After spending over 15 years on remand, a 59-year-old man has been freed of murdering a German engineer in Tobago.
Sheldon Keel was found not guilty by High Court Judge Sherene Murray-Bailey at the end of his judge-alone trial, last Friday.
Keel was jointly charged with his former landlord Ainsworth Williams for murdering German national Peter Taut on an unknown date between October 30 and November 2, 2009.
Taut, 49, was found buried in a shallow grave in the front yard of his Bacolet Crescent home.
Police officers excavated his property after his friends reported him missing.
Taut’s feet and hands were bound and there was duct tape over his mouth. An autopsy revealed that he died of asphyxia and blunt force trauma to his head.
Keel, his then-girlfriend and their two children were found in Taut’s house during the search and he (Keel) was eventually charged alongside Williams for the crime.
Williams, who had sickle cell disease at the time, died before the case came up for trial.
During the trial, Williams’ former common-law wife testified that she overheard Williams and Keel discussing killing Taut.
She claimed that she saw them with the ingredients for a “bush” tea as well as rat poison and sleeping tablets.
However, Keel’s then-girlfriend claimed that he was picking up his son from school at the time he and Williams were alleged to have been discussing Taut’s murder.
Keel, through his lawyers Michelle Gonzales and Ayanna Norville-Modeste, of the Public Defenders’ Department (PDD), denied any wrongdoing as he claimed that Williams had asked him to clean Taut’s home, which he (Williams) claimed to have recently purchased.
In deciding the case, Justice Murray-Bailey treated the evidence of Williams’ wife with caution as she found her to be a witness with an interest to serve.
She found that the circumstantial evidence presented by prosecutors was insufficient to prove that Keel was guilty of the crime.
Justice Murray-Bailey found that prosecutors had failed to eliminate other possibilities and prove that separate events and circumstances in the case could only be explained rationally by Keel being guilty.
Taut’s house was located a short distance from a property owned by British couple Peter and Muriam Green.
Months before Taut’s murder, the couple barely survived an attack by a cutlass-wielding intruder at their home.
A man from Argyle, Tobago, was initially charged with the attempted murder of the Greens, although residents and the couple claimed that the police had charged the wrong man.
However, the charges were eventually dismissed by a magistrate after prosecutors failed to lead any evidence against him.
The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) was represented by Maria Lyons-Edwards and Roger Hinds.
