Annalise Johnstone murder accused "as guilty as each other", dad says

The father of Annalise Johnstone today demanded justice for his daughter, telling a jury his son and the boy’s girlfriend were “as guilty as each other” of her murder.

Gordon Johnstone, 44, was giving evidence in the trial of his son Jordan and Jordan’s girlfriend Angela Newlands, who both deny murdering Annalise at a witch’s monument in Perthshire last May.

He told a jury at the High Court in Livingston that he was “as clear as fog coming off the sea” about his daughter’s fate.

He said: “I just want to see justice, no matter what. All I know is that my daughter’s buried and the two of them is as guilty as each other.”

Mr Johnstone, from Fauldhouse, West Lothian, admitted he had fallen out with Annalise, 22, over her lifestyle about 18 months before she was killed last May.

He admitted: “We left on an argument. That’s haunted me to this day.”

He said his daughter could be ‘wiry’ and was capable of holding her own in a fight. But he agreed she would have been no match for her brother Jordan who pick Annalise up and carry her. He explained: “He’s not a little puny boy. He was into bodybuilding same as me when I was younger.”

Mr Johnstone told the jury he had gone to see his son in Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison a few weeks after Annalise’s body was found by a roadside in rural Perthshire.

He admitted he had threatened to “smash his face on top of the table” if his son did not reveal what he had done to his sister.

He told the jury that Johnstone then recounted a version of events blaming his co-accused for the murder and claiming that he had desperately tried to staunch the blood flowing froma wound in Annalise's neck with his T-shirt before she died in his arms.

Mr Johnstone said Jordan told him he had been at the Maggie Wall’s witch’s memorial near Auchterarder with Annalise and his co-accused but had walked back to their home in Auchterarder because he was only wearing a t-short and was feeling cold.

“He said Angela came in within five or 10 minutes of him arriving at the house and she went straight to the sink. He went over and she was washing blood off her hands.

“He turned around and asked her: ‘Where’s Annalise?’ and Angela said she was taking pictures of the witch’s monument.

“He said he was a wee bit cautious because it was dark. He sprinted back down to the monument and he seen Annalise lying on the ground.

“He seen my daughter bleeding profusely out of her neck. He said he ripped off his T-shirt and tried to staunch the gash in her neck.

“He said Angela came driving down five minutes later. He was screaming to get the police get an ambulance. She shouted: ‘I’m not getting any ambulance’.”

Mr Johnstone said his son had also claimed that he found the implement used to inflict the fatal wound next to Annalise’s body and hid it along with other personal posessions including her mobile phone.

He went on: “He said he put it to the one side, he put it somewhere I think it was to show the police that it wasn’t his fingerprints on it.

“I think he went back up to the house and they had quite an argument. Angela was going to accuse him. She said: ‘You better take the rap for that or I’m going to tell the police you were interfering with my kids.’

“He telt me that he had to go and move her body to somewhere where she could be found because Angela was going to phone her father to take her body and put it somewhere else.

“He said he put it somewhere so that someone could find her because he was worried about her father coming down and moving the body so that it couldn't be found.

“Jordan said that the two of them drove the Galaxy back to the witch’s monument and they both put Annalise in the back of the car. He didn’t go into any detail about what they did but they took Annalise and put her near to woods.”

Asked about the Traveller community, to which his family and his son’s co-accused belong, Mr Johnstone admitted there was “constant fighting through each other”.

He added: “It’s part of growing up in the Traveller community. I’ve steered clear of that for years.

“I’m a ‘housy’ now. I get called a bug because I stay in a house. I never got back into a caravan because I'd rather have a power shower than washing into a bucket.

“They (Annalise and Jordan) stayed with their granny when Jordan’s mother passed away and they were raised in a caravan.

Asked if he’d met Angela Newlands before his daughter’s death he said he had seen her outside his house on one occasion.

He commented: “I couldn't keep up to date with Jordan’s women. He’s a bit of a Casanova. A couple of weeks prior to that he was with someone else and he’s got another woman he’s had a kid to.”

Under cross examination by Mark Stewart, defending Newlands, Mr Johnstone agreed that his daughter would have to have been bleeding for Newlands to get blood on her hands and that it would have taken around 15 minutes for Jordan Johnstone to run back to the scene of the crime to try to save his sister

Mr Johnstone admitted: “I know by the injury she sustained it would only have taken a couple of minutes until she died.”

Mr Stewart said: “That’s an agreed fact that she’d have expired from the injuries within a few minutes. It gives you the flavour that perhaps what you were being told wasn’t true.”

Judge Lady Scott warned jurors that the allegations made by the accused Johnstone about Newlands did not constitute evidence.

The jury heard earlier that Annalise’s body was found by a retired couple on a hillwalking holiday to Perthshire.

Johnstone, 25, and Angela Newlands, 19, deny murdering Annalise, from Ardrossan, Ayrshire, by repeatedly stabbing her in the neck on 10 May 2018 and attempting to defeat the ends of justice by covering up the crime.

The trial continues.