Jilted lover 'murdered ex-girlfriend' From: AAP By Adam Gartrell December 02, 2005
A YOUNG man strangled his former girlfriend because he could not move on after she found someone else, a Sydney court was told today.
William Harold Matheson, 23, has pleaded not guilty to murdering 18-year-old Lyndsay van Blanken. Ms van Blanken was engaged to another man when she went missing on November 24, 2003.
Seven weeks later, her decomposed body was found stuffed in a cricket bag, hidden in the storeroom of a unit block in the inner-east suburb of Queens Park.
In her closing submission to the NSW Supreme Court, Crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen said Mr Matheson had planned the "grotesque" murder because he could not move on the way Ms van Blanken had, and became obsessed with her.
Ms van Blanken met Mr Matheson in 2001 when he played cello at her mother's wedding.
Advertisement: Ms Cunneen said Mr Matheson and Ms van Blanken never considered each other "boyfriend and girlfriend", even though their relationship was sexual. Mr Matheson was distant and detached towards her and never publicly displayed affection, she said.
"She was very frustrated with him, there was no passion from his side," Ms Cunneen told the court.
"It was a relationship that for Lyndsay, proved to be an unfulfilling one."
It was only after Mr Matheson found out that she was seeing someone else that his attitude suddenly changed, Ms Cunneen said.
Mr Matheson had an "extreme reaction" to the ending of the relationship and engaged in "unhealthy and obsessive ruminations" about his former lover, she said.
He would often turn up unannounced and unwelcomed at Ms Van Blanken's house and workplace, she said.
"(Mr Matheson) didn't love Lyndsay van Blanken; he hated her. He only wanted her when someone else wanted her."
She said that on November 24, 2003, Matheson lured Ms van Blanken to the unit block, where he slipped a cable tie around her neck and strangled her.
"Lyndsay van Blanken would have struggled for her life when she was being garrotted in that seedy little place with no light," she said.
She said CCTV footage and witnesses had proven that Mr Matheson was in the "precise location at the precise time" that the cricket bag had been bought.
"It was acquired for the purpose and use to which it was put, to hold and keep a body, the body of Lyndsay van Blanken," Ms Cunneen said.
The trial, before Acting Justice Jane Mathews, continues on Monday.
