QC: Ebanks killed banker

(CNS): A jury was told it could safely convict Leonard Antonio Ebanks of Frederic Bise’s murder, Thursday, as Simon Russell Flint QC dismissed the defendant’s claims of a conspiracy and said the jury could be sure he was one of the two men who had killed the Swiss banker. Flint said the evidence from two different women, who both claim Ebanks had confessed to them, was not a malicious collusion or conspiracy involving the police and the prosecution in order to wrongly convict an innocent man, but clear evidence that Ebanks was one of the murderers. Acknowledging inconsistencies in the women’s stories he said the fundamentals of what they said were the same and they had related facts that only the killer could have told them.

As he summed up the crown’s case before the twelve men and women of the jury after a four week trial in the Grand Court, the crown’s lead prosecutor said that Ebanks’ evidence that the women were lying out of malice and greed was “utter rubbish” but that was the only thing that Ebanks could say in defence of the charges.

He said the defendant had told lie after lie as he tried to evade a second murder conviction but the only reason why the women had given evidence about Ebanks’ alleged confessions was because he had not been able to stop himself from telling the women about his crime.
With no forensic evidence or eye witness evidence linking Ebanks to the murder of Bise the crown is dependent on the jury believing the accountsgiven by the women who, the crown said, do not know each other and had heard Ebanks confessions on separate occasions two years apart.

Flint reminded the jury of what he described as the horrific head injuries Bise had sustained at the hands of his killers and that the pathologist had said they had likely been sustained with a cinder block – the weapon that Ebanks had told both women he had used when he made his alleged confessions.

Bise was killed after what the crown believe was a gay sexual encounter for money. His badly beaten body was found in the back of his own burned out car which had been parked on the driveway in front of the house, where the Swiss banker was living at the time.
Flint said that Ebanks had been part of a joint enterprise with Chad Anglin and had killed Bise and that the jury could be sure that he would have no problem selling his body for sex and do whatever it took to get money for drugs.

The case continues Friday with the defence’s closing speech by Courtney Griffiths QC. The judge presiding in the case, Justice Charles Quin, is expected to sum up the evidence for the jury Monday before they will be asked to deliberate.