Jurors have retired to consider their verdicts in the Banbury ‘love triangle murder’ trial.
The 12-strong panel are trying the case of the case of five people accused of murdering Keith Green, 40, in Banbury on the eve of Valentine’s Day.
Mark Meadows, 25, and his brother Travis Gorton, 20, are said to have stabbed the former’s love rival Mr Green to death in the garden of his home at 42 Howard Road late on February 13.
Prosecutors claim Meadows carried out the stabbing in order to be with his older lover – and Mr Green’s partner – 38-year-old Louise Grieve.
Her son, Callum Johnson, 21, and a youth who cannot be identified for legal reasons, also face an allegation of murder.
All deny murder and, in the case of Meadows and Gorton, possession of the knives allegedly used to stab Mr Green to death.
This week, representatives for the five defendants have addressed the jury on their client’s cases.
He only wanted to talk to Keith
Andrew Selby KC, for Mark Meadows, told the jury that the only plan involving his client was to talk to the victim.
Messages to his co-defendants on the ‘very day’ that Mr Green died ‘all reveals there was no plan as the Crown suggest, to kill or cause really serious harm’, Mr Selby said.
“There’s so much more that was going on here. There was a plan to talk to Keith. Mark wanted him to leave; to leave Howard Road so Mark could be with Louise and her kids. One big family.
“He could never achieve that if he murdered Keith Green.
“His plan was to talk, that plan went very badly wrong.”
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The barrister reminded the jury of an incident in September when Keith Green had attacked his client after finding him in the Grieve family home.
While the prosecution alleged that Meadows had turned off CCTV recording equipment in the shed before lying in wait for Mr Green on the night of the killing, Mr Selby suggested the evidence – including a footprint on a bin lid near the CCTV kit – could equally be explained by Mr Green turning off the machine himself and lying in wait for Meadows and his brother Travis Gorton.
“By the time Mark and Travis got to the shed, there Keith is; cameras off, armed, ratchet [found by his body] in one hand and maybe the blue knife [belonging to Louise Grieve and subsequently recovered outside Meadows’ flat] in the other,” the barrister said.
“‘Hello boys.’
“Almost as if they’re not lying in wait for him - but he knows they’re coming. This time it’s different to September.”
The evidence was consistent with Meadows being attacked by Mr Green and being rescued by his brother Travis Gorton who carried out the stabbing in defence of his older sibling, he suggested.
Mr Selby said: “To get to murder, you have to be sure that there was an unlawful killing and you have to decide whether unlawful violence was used and to do so you have to be sure that one or other or both were not acting in self-defence or in defence of another and any force used was excessive.”
A number of witnesses had spoken of Meadows’ placid nature, he added.
‘What have you got yourself into, Marky?’
Representing Travis Gorton, Christopher Donnellan KC, suggested that the jury might agree with his client’s comment sent in a message to Meadows weeks before the fatal stabbing: “FFS [for f*** sake], Marky. What have you got yourself into?”
“There is his brother, about four years older than him, mixed up in this complete mess of a relationship with a much older woman and her family, her partner. What a mess,” he said.
Gorton did not give evidence from the witness box during the trial.
However, in his interviews with detectives following the alleged murder he claimed to have been asleep in his brother’s van at the time and played no part in the stabbing.
Closing his client’s case to the jury, Mr Donnellan did not go behind that explanation – but tested planks of the Crown’s case.
Although Mr Green’s blood was found on his client’s clothing, the barrister reminded the jury it was from ‘contact’ with a source of the victim’s blood – rather than from an ‘airborne’ source, as with clothing linked to Meadows.
“You don’t know where he had that contact, you don’t know when he had that contact, except that it was after Keith Green had been bleeding and before that blood dried,” he said.
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He took the jury through the evidence from Kieron White, who following the attack claimed to have seen a knife hanging from Meadows’ waistband and Gorton behind him in the hallway of the Howard Road house. “There is no mention of a knife in Travis Gorton’s possession.”
The barrister rubbished the testimony of Meadows’ former flatmate Ryan Cope, who claimed to have been told by Gorton after the stabbing they had washed themselves in ‘bleach’.
Mr Donnellan said: “The police arrived very shortly afterwards, did anybody say ‘we could smell the house was full of bleach’? No. Did they say Travis Gorton smelt of bleach? No.”
He suggested that Mr Cope’s version of events had come from his imagination. “He wants to be important. He wants to be detective,” the barrister added.
Although it was not his client’s case that he had stabbed Mr Green in defence of his brother, Mr Donnellan told the jury that ‘if’ he had been in the garden and seen his brother being attacked he was ‘entitled to defend him’.
“If you think he may have been there, if you think he may have had to defend or protect his brother, then he is entitled to a defence of self-defence,” he said.
‘They’ve made her into a scarlet woman’
Adrian Amer, whose client was the only defendant to give evidence from the witness stand during the trial, said: “Who are we to judge Louise Grieve’s personal life? Let’s make no bones about it, she’s been made out to be a scarlet woman.”
Warning the jury to ‘beware stereotypes’, he added: “This is not a court of morals. This is a court of law. You might not like the fact she had two lovers. You might not like the fact she had a young lover. You might not like the fact she was a confused lover.”
Mr Amer noted that his client might not be the jury’s ‘cup of tea’, but asked them to remember her ‘love’ for Keith Green – the man she ‘ultimately wanted to be with’.
He urged the panel to ‘reject conjecture’, to test points made against Grieve with ‘good, solid, raw evidence’, to ‘beware’ statements attributed to her that she disputed, and be aware of witnesses or co-defendants pressing their own cases at the expense of his client.
The barrister reminded the jury that Grieve had spent the two nights before the attack together with Keith Green in the shed.
“She sent him loving messages and he sent her loving messages in return. She in fact tried to keep Keith and Mark apart. She wasn’t encouraging a get together,” he said.
Grieve had performed chest compressions on her fatally stabbed partner, Mr Amer said. “If you wanted somebody dead, if you wanted somebody harmed, you wouldn’t do CPR on them.”
Evidence could be ‘twisted’, he added. The suggestion at the outset of the Crown’s case was that Leeds store Fantasia, from which the knives were bought by Meadows last summer, was a knife shop. In fact, it sold a wider array of ‘fantasy’ products, Grieve’s lawyers showed.
Holding up a collection of glossy photographs of the shop, Mr Amer told the jury it was an ‘example of how evidence can be manipulated and twisted and misdescribed’.
‘Jaundiced eye’
Judy Khan KC, for Callum Johnson, suggested that the evidence in the case actively pointed away from her client being involved in a plan to kill Mr Green.
She cited texts sent between Johnson and Mr Green after the incident in September when the latter attacked Meadows after finding him in the Grieve family home.
Johnson, then just 19 and the eldest of 10 siblings, told his step-father he’d ‘scared the kids’ and ‘should apologise to the kids for scaring them’.
He added: “Always here if you need a chat because you always been there for me.”
The messages between them revealed two important points, Ms Khan said. First, her client’s respect for the man whom he saw as his dad. Second, his ‘love and concern for his younger siblings’.
Given those two points, why would Johnson have got involved in a plot to kill his step-father, depriving his younger siblings of their own dad, she asked.
“The simple answer is he obviously wouldn’t, would he?”
She reminded the jury of her client’s witness statement, made some four days after the fatal stabbing and when Johnson was ‘still in shock’, in which he agreed with Mr Green’s assessment that Meadows was a ‘t**t’.
Turning to the events of February 13, she accused the Crown of working backwards from the stabbing in order to fit their ‘case theory’ – looking at communication between Johnson and Meadows though a ‘jaundiced eye’.
Johnson was said to have two roles: to get his Uncle Tony, who had no love for Meadows, from the house and to act as Meadows’ ‘eyes and ears’.
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A call barely a minute long from Meadows was said to have been when Johnson was recruited into the plan. But Ms Khan rejected that suggestion and, instead, was a question about whether his mother was going to the bingo that night.
If Johnson was to get his uncle out of the house before the attack on Mr Green, why had he left his friend Kieron White behind in the home, Ms Khan pondered.
And if he was meant to be the ‘eyes and ears’, why were there repeated missed calls from Meadows on the night of the attack?
She told the jury it was ‘plain as a pikestaff’ that her client would have had no ‘desire, interest or intention’ to be involved in a plan resulting in Mr Green coming to harm.
Ms Khan poured doubt on some of the comments attributed to her client in the weeks following Mr Green’s death.
They included an alleged comment to his then girlfriend that he had ‘blood on his hands’. His barrister told the jury that the girlfriend’s recollections were made in a statement five months after comments were allegedly made.
They were said on the night Johnson’s friend Kieron White was himself stabbed; when Johnson went to his aid he was literally left with blood on his hands.
‘A chapter missing’
Peter Doyle KC, for the youth who cannot be identified as they are under-18, urged the jury to ask searching questions of the evidence.
Pointing to the Crown’s sequence of events, he said: “This document should not be regarded as the story. It’s a story; initially presented to you with a significant chapter missing.”
That missing chapter had eventually been provided by the defence and, he claimed, showed that his client had very different plans for the weekend of the alleged murder.
The trial continues.
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This story was written by Tom Seaward. He joined the team in 2021 as Oxfordshire's court and crime reporter.
To get in touch with him email: Tom.Seaward@newsquest.co.uk
Follow him on Twitter: @t_seaward
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