Lynne Martin. Photo: Social media image
The woman who killed her elderly father by setting his house alight has died suddenly, the day after she was found guilty of murder.
Lynne Martin, 63, was found dead in the cells at the Gisborne Police Station on Thursday morning, Stuff understands.
She was being held there before being transferred to prison, after a jury on Wednesday afternoon found her guilty of murdering her father, Ronald Allison.
Allison, 88, died when his house near Te Karaka, about 30 km from Gisborne, burned to the ground in the early hours of January 25, 2013.
In a trial that began earlier this month, the Crown said Martin drove from her home in Tauranga, entered her father's home and started the fire by placing a pot of oil or fat on the stove and turning the element on full, leading to a delayed ignition that started a fire that spread quickly and burned the house to the ground.
The defence didn't call evidence and the jury didn't hear from Martin, though they did hear her voice in hours of conversations recorded on hidden devices. But they heard from about 50 witnesses, including Martin's brother John and her husband Graeme.
In summing up, Crown prosecutor Steve Manning told the jurors that in order to secure a guilty verdict, the Crown had to show that Martin had started the fire that killed her father, and that she had intended to kill him.
He told the jurors they didn't need CCTV footage or an eyewitness to show this had occurred, and that they had been presented with sufficient evidence to infer that it had happened.
He said there had been "overwhelming evidence" showing Martin had been in Te Karaka at the time of her father's death, despite her denials, and the jurors had heard this from telecommunications' experts who told the court Martin's phone had been within about 10km of the Te Karaka cellphone tower for about two hours on the night.
He said evidence had shown Martin had lied "on multiple occasions on multiple topics", but her "big lie" was telling her husband Graeme, and the police, that she hadn't been in Te Karaka.
Manning said Allison's death hadn't occurred "in a vacuum" and it was shown that there had been years of disharmony between Martin and her father, particularly over her requests for money, and that in 2010 she threatened to go to police claiming he had sexually abused her. When he refused to give her money she followed through on her threat.
At the time of her father's death, Martin was "flat broke", and an undischarged bankrupt with just $119 to her name, and she knew she would get $150,000 from her father's will, Manning said.
But she told everyone she had been "cut out of the will", despite having a letter from her father - which the jury had seen - in which he said she would still get the $150,000 even though she had made the allegations of sexual abuse.
Manning said a phone call Martin made to her father at 11.03am on January 24, which lasted over 22 minutes, was the "trigger event" that led to her killing him.
"This was a call that followed a pattern of trying to get money or possessions out of her father. On this occasion he said no, and her reaction? She nutted off," he said.
"That phone call, sadly, seems to be all it took to set her off on a chain of events that led to her father's death," he said.
He told the jurors that they might think it "very unusual for someone to end their father's life by burning them to death", but the evidence showed she did it.
Evidence from fire experts showed the delayed ignition fire at Allison's house had started in a pot on the stove, exactly the same method of starting a fire that Martin would years later describe to an undercover police officer.
Manning reminded the jurors of Martin's conviction for arson in Australia in 1999, which had occurred when she was drunk and angry and followed a financial dispute, just as had been the case the night her father died.
It wasn't a "remarkable coincidence" that these strands of evidence pointed to Martin being the killer, he said.
Martin knew her father was at home alone, asleep, that he was immobile, would not be able to get up easily, had taken a sleeping pill as he always did, and that when she started the fire it was "logical reasoning" that she meant to kill him, Manning said.
Martin's lawyer Rachael Adams told the jurors there was no DNA, no fingerprints, no confession and no eyewitnesses and said the Crown was asking them to draw inferences by taking a number of pieces of evidence that were not sufficient on their own, in order to leap to the conclusion that Martin was the killer.
Using the rope analogy, she said the Crown's rope was not the only rope, and there could be other people that could not be ruled out.
* This story was previously published by Stuff.