Tabak ‘determined to kill’, prosecution claims

Nigel Lickley QC, in his closing speech at Bristol Crown Court, claimed that it was Tabak’s clear intention to kill Ms Yeates or at least to cause her very serious bodily harm.

Tabak, he said, “knew that she was in pain, that she was frightened and struggling to breathe, and yet he carried on until… her life was extinguished.” He told the jurors: “Tabak could at any point have released his grip and walked away. He chose not to”.

It has been the prosecution case that this was a sexually motivated attack. Mr Lickley asserted that the defendant “knows this whole incident is linked to sex”, asking why it was that on 11 January, after killing Joanna, he was looking up phrases on the internet related to the definition of sexual assualt.

The court also heard the 33-year-old Dutchman described as a “very clever, intelligent, highly educated” and “shrewd” man who was also “dishonest, deceitful, and a liar”.

Mr Lickley invited the jury to focus on Tabak’s conduct after killing Joanna Yeates, which demonstrated, the court heard, an “active attempt” to deceive the police through the witness statements which he prepared.

Read more: Tabak trial hears Jo Yeates had 43 injuries

Not a planned attack, defence argue.

As the prosecution described the moments in which Vincent Tabak strangled Joanna Yeates as a “long time to hold anyone forcefully, let alone around the neck”, the defence suggested that it was, instead, “a fraction of a minute… a very short fast moving incident”.

I’m not going to ask you to like Vincent Tabak – there’s frankly nothing to like. William Clegg QC, Tabak defence

William Clegg QC, for the defence, began his closing speech with the words: “I’m not going to ask you to like Vincent Tabak – there’s frankly nothing to like.”

“There was no excuse for his conduct,” he went to say. “But this was not a planned, premeditated killing,” he argued.

Mr Clegg claimed that the incident may have lasted just 10 seconds, posing the question: “Can anyone be sure that he intended to kill her?”

He disputed the claim that the killing had been planned by Vincent Tabak, given that he would not have known, among other things, Joanna’s whereabouts that evening or the fact that her boyfriend Greg Reardon was away that weekend.

Read more: Tabak 'so sorry' for killing Yeates

Timing disputed

Mr Clegg also told the jurors that the prosecution had got the timing of Joanna’s death wrong, claiming that it had happened later in the evening, and that screams heard earlier that night were a “red herring”, signalling not Joanna’s struggle with Vincent Tabak (as the prosecution allege) but students out celebrating the end of term.

It was also disputed that this had been a sexually motivated attack. “Where is the evidence?” asked Mr Clegg, “They’d hardly seen each other.” Dr Nat Carey, whom he described as “one of the most distinguished pathologists of his generation”, had said that it was pure speculation that it was sexually motivated, the jurors heard.

Mr Clegg, as he’d done previously in this trial, repeated that Vincent Tabak’s conduct after he’d killed Joanna was “utterly disgraceful”, but said: “It doesn’t alter what was in his mind at the time it happened”. And that, in the view of the defence, did not constitute a plan to kill.