After a jury's manslaughter verdict yesterday, LORETTA JOHNSTON reports on the night Zhang "Tina" Yu was killed.
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UNIVERSITY of Tasmania student Zhang "Tina" Yu entered Sandy Bay pizza shop La Bella just before 2.30am on June 25.
She had been at a nightclub with friends and was wearing a black, sleeveless dress.
Within hours she was dead and her body was dumped in the Tyenna River in the Mount Field National Park, about 60 kilometres west of Hobart.
Daniel Joseph Williams was yesterday found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter after a seven-day trial.
The court heard that at La Bella Ms Yu was introduced to Williams and Stavros Papadopoulos by a mutual friend and accepted an invitation to join the two for a drink at Papadopoulos's New Town flat.
"Apart from Williams and Papadopoulos, no one saw Zhang Yu alive again," Director of Public Prosecutions Tim Ellis said in his opening address.
Last week the jury watched video of police interviews with Williams.
Williams told the detectives Ms Yu was sitting on the couch, patting Papadopoulos's dog.
He said she was unhappy with a drink Papadopoulos gave her and was preparing to leave, asking for the phone number of the friend who had introduced her to the two men.
Then Papadopoulos came through a sliding door behind her and brought down a concrete block over her head.
"He put all his force into it and as he's connected he's let go of it," Williams told police.
"I'm surprised that it didn't knock her out and I'm surprised that the Besser block didn't break."
He said Ms Yu, bleeding, stood up and Papadopoulos then punched her and dragged her up the hallway.
He said Papadopoulos also slammed her against a wall and placed his hand between her legs.
He said Ms Yu then agreed to have sex with Papadopoulos, but refused to take a shower first.
"She walked out of the bathroom trying to touch me. I said `don't come near me'," Williams told police.
"In the end she told Stav to just kill her. That's when he wrapped something around her neck the first time."
Williams also told police Papadopoulos handed him what looked like a Playstation cord, which Williams said he then wrapped around Ms Yu's neck and pulled until it broke. He told police Papadopoulos then drowned Ms Yu in the bath.
Williams said that during the attack, which he told police lasted for at least an hour, if not two, he smoked five or six bongs of cannabis in a row.
"I was walking backwards and forwards, I was going back to the bong," he said.
"It stopped me thinking about stuff so it sort of relaxed me."
He also told police he touched Ms Yu indecently after she had drowned to show Papadopoulos that he was comfortable with the situation.
"I thought if I wasn't in it with him, I was next," he said.
After Ms Yu was drowned, the court heard Papadopoulos and Williams cleaned her blood from the flat, wrapped her body in a sheet tied with a piece of clothesline wire and a rug from the kitchen floor.
Williams told police he backed his green Commodore up to the stairs of Papadopoulos's flat and the two loaded the body into the boot and drove to the Mount Field National Park, where they dumped her body in the Tyenna River.
He told police of a panicked journey to find a place to dump the body.
"He (Papadopoulos) was questioning me on the way like he didn't have a plan where to go," he said.
When asked what the conversation was on the return journey, Williams replied: "Glad it's over and done with, can't wait to get home and go to sleep and forget about it all."
He told police that before he and Papadopoulos met Ms Yu, Papadopoulos had said he wanted to "kill and rape a bitch" that night but that he had not taken the comment seriously. Papadopoulos had often spoken that way.
Williams said such comments were most likely influenced by psychopathic rap music the two men often listened to.
In summing up the case earlier this week, Justice David Porter told the jury it was the Crown's case that whether Williams was a willing or a reluctant participant in the events that led to Ms Yu's death, he was nevertheless a participant and was exercising a free choice to participate.
He told the jury that defence counsel Greg Richardson had asked the jurors to put themselves in Williams's position, faced with Papadopoulos "who you know is a violent, cruel man who seems to take some delight in violence towards women".
He also said the defence had argued Williams's actions on the night Ms Yu was murdered did not demonstrate that Williams had the requisite state of mind for murder.
Yesterday's verdict, which was delivered just before 5pm, marked the end of a seven-day trial that included 14 hours of deliberations by the jury.
Williams is due to be sentenced next month, as is Papadopoulos, who has already pleaded guilty to murdering Ms Yu.
