She claimed he was killed by Pirates | THE BLACK WIDOW MURDER | Forensic Investigators

it was a romantic weekend no different than many of the others the couple of three years had spent before but this one would end in a way that 53-year-old John asworth would never forget it had a smell about it and it just didn't make sense to get that money there was only one way I've never come across anyone as callous and strong the next thing she can recall is dying there naked we had no body no weapon no definitive crime [Music] scene [Music] today when you hear the word piracy you think of unauthorized use of copyrighted material in this case detectives were looking for pirates in The Bays around Brisbane it was a curious start to an investigation and one that would go deeper than the waters in which it began around about 3:00 in the morning the AC rescue boat got called out to an unknown Medical Emergency on board a boat somewhere in the bay and it was Pitch Black we're just shining spotlights everywhere trying to find this boat that was supposed to be in [Music] distress it took took was about half an hour before we actually located it the boat was in total darkness there was no navigation lights whatsoever on the boat then the lights caught a lady standing on the back of the boat hello are you okay over there the skipper called out to her and asked if she had a medical emergency on board she replied yes heyy sweetie what's been happening I jumped over onto the misty blue and I asked her what had happened she said someone must have boarded the vot and I must have been hit very hard and got knocked out from it what's your name Dar um Trisha [Music] bers when I went down the steps into the cabin I saw a man lying on the left hand side on the bunk there was quite quite a bit of blood around the patient was fully conscious I asked him what happened and he said to me that someone had boarded the boat he heard the female call out and that's when he got a start and he jumped up and that's when he must have hit his head we've located Misty Blue we have two injured persons on board and we're about to take the vessel in tow we'll be back at our base in approximately 15 minutes do you know when you the man and his partner were immediately taken to hospital where the local police attended on our arrival we saw John Asquith and Patricia B John was being treated by medical staff for head injury both of them looked tied but they were relatively calm in their dealings with us and had a little bit of the lost as to what is actually happened to them while joh was being treated we tried to ascertain what happened during the evening Patricia had stated that theyd been traveling out on Morton Bay earli the previous afternoon when the bait broke down with a fuel filter problem she decided that they'd anchor up in the channel and stay there the night looking good it is as good as you oh yeah you're good they had a ROM evening they had dinner they drank two bottles of wine half a bottle of Port they both showered out on the back of the vessel in the nude and went to bed wake up the next thing she can recall is laying there naked curled across the front of the boat what's wrong John with blood over his face bending over asking if she was all right they both then retired to the inside of the boat at which time John has begun an hour an hour and a half of calling for help over the [Music] radio but it appeared Jon's wound was not a result of a bump to the head but something more Sinister the doctor he told me from his experience of treating injuries that it appeared to be a bullet wound and we looked at John and at Patricia buers and they all but laughed off the idea as to how ridiculous is that one would think that if a person was shot in the head that uh you would know about it when X-rays were carried out metal fragments to a depth of 7 cm were found in John's skull he had been shot and detectives were brought in to find out who shot him and why we then went to the PA Hospital to speak with John and also to speak with Patricia in relation to what happened we couldn't find Patricia she wasn't at the hospital so it was imperative for us at that time to find her there was two scenarios people had either got on the boat and assaulted her and shot John or they had only been the two of them on the boat somebody must have had a firearm on that boat now whether it was Patricia or John or other people that's what we were trying to [Music] establish police were looking for Patricia buers the only witness they had to what may have occurred on the misty blue she wasn't at the hospital where an x-ray had just confirmed her partner had been shot nor was she at home once we got to the house there was no one there and in the meantime we'd been contacted by by the hospital that Patricia had turned up to see John we spoke with Patricia asked her what had happened she told us a story that pirates had come on board and attacked John she told us said he' been shot in the head or the P had shot him in the head however Patricia bers had never mentioned this when she first spoke to the police her lack of such an important detail was an immediate concern she was asked was there any firearms on the boat and she said no she was then asked did she have any firearms and she replied yes that she had two Firearms at home and there was also one at the uh business and we asked her if she'd be prepared to come back to her house let us search the house for Firearms she took us through the house basically and showed us where the air rifle was she then gave us a 22 rifle which had a scope on it okay she was quite helpful and didn't appear to be worried in any way about the consequences of taking her weapons from her she used to operate a fishing troller and she used to use the Firearms to shoot sharks and also she had some pet parrots on their property and cats used to come and attack the parrots and she used to shoot at cats she also took them to the business that she and John operated where another weapon a 10 gauge shotgun was confiscated after collecting the Firearms with Patricia we asked her was she prepared to come back to the police station to be interviewed on audio and video she said no but she would talk to us off tape we asked her was she prepared to undergo a test on her hands to establish whether she had fired a firearm recently or to eliminate her this was purely voluntary for her and she was not compelled to undergo that test in any way and she declined to undergo that test she also said that she just wanted to get back and see John at the hospital so we then took her back meanwhile the misty blue had become a crime scene we've gone inside the cabin of the baby the left hand side the port side was where John would been laying we noticed in the v section between the two bunks there was a quantity of dried blood in the floor well and on the right hand side the starboard side there was the bud Splash pattern and on examination of the dry blood we found small fragments of metal consistent with that of a Splatter from a bullet as well as on the wall of the bulkhead which we took possession of for forensic examination when these fragments along with those from John's skull were examined microscopically they were found to be gilded because they had gilding material adhering to them this would indicate that it's most likely a22 caliber weapon which has fired this projectile that firearm was recovered by detectives and brought to police for further examination however in this case the pieces of projectile were damaged to such a great extent that there was no markings on them which could be used to match it back to an individual firearm so Patricia's 22 caliber rifle with a telescopic lens could not be ruled in or ruled out and at this stage neither could her story about Pirates well I don't know of any pirates in Morton Bay it could have been a valid story we had to confirm or deny her story there was nothing missing from the boat radios were on board all the fishing gear barbecue that was all on board even John's wallet was still on board there was nothing taken whatsoever then if you're talking about pirates that would be going on board to take something so the only options that could have happened on the boat were that John had tried to shoot himself although very unlikely because where the bullet was in the top of his head there was no physical way that a person could hold a long rifle back and shoot themselves in the head another option that we did have which was that Patricia was the one that shot him the only other option is that it could have been a domestic fight on the boat and things had gone bad and subsequently John had been shot in the head [Music] somehow once John was sufficiently recovered to be interviewed we went to the hospital and spoke to him we made a decision to take the weapons up to John to make sure that they were the guns that were in the house he identified the shotgun and said that that was the one from the shop he identified the air and said that was the one from home however with the 22 rifle he said he had never seen that before we asked him why was he so positive he had not seen this 22 caliber rifle before and he said it was quite simple the one that they had at home didn't have a telescopic site so immediately that raised a suspicion in our mind we suggested to John that maybe Patricia had shot him he was was totally aass at that suggestion and said that uh no way in the world that could never have happened as far as he was concerned they had a a very good relationship and there was no problems whatsoever he was of the opinion that somebody must have come on the boat and had assaulted both him and Patricia John asworth had most probably been shot by a 22 caliber weapon police had ruled about Pirates and an attempted suicide suspicion was now with his partner Patricia one of the guns she had presented to police was a 22 caliber rifle but it wasn't the caliber that had caused the concern but the fact that JN had not recognized the weapon we did a check of that weapon and found that it had been purchased at a a gun shop in beanley the same day or that afternoon when John Asis had been taken to the PA Hospital I then went down to the Bley gun shop he showed us his records and the documents said that the gun had been purchased by Patricia she' paid $100 or something for the weapon the did say that she said she wanted a 22 without a scope the only one he had at the time was the weapon that we had which had a scope he did say to her that the scope could be taken off and he remembered that she also had to go to an automatic teller to get some money to pay for it from there we took out a search warrant to get Bank details from Patricia she'd gone to the ATM which is straight across the road from the gun shop got the money out walked across and purchased the gun we could definitely say that yes she had bought that gun from that shop that afternoon we knew then that's why she wasn't at the hospital to see John cuz she was out buying a gun because she knew obviously that we would do a search on the house and would be asking for the weapons so we were then looking for the fourth gun the old 22 the blood smeared half cabin Runabout was towed to Manley for a thorough Police examination the 53-year-old victim John asworth of yler had been shot at Point Blank Range a 46- year-old woman had also been on board it's understood the pair had been drinking for some hours the vote was L um broken down and M in the channel water police are now questioning boties who were in the area at the time of the shooting this afternoon police divers began a search of the area where the boat was mored it's believed they're looking for a 22 caliber rifle our immediate thought was maybe the rifle was discarded over the side of the boat in Morton Bay however with the tide and the currents and the movements of the ocean nothing was able to be located if Patricia buers was responsible for shooting her partner John then they needed to find a motive first stop was their relationship all family and friends said that they had a good relationship together they got on well there wasn't any problems they were in business together they seemed like a a happy couple everyone we had spoken to it said that it was a good relationship there was no fighting they'd never fought they were going along the lines that they would probably eventually to get married to me that had to raise a few doubts as to what had happened but you go back to the evidence and the evidence was there Patricia had some sort of involvement in shooting John the second stop was John's financial situation and who would benefit if he died John had said that he had one insurance policy and he said that that time beneficiaries were his children when we got the detail insurance policy the beneficiary had been amended and Patricia was the sole beneficiary of that insurance policy so we then did a check on a registry of life insurance policies and they came back and said that there was another four insurance policies on John's life Mr as yes we then took the whole lot of the documents up to John showed him each individual document these two he pointed out that it wasn't his signature on any of those documents none of them we asked him did he have any idea who may have done it he said no we asked him would Patricia have done it and he stated no there's no way in the world she would not have done that the beneficiary for all five policies totaling the amount of $275,000 was Patricia [Music] B it appeared Patricia buers had stood to gain financially if JN had died on the night he was shot but in order to build a case against her the detectives would firstly need to prove the documents were indeed forgeries in most cases when a person commits the act of forgery they try to reproduce what we call a pictorial representation of the genuine signature when we compare the specimen signatures of John aswith with the disputed insurance applications in his name the first thing we see is there is some attempt at reproducing the pictorial likeness those loops and whs but what they failed to do is to pay attention to the finite things that make up John as with's signature that is the fluency the speed of writing the complex formation of that particular signature and the pressure of the pen onto the paper all the disputed John asth signatures fall down in all those areas they were not written by John aswith and I was satisfied that all those simulated forgeries had been written or forged by the one writer and police believed that person was Patricia Myers not only were all the life insurance documents sent to the one mailbox address owned by her but when detectives looked at the records at a medical center where a checkup was required for one of the life insurance policies the evidence kept building there's no booking at all for John aswith the only booking that was in there was for a Joan aswith she had a blood test taken and was given the certificate and their carbon copy in their receipt book was also made out to a Joan asith it didn't take an expert to see that the documents sent to the insurance company had been altered so we compiled a photo board with a photo of Patricia showed this to the receptionist and the receptionist identified Patricia as the person who went to the surgery on that day while the detectives mounted a case of attempted murder John asworth continued to deny Patricia's involvement that was about to change he' gone to his own doctor said he was feeling sick the doctor did a urine test and they found that he had a large quantity of valum in his system the circumstantial evidence against Patricia bers was mounting but police still hadn't been able to find the missing 22 caliber rifle they believed she used to shoot her [Music] partner my son Ashley was fishing and he noticed a rifle butt or a stock or a rifle this unusual thing to find by the river of course and we heard about the Sho on on the boat we read about in the paper the next day and we saw it on the TV on the news putting two and two together perhaps might have something to do with it so we decided to hand it into the place the finding of the but was significant it was the swn down part of a 22 caliber rifle but it was the fact that those who found it lived right next door to Patricia buers that made it such an incredible find well I thought if the rifle stock was found there and if she had saw the gun down that she may have thrown the barrel parted in the back of the creek as well I then made arrangements with our police divers hopefully to try and find the barrel I wasn't holding any high hopes you want to turn around sh move it they're only in the water 40 minutes and one of the divers recovered a barrel of a 22 caliber rifle I thought fantastic that was it that's what we needed the only other missing link to that part was the actual gun part itself the barrel was examined and seemed to have been cut if that same damage was present on the piece of barrel retained on the rifle this may have damaged or broken up the projectile or or caused it to start to deform as it's left the barrel or it may break up as it strikes an object such as the skull of Mr asor I really think that that's the only thing that saved his life was the fact that it shattered before it hit him in the head realistically if she had cut the gun down with a hacka and done a straight cut I don't think John would be here today so I thought maybe she'd cut the thing down at the house so I then took a search one out when we got to the the residence there was a large workshed and a vice on the bench in the workshed the area was quite clean however underneath the vice there was what appeared to be wood shavings those shavings along with the Winchester rifle butt were taken to a Timber specialist to see if the two were a match starting with the rifle butt piece we made a razor cut on the end grain of the wood piece and determine whether it was a hardwood species or a softwood and it turned out to be a hardwood then we load it into a microone which is a a sliding [Music] knife and the knife allows us to cut very thin sections along the three planes that we need we all stain that with saffrin and that highlights wood structure and we can place it onto a glass slide to enable us to look at the wood Anatomy under a microscope it's a bit like fingerprinting way all species have a different arrangement of the anatomical features so we're able to look under the microscope and then key those features into a computer database and that'll give us the possible Timber types in this case the wood turned out to be batula species which is a birch it's a northern hemisphere Hardwood when the wood shavings were then compared the result was what the police had hoped we determined conclusively that the shavings were Pula or Birch the same Timber type and Timber species as the rifle butt I think she cut the gun down at the home at yler and put it on the boat had it there she had planned to go out that weekend it was all going to happen on that [Music] weekend and the only thing that went wrong was that John didn't die he just stayed alive and I think that wrecked her whole plan she was then charged with one attempted murder Grievous bodily harm Grievous bodily harm with intent unlawful wounding and 11 counts of forgery and 11 counts of uttering a false document with all the evidence presented to him John asworth still couldn't believe that the woman he loved had tried to kill him but 2 months after she had been arrested and was out on bail awaiting her trial John changed his mind he felt really sick one day after Patricia had prepared him some lunch and he said that he felt really drowsy and was bumping into things and couldn't stay awake he said he'd gone to his own doctor said he was feeling sick the doctor did a urine test and they found that he had a large quantity of vum in his system he said that he was not on any medication and hadn't taken any medication since he left hospital so she must have done it she must have put something in his food this realization that John came to was like a bombshell to him he just complet completely changed his attitude and he realized that Patricia the woman he had been living with and in his opinion had an absolutely wonderful relationship with had been trying to kill him however as police were about to discover JN was not the only man to have fallen under Patricia Bayer's [Music] spell after a two we trial a jury found Patricia by as guilty of attempted murder she was sentenced to 12 years but was eligible for parole after three it was thought she would not reoffend but for one family who had taken a keen interest in her case the opposite was more likely to be true I received a phone call from a woman um bit concerned in relation to her father who had lived with Patricia B for a long period of time and because of what she'd seen in the media she then had fears for her father because all the assets the house the cars the boat were all now in her possession I I believe you're doing this to me Patricia bers and KL Gins had been a couple for eight years until as his daughters learned he had apparently walked out on Patricia on the 6th of July 1990 and they told us that when they hadn't heard from their father they had phoned Patricia and Patricia had told them that they had split up and and that he was going to Thailand to be with his Tha girlfriend she appeared quite emotional about this was crying and tear and appeared to be very upset about the breakup everything's been takeen here sure you go enoy yourself eh oh thanks very much according to his boss Carl Gins was intending to see his Thai girlfriend and then return to work after 2 months his boss had last seen him 3 days before his scheduled flight out of the country he asked me if if I'd like to have a beer and I was aware that uh things were probably a bit uncomfortable on the social scene and I said no mate I I don't really want to um walk into any um domestics c a real they had sat in the car for a little while because Carl had been overpaid $1,000 in his wages and they came to an arrangement that Carl would pay him back over a period of time or or deduct it from his next pay it wasn't a big issue because uh he was a man of honesty and integrity I shook his hand uh wished him well and said I'd see him in a couple of months when he he came back from his [Music] leave he was quite surprised when approximately two weeks later he received a typewritten letter from Carl it was a resignation letter stating that he would not be coming back and that he had settled with Trish about his house and in some ways he felt he may have made a bad decision but he said he didn't believe Trish would be left on the Shelf because uh she was a good looking girl but there was no mention of the ,000 Carl owed his employer so his boss wrote back to him at the address kyl had requested all mail to go his old place now owned by Patricia 3 months later he received a check for the amount at that point I figured well all monies had been paid Carl had made up his mine we sendy skar off and that was the end of the matter our first step in trying to locate Mr gin was to try and confirm whether he had actually flown to Thailand on the date nominated however he never caught the plane I contacted Ty a wise and I was told that the flight had been cancelled by a woman purporting to be Mrs gin's uh she canceled the flight and requested a refund all our attempts to locate him um were to noil the only hint that Carl was alive and dwell in Australia was the activity on his bank account and the purchase of a pagola for Patricia's Place some 4 months after he had last been seen so if he had signed that he was obviously still in Australia and still had some contact with Patricia or alternatively somebody had access to his American Express card and had forged his signature on the voucher for payment for the [Music] pagala so I sent the letter of resignation from Carl and another letter with the ship logs which had Carl's handwriting in it to the document examination expert the conclusion of the expert was that the signature and the handwriting was not by Carl Gins I also looked at what happened to Carl's assets which included the house at yler and found out that the house had been transferred to Patricia approximately 3 weeks after Carl had last been seen on the transfer document the signature of Carl Gins and the signature of the witness were Vries the only genuine signature was that of Patricia bers the American Express docket was also a forgery I went and interviewed the Proprietors of the pagala company uh the salesperson told me that he had attended at the address at yler where he had met a woman that introduced herself as uh Trisha Gins and signed the American Express voucher in front of him in the name of CT gins now from a forensic point of view this was absolutely brilliant evidence we could then use the signature that Patty buyers forged on the aex transaction as a benchmark and compare that with all the other Forge signatures that we had on all these documents and conclude that whoever signed the aex voucher was the author of all the other Ford signatures police had circumstantial EV Ence but they had no body no crime scene and no weapon and their Prime Suspect was due out of jail in less than 18 months Patricia bers was the classic black widow she had attempted to kill her partner John asworth to obtain wealth and now it appeared she had already had a practice run with her previous partner kyl Gins while a body had still not been found police and the prosecutor brought into into the investigation knew they were looking at murder months before about a year before she'd secretly obtained a copy of his will the signature that requested the will to be sent had been proved to be a forgery and she knew that she had to share that house those assets with the daughters so she wasn't going to get everything and she knew that Carl had started up a relationship with a new woman in Thailand she knew that he was going to be leaving her she knew that she was going to lose the house she was going to be left with nothing so the night that Carl walked through that front door he disappeared off the face of the Earth The Next Step was to ascertain if there was any forensic evidence at the house by the time I did the search one six years had passed since KL had last been seen and I found a diary relating to 1990 and on the 6th of July there was an entry car left dropped him in the city and on that same day a new bed was delivered the bed just seem R Patricia had told John aswi that Carl had left her and taken his bed with him and it had a smell about it I mean if he was going to Bangkok you wouldn't take your bed with you if you were going to Darwin to then go off to Asia it just didn't make sense I was asked to focus on the main bedroom area particularly to search for the presence of blood we found a series of very small droplets on one of the walls these ranged between a half a mm to 1 mm in size and there was about 21 of these droplets we performed presumptive screening testing of the stains for the presence of blood and they all came up positive We performed Al luminol examination on the carpet of the room this is another presumptive screening test for the presence of blood the carpet was basically placed on top of the Gip Rock there was no underlay underneath which made it unusual in the fact that it was there in that sort of [Music] state and what we obtained was a whole area of positive reactions on the timber chipboard floor under the carpet once we turned the lights back on and had a look at to see where these fluorescent reactions were occurring there seemed to be areas of dark staining that married up with where the fluorescence was [Music] occurring a DNA profile was created from the blood stains and compared to the DNA from KL godin's daughters while it couldn't be confirmed the blood in the room was consistent with coming from the father of those daughters the pattern of the blood spatter was also of great interest due to their size it can infer that they were deposited as a result of a strong force being applied to a source of blood um something such as blunt force trauma or it could be from a gunshot wound gunshot wounds typically cause what's called High Velocity blood Splash and that type of staining is very small almost Mist likee blood stains these were very small so it certainly couldn't be eliminated or it could be something as mundane as a sneezing or coughing with blood in your mouth or nose the bedroom had all the hallm marks of being the likely place of where car Goins was actually killed couldn't say it with certainty but it certainly looked like it obviously the case would be significantly strengthened if we could find the body of KL Godin so how did she get rid of the body there were at least to my mind two options she buried him nearby to where she killed him which would mean that she buried his body somewhere in the yard or alternatively she took him out on a boat and dumped his body at Sea when John es commenced his Rel relationship with Patricia the house at yler was still in the process of being finished so I interviewed him about when different things had happened to try and identify if something had occurred where a body could be concealed around the time that Carl went missing from everything he told me a likely place was the garden shed that he thought had been constructed about the time Carl disappeared the shed was dismantled and the area below was excavated by the back high I had hoped that we would find Carl's remains but there was nothing found we had no body no weapon no definitive crime scene but what we did have was substantial evidence that Patricia bars had gone to Great Lengths to plan and conceal the death of Kyle gin each individual piece of evidence could not prove her guilt but when it was put together I knew you could put a very compelling case of murder to the jury Patricia bers has pleaded not guilty to murdering her deao husband Cal Goin went missing in July 1990 Byers claiming he'd run off to Bangkok to marry his prostitute girlfriend prosecutor Paul rutage claimed all Mr gon's worldly assets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars have disappeared through a series of frauds and forgeries directly linked with Buyers buyers motive to kill kyl Gins money she knew that to get that money those assets there was only one way forgery but for forgery to work Carl had to die after a month of hearing the evidence a jury came back with a guilty verdict the verdict was welcomed by John asworth who fell prey to the Black Widow in 1993 naturally enough I'm pleased to see Justice done until now the jury was unaware that bers was already serving 12 years in jail for that attempted murder as a result of this verdict baer's future is life in prison Patricia bers has the right to apply for parole in 2012 as a result of the two cases and her two convictions rumors arose about the death of her first husband police investigated the car accident in which he died but found no evidence to support the theory of Foul [Music] [Music] Play [Music] we

Channel: Australian Crime

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Keywords: Australia, Australian Crime, Australian crime documentary, Australian crime series, Gangs & Mobs, Stalkers, child crime, cold case, con artists, crime, crime documentary, crime series, disappearances, family crime, ivan milat, murder, podcasts, police, renae marsden, revelle balmain, roger rogerson, serial killer, true crime, true crime documentary, true crime series

Id: s9DYrOmyD6M

Length: 42min 25sec (2545 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 02 2023