UPDATE: The jury in the 1967 Rochester rape trial has been discharged after failing to reach a unanimous or majority verdict. Read more here.
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Day 2: The woman who was in the same car as the alleged victim of rape in Rochester in 1967 does not remember the night in question, a court has heard.
But another woman, Jacqueline Boyd, said the complainant pointed out her alleged rapist, John Thomas O’Connell, at a dance in Moama three months after the incident.
The County Court trial of O’Connell, 69, continued in Bendigo on Thursday, in which both women appeared as witnesses.
The case centres on the evidence of Ms Boyd, who spent many days picking fruit with the complainant and accompanied her to dances.
The court heard Ms Boyd, who was six years older than the complainant, was first told of the alleged rape when the two went to a dance together in Moama.
The pair were leaving when O’Connell allegedly approached Ms Boyd.
“A man said to me, ‘Who’s your mate?’ I looked at him, and (the complainant) grabbed me, crying, shaking, it was awful,” Ms Boyd said.
“She said, ‘That’s the man that raped me’.
“I said that was Jack O’Connor. I thought that was his name. It was the same person.”
Ms Boyd said she knew of O’Connell but made a mistake with his name.
She said there was a noticeable change in the demeanor of the complainant in the months after the alleged rape.
“She got quiet, she didn’t mix well like she did before,” Ms Boyd said.
“I was worried about her.”
The two women lived together in Melbourne when the complainant gave up her son, conceived from the incident, for adoption. Ms Boyd described the decision as a “terrible thing”.
The son tracked his mother down in 2000 and convinced her to go to police with the rape allegations. DNA evidence confirmed the man was the son of the complainant and O’Connell.
Ms Boyd said the motivation in reopening the rape case had nothing to do with compensation, but was about the complainant wanting “to see justice done”.
The woman who was with the complainant on the night in question, Valda Grogan, also gave evidence to the trial. She was aged 12 at the time.
When asked if she had any memory of the night, Ms Grogan replied: “Not at all.”
She told the court of her surprise when police investigators contacted her.
“I thought someone was playing a silly joke on me,” Ms Grogan said.
“If something like that had happened, I would have remembered.”
She said she could remember her childhood “vividly”.
The prosecution alleged Ms Grogan and the complainant got into a car with O’Connell and another man in Rochester, before they were driven out of town. O’Connell allegedly dragged the complainant 100 metres from the car and raped her.
Police informant Detective Senior Constable Bernadette Waddington told the court of the difficulty in tracking down statements and records from the period.
Detectives from Shepparton took a statement from Ms Boyd in 1967, which could not be found.
There was also no record of the complainant’s time at a convent in Melbourne, where she discovered she was pregnant. Adoption records could also not be found.
Records of the black car allegedly used in the night in question were unable to be found.
All witnesses have now been called in the trial, which continues.