WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

Resentment over a Facebook post seems to have been the partial motivation for a 16-year-old to participate in the horrific kidnapping, torture with a makeshift blowtorch and forced hanging death of another teen girl inside an abandoned South Auckland state house, prosecutors said today as the now-adult defendant’s murder trial began.

The body of Dimetrius Pairama - a “bubbly, pretty and friendly” 17-year-old with a distinctive giggle who was better known by nicknames Demi or Precious - was discovered inside a rusty steel drum in the overgrown backyard of a Māngere home five years ago this month.

Co-defendants Ashley Winter, now 32, and Kerry Te Amo, 29, were found guilty of murder by a jury the following year. But the 16-year-old, now 21 and with continuing interim name suppression, did not join them at that first trial for reasons that are “irrelevant” to the current jury, Justice Kiri Tahana said today in the High Court at Auckland.

 “The Crown case is that Ms Winter and Mr Te Amo did not act alone,” Crown prosecutor Claire Robertson told jurors a short time later in her opening address, describing Winter as having been “dominant in the violence” but the current defendant as “an active and willing participant from the beginning to the end”.

“She was not forced, she was not coerced into doing anything she didn’t want to do. She was fully supportive. [The 16-year-old] had her own grudge against Ms Pairama and acted against it.”

The defendant began the trial by pleading not guilty to both murder and kidnapping, with her lawyer suggesting she was a reluctant participant at best - helpless to stop the madness due to her young age and a mental disability.

Robertson warned the courtroom that haunting and gruesome details of the “undeserved, vicious ... horrific assault” - many of which will come from a 14-year-old with immunity from prosecution who was also present during Pairama’s final hours - may be difficult to listen to.

Dimetrius Pairama was found dead at a derelict house in July 2018.

According to prosecutors, the trio took turns beating Pairama before Winter ordered her to undress, with the victim’s underwear shoved in her mouth and taped shut. She was then tied to a chair by Te Amo and the current defendant before Winter and the current defendant cut off her hair using a razor and scissors, authorities allege.

It was the 16-year-old who then made a “makeshift blowtorch” using an aerosol can and a lighter, using it to burn the victim, prosecutors said. When Te Amo took a turn alone in the room with the victim, the 14-year-old witness said she heard what sounded like bones breaking as she stood on the other side of the door.

Winter and the 16-year-old later poured baby formula and another chemical found in the house on the victim, who was crying and said she needed to go to the hospital, according to prosecutors. Eventually, Robertson said, the victim was presented with a chilling choice: death by hanging or stabbing.

“Ms Winter told her if she didn’t decide by 3pm she would stab her,” Robertson told jurors.

The 16-year-old is accused of having helped Te Amo to make a noose out of sheets. After Pairama died, her body was cut down, covered in sheets and plastic rubbish bags and stuffed into the steel drum, prosecutors said.

“They took away her will to live then presented her with an impossible choice,” Robertson told jurors.

Kerry Te Amo and Ashley Winter were convicted in 2019 of murdering Dimetrius Pairama. Photos / Sam Hurley

Not long after the killing, the 16-year-old would be seen on CCTV wearing Pairama’s blue long-sleeve top that she had been wearing prior to her death, jurors were told.

Prosecutors said it “remains unclear” why Pairama would have been so viciously targeted by the trio, but a witness told investigators that Winter blamed the victim for an earlier, unrelated assault, while the 16-year-old seemed to resent Pairama for something she had posted on Facebook. The 16-year-old’s own version of events would change multiple times, but she at one point said that Pairama had been “talking smack behind her back”, prosecutors alleged.

“It’s unfathomable that either of these two reasons” could result in such “a senseless and unimaginable attack to a young and vulnerable teenager”, Robertson said, adding: “Sometimes we can never know why things happen.”

Defence lawyer David Niven acknowledged during his own opening statement that many of the horrific details outlined by prosecutors are uncontested and that his client was present when “the catalogue of horrible things happened to Ms Pairama”.

But while she participated in “some of the torture”, the 16-year-old had no interest in helping when she realised Winter’s intention to kill Pairama, Niven said.

“She does not accept that she offered them any help,” he said. “She actively took steps to discourage them.

“...She never expected things to go that far.”

Niven described his client as a relatively recent friend of the victim who had no reason to wish death upon her. He pointed to a communications assistant sitting next to his client in the dock as proof of her disability, which he suggested might be a reason she wasn’t successfully able to convince the older co-defendants to desist.

He also acknowledged to jurors that parts of the trial will be “extremely unpleasant” for jurors.

Testimony is set to resume tomorrow.

Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.