A teenager told police he heard a loud, shrill scream followed by "no, no, no" on the night mother of three Paula Conlon was stabbed to death in her Canberra home.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The boy was playing video games just down the hallway when he heard the sounds, and said he was quite certain only he, Ms Conlon, and the man on trial for her murder were in the house.
The scream, he said, was Ms Conlon's.
"No man could scream that hard," he told police the night after the murder.
The teenager was boarding with Ms Conlon, a family friend, while he went to school in the ACT.
Ms Conlon's boyfriend Aleksander Vojneski, 31, is on trial for murdering her in her Macgregor home in March 2012.
On Tuesday, the teenager's interview with police was played to the court.
He said everything had seemed fine on the night of the murder.
Mr Vojneski was over and Ms Conlon seemed happy, he said. The couple were singing along to the video game SingStar, and Mr Vojneski had thanked the boy when he showed him how to get phone reception in the house.
"They both seemed pretty happy, we were talking about Jim Carey movies they both wanted to watch," he said. "They were having a good time, I could see they were drinking."
The teenager was in his room, playing an online game with people he knew, but went outside a number of times.
Ms Conlon and Mr Vojneski were playing music in the garage and asked to borrow his iPod dock.
Later on in the night, as he played the game, he said he heard the scream, despite wearing a set of headphones playing music and a set of earphones playing the video game's sounds and the voices of his fellow gamers.
The friend he was gaming with had heard the noise through a microphone and asked "what is going on in your house?"
Ms Conlon's boarder said he did not want to go outside, but later left his room at the end of a game.
He said he heard a noise from a loud outside gate. The tap was still running, he said, lights were on and a door to the garage was open.
The next morning he was in a rush and left without saying goodbye to Ms Conlon. He said he noticed her door was about one centimetre ajar and the light was still on.
"I didn't think there'd be a dead body in there," he told police the next night.
Earlier on Tuesday, an interview between police and Ms Conlon's eldest daughter was shown to the court.
She told police she had "never liked" her mother's new boyfriend, saying he yelled a lot and "went off at mum".
"He always used to come over, I never liked him," she said.
The daughter said Mr Vojneski was on very strong medication and would "go off" when he drank alcohol. "He used to yell a lot and he went off at mum, call her bad names."
The trial continues before Justice John Burns.
