00:00Today, in Lachlan Young's Supreme Court trial for the murder of Hannah Maguire, his defence team for the first time offered an alternate version of events on the night that Hannah was killed.
00:09Now, the prosecution has claimed that Lachlan intentionally killed Hannah on April 5, 2024.
00:13However, today, his lawyer, Glenn Caseman, suggested that the couple had gotten into an argument and that Lachlan had, quote,
00:20forcefully thrown her to the ground while they were in the bathroom and she'd hit her head and died.
00:25A colleague of Lachlan's, Benjamin O'Keefe, took to the stand for the entire day today.
00:28He told the jury that on April 2, Lachlan had approached him and asked for his help in a plan to roofie and scare Hannah by placing her behind the wheel of a car while unconscious and rolling the car down a hill.
00:38O'Keefe told the jury that on the night Hannah died, he did help Lachlan dump her Mitsubishi Triton, but claimed he did not know that she was dead, nor that she was inside the car.
00:46Lachlan's defence team challenged this.
00:48They claimed that on the night Hannah died, Lachlan called O'Keefe and asked him to come over to the house.
00:53When he arrived, they suggested he encountered Lachlan in the bathroom with Hannah's body.
00:56However, O'Keefe maintains that he never went inside the house and that he merely accompanied Lachlan to the bushland in Scarsdale.
01:03Now, O'Keefe claims that he witnessed Lachlan set the Mitsubishi Triton on fire.
01:08However, the defence also challenged this and suggested that it was O'Keefe himself who set the car on fire.
01:13Then Casement, the barrister, said your story that you never got out of the vehicle at Scarsdale is a lie.
01:19He continued, you got the blowtorch out of your car and you suggested the car should be burnt.
01:24Your blowtorch is the one that lit the fire and it was you who lit the fire.
01:28Now, O'Keefe categorically denies this.
01:30He says that once they were in Scarsdale, he never got out of the car and he did not know that Hannah was inside.
01:35Earlier in the day, Mr Casement also accused O'Keefe of lying on the stand.
01:39In fact, he repeatedly pressed him on whether he was being truthful, whether he was, quote, taking this seriously and suggested that he was, quote, making things up as he went along in an attempt to distance himself.
