A jury has dismissed the allegations of a former biker that he was only an innocent bystander watching the horrific death of a Sydney lady whose body was discovered burned in the bush.
The body of 33-year-old Najma Carroll was found 15 days after she was killed on July 14, 2020, by a bushwalker who was strolling through the Sandy Point region.
Following a six-week trial in the NSW Supreme Court, a jury found one of her killers, Benjamin Troy Parkes, guilty of murder on Wednesday.
The 46-year-old made an ineffective attempt to claim that Carroll was beaten and that Robert Sloan, a heroin dealer he worked with, tried to burn her body by dousing it in gasoline.
Her cranium was found to be broken into 62 pieces consistent with blunt force trauma by an anthropology who inspected her severely burned body, the court heard.
While staying at the Hunts Hotel in Liverpool, which is in Sydney’s southwest, Parkes, Sloan, and Carroll got to know one another.
Crown prosecutor Darren Robinson said jurors at the beginning of the trial in February that Carroll had “invested” $8000 of her superannuation in their illegal drug company.
The jury heard that Parkes had a deal with Sloan to kill her because he was concerned that Carroll “knew too much” about his drug operation.
Robinson informed the jury that the two made plans to transport her from the Hunts Hotel to the Smithfield home of a friend, where she spent the night in his garage before to her death.
Parkes said he didn’t intend to kill Carroll and that he only came to the Sandy Point location with a jerry can of gasoline to burn Carroll’s SUV on fire because he thought it might be connected to their drug trade.
On May 24, he will have a sentencing hearing.
