Mr Dower’s death seized his mobile phone.
Much of Wednesday’s court proceedings centred on legal argument on the admissibility of video contained on the device.
The court heard the footage, which was ultimately tendered as evidence, was a restored copy of a corrupt file found on Jenkins’ phone, alongside two undamaged videos from the same scene – each only a couple of seconds long, revealing little.
Senior Constable Yang, of NSW Police’s State Electronic Editors’ Branch, told the court told the court he used Untrunc software to resurrect a copy of the video.
An anonymous caller alerted police to the presence of Mr Dower’s body in the laundry late on April 16, 2015.
Crime Stoppers would not disclose to investigating police the caller’s identity, in line with the caller’s request for anonymity, the court heard.
Police used Mr Dower’s tattoos to initially identify his remains before his daughter flew to Australia from Finland to provide a buccal swab
The trial continues before Justice Hamill on Thursday.