Den Amstel murder case lawyers argue over phantom
LAWYERS on opposite sides n the Den Amstel murder case at the Demerara Assizes, argued, in their addresses to the jury yesterday, whether a phantom killer was involved.
Defence Counsel Nigel Hughes, for accused Dwayne  Jordan, told the jurors that, from the evidence presented, they were likely to find that a phantom was the murderer. But state prosecutor Prithima Kissoon countered that there was no phantom and it was Jordan who killed his darling wife, Claudine Rampersaud, on the night of June 14, 2007.
In his unsworn statement from the dock yesterday, Jordan said he knew the victim for a number of years and the two started to live together, at Lot 6 Den Amstel, from 1999 to 2007 January, after she was put out of her mother’s home.
She used to call him to follow her out to work and back.
The accused said, a few weeks before the incident, somebody said that she had another man.  According to him, on the night of the murder, he was waiting on her to call him but she did not and he decided to walk out to the road where the same person told him that she had just gone into the abandoned house with a man.
He said he decided to go into the building. From outside, he heard a sound and he went up but as soon as he pushed the door, he received a lash and, as he tried to get to the person who attacked him, she started to protect him.
Jordan said the attacker wounded him in one side and he was still trying to get at the assailant but Rampersaud intervened. He said he suffered chops on two veins at the back of his feet and a knife was placed at his throat to prevent him from screaming,
Later, he tried to get out of the house when he realised that he could not walk and had wounds on his abdomen and other parts of the body and his face was swollen.
“I managed to crawl to a clump of bushes where, two days later, I was rescued by the Police,” the accused told the court.
Hughes admonished the jury to abide by the evidence before the Court and not to take on the role of detectives to solve the case for the prosecution.
Kissoon, who is in association with other State Counsel Konyo Sandiford, urged the jury to find that, it was the accused who lashed out at the witnesses that dark night with his hatchet and knife.
Kissoon maintained it was not any phantom lover of the deceased who killed her, as the Defence would like them to believe, but that the accused who had murdered his darling wife.