A second neighbour has told a jury he saw “shadows” involved in an apparent violent disturbance just inside a Carlisle address where Lee McKnight is said to have been badly beaten before he died.
Four men, along with mother and daughter Carol and Coral Edgar, are on trial and are accused of murdering 26-year-old Mr McKnight.
At the city’s crown court earlier today, a woman recalled seeing violence and hearing repeated cries of pain from inside a property directly opposite hers, on Charles Street, at around 2am on July 24.
This afternoon, the woman’s boyfriend also gave evidence about events which sparked a murder probe after Mr McKnight’s body was found in a river on the Carlisle outskirts just over three hours later.
The man described how he “heard banging, as if somebody’s door was getting kicked through”. He jumped up and looked across the street.
“All I could see was male shadows on the other side of the door,” he recalled. “I’m saying male because I know Coral and I know Carol, and the shadows that I seen behind the door were too large to have been them.”
There were three or four shadows, he said, as if they were kicking and stamping. He also heard not screams but a yelp.
“It sounded like a man, not a woman, but as bad as it sounds we thought it was just an every day occurrence over that road,” he said.
Were it ever quiet, he explained, “I would be worried”, adding: “That’s just the sort of house and street it was.”
There was music on in the house opposite at times, he told jurors, and he recalled then seeing Carol Edgar return to the address and park her Nissan Navara outside.
He said it was facing towards Fusehill Street, in contrast to his girlfriend’s earlier evidence that the vehicle was pointing in the opposite direction.
Carol Edgar seemed “bouncy” as she got out of the Navara, the male neighbour remembered.
But he then saw her Charles Street front door was open with Coral standing there “white-looking, grey” and “clearly not herself”.
Coral then appeared to say something to her mother, of whom the neighbour said: “Her full demeanour went from about 10ft to about 4ft, the way she was carrying herself.”
Both he and his girlfriend insisted they heard the sound of a barking dog they thought was Carol Edgar’s inside her address.
But jurors heard it was “agreed by everybody in this case that the dog was not present”.
The couple spoke of not providing statements to police initially, but then giving accounts when they later realised it had been such a serious incident.
They also took issue, during cross-examination, with a defence barrister’s suggestion that the disturbance behind the door involved only one person striking another, with that pair then involved in “some sort of grappling”.
In addition, both neighbours described a third defendant, Paul Roberts, arriving at the Charles Street address.
“He had some, like, Army canvas rucksack on his back,” said the male neighbour.
Coral Edgar, Carol Edgar, Roberts and three other men deny murder, and the trial continues.
