Leigh Matthew Frederick Beer is on trial for murder. Photo: RNZ / Robin Martin
A witness has recalled finding it unusual to hear a man screaming a woman's name at the scene of a fatal fire in New Plymouth, but never hearing a woman scream back.
Leigh Matthew Frederick Beer is on trial at the New Plymouth High Court, charged with arson and murder following the death of 21-year-old Emma Field in May 2022.
Her body was found at a Devon Street West property after a fire swept through part of the century-old house divided into flats.
Beer is also charged with assault with intent to injure for punching a motorist who stopped to help fight the fire.
The Crown argues after an evening of drinking and drug taking, Beer "out of the blue" tipped over a bed Field was asleep on and set the mattress alight and left her to burn to death.
Emma Field. Photo: NZME
He has denied all charges.
Beer's defence team has argued the case against him is circumstantial and someone else could have lit the fire.
A video of an interview with a witness - who has name suppression - was played to the jury on Thursday.
In the video shot three weeks after the fatal fire, a detective specialised in interviewing young people asked the witness what she remembered of the night of the fatal fire.
The witness said she was playing guitar in a bedroom in a house across the street when at about 10.25pm she heard arguing, a male voice swearing and some male laughter.
Unsettled, she went into another room and began playing computer games with a cousin when a short while later they began to hear "a male voice screaming a woman's name".
"He screams out a girl's name, Amber - we thought it was Amber - but I'm pretty sure it was Emma."
Thinking the name sounded like the name of another family member's girlfriend, they went out to the road to investigate and saw the fire.
"It's not a big fire yet, it's like small ... it looked like it had already been lit a few minutes because it didn't look like it was big and exploding, but I heard the windows smashing and the guy breaking a window."
The witness ran back inside and woke up an adult relative before going outside again and calling 111.
She said a man appeared to be fighting the fire.
"He's got a hose and he's trying to put out the fire ... and he looks real tired and then this other guy comes and starts bashing him in the head and stuff."
The witness said when emergency services personnel arrived they separated the two men.
"Police pulled up and they try and grab the guy, but he's shaking and he's like screaming and fighting back and he was lying down on the ground at one point with a whole lot of medic people and police surrounding him."
He was put on a stretcher and put in a ambulance, she said.
"My cousins were all scared and like crying."
The court had previously heard an unruly and agitated Beer was sedated and taken to Taranaki Base Hospital.
Asked by the detective to go back over hearing the screaming, the witness said it was unusual.
"It was the guy screaming Amber, but one thing we talked about was that we couldn't hear her screaming which we were confused about because the fire had only started five, up to 10 minutes ago."
When the video finished, the Crown took the witness through a diagram she had drawn of the scene during the interview and CCTV footage taken on the night showing her and family members on the street.
Under cross examination from Beer's defence counsel, Julian Hannam, the witness confirmed she was at the back of a house across a busy road from where Field died, listening to Spotify when she heard the arguing at about 10.25pm.
She admitted she did not know where the arguing was coming from.
The witnessed confirmed to Hannam that the video interview was done three weeks after the fire.
"It's not the next day, it's not a week later, it's a couple of weeks later," Hannam noted.
He also asked if she had spoken to police before giving the interview.
"I think they may have come to see us once or twice," she replied.
Hannam then questioned the witness about who was hitting whom in front of the burning house.
She said a man came onto the property and hit the man who had been screaming and was pointing a hose at the fire.
The trial before Justice Karen Grau is in its second week and likely to last about a month.