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Things
David Owen Lyttle is serving at least 11 years of life in prison for murdering Brett Hall. (File photo)
A suggested motive for the murder that two friends fought over a construction project was a fight the Crown had chosen but did not need to win, the Court of Appeal was told.
Bretton (Brett) Hall was friends with David Owen Lyttle, 55, a builder from Halcombe, Manawatū, perhaps Lyttle’s only close friend.
Lyttle was building a house for Hall in a remote rural site near the Whanganui River and the Crown said Hall was unhappy.
Hall disappeared in May 2011 and his body has not been found.
READ MORE:
* Life in prison for David Lyttle for murdering his friend Brett Hall
* Missing man was scammed into a drug deal and ‘disappeared’, jury said
* Mystery of Brett Hall’s disappearance solved in Crown evidence, says prosecutor
* False Confession Alleged in Bodyless Murder Trial
After a search in case Hall had an accident in the rugged bushes around his block, the disappearance was treated as a homicide. He had been on probation from prison for drug offenses when he disappeared.
Lyttle was indicted in 2014 and ultimately convicted in a Wellington trial in late 2019.
His appeal against Hall’s murder conviction continued in the Wellington Court of Appeal on Thursday. Lyttle is serving at least 11 years of life in prison.
At Lyttle’s trial, the defense said the alleged motive was disproved when the evidence was properly examined and the police had not investigated the evidence that Hall was murdered due to his drug trafficking.
PINK WOODS / THINGS
David Owen Lyttle was found guilty of murdering his friend Bretton (Brett) Hall in May 2011 on Hall’s remote property near the Whanganui River. Judge Jill Mallon sentenced Lyttle to life in prison.
Motive is not an ingredient that must be proven for a murder. Crown’s lead attorney for the appeal, Mark Lillico, said the motive was “a fight that Crown had chosen but did not need to win.”
In 2014, the police carried out a complex “Mr Big” sting operation against Lyttle.
The Crown maintained that Lyttle had confessed to killing Hall at the culmination of the operation, saying he was pressuring him to get involved in the drug scene.
Lillico said no evidence was found to back that up, but that there was tension between the two over the house, even if Lyttle had flawlessly fulfilled the construction contract.
THINGS
Brett Hall’s body has not been found, but his friend David Lyttle was found guilty of murdering him.
The defense said that the method used in the sting to extract the confession raised the possibility that the incentives of easy money and company played on Lyttle’s vulnerabilities and resulted in a false confession.
One of the questions for the appeal was whether the risk of the false confession made it unreliable and what should the jury be told about that risk, particularly when the defense said that many elements of the confession could be proven incorrect.
In the end, the jury was told that confession alone was not enough to find a murder conviction.
Leilani Hatch / Things
The case of Brett Hall, who disappeared from his lifestyle block on the Whanganui River in 2011, appears on the Police Ten-7 television show. (File photo)
Lillico told the three appellate judges that the jury’s direction actually favored Lyttle.
It would have been enough for the jurors to have been told that it was up to them what to do with the confession and to be careful about it.
Even without the confession, the Crown still had the other comments Lyttle made to the police after he was briefed on the sting operation. That included Lyttle saying, “It was self-defense.”
The appeal was expected to end on Thursday.
