IN what has been described as a case of sex, lies and obeah, the lead prosecutor, in urging the jury to return a guilty verdict in Michael McLean’s murder trial, yesterday asserted that the six family members were killed as a ‘blood sacrifice’ so the accused could overcome impotence.

“All of them were killed as a sacrifice,” Director of Public Prosecution Paula Llewellyn said during her closing arguments in the Home Circuit Court.

She explained that based on McLean’s fixation with his penis throughout the trial and how confident he was about his sexual prowess, it was clear that his penis was “extraordinarily important to him” and that the victims were killed to “protect the return of the golden penis”.

Llewellyn said the accused, in his mind, felt that his girlfriend was responsible for his back pain and loss of feeling from his navel down to his leg, which he suspected was a result of the “pink fish” that she had given him to eat or the drink that she had received from her obeah man, so he murdered her and her family.

The prosecutor told the jurors that McLean, who appeared very haughty, was too smug to admit that was the reason for the victims’ demise, so he concocted a story and told several lies to deflect from the truth.

“You think he can come and admit that his belief in obeah and his stupidness and ignorance kill these people?” she said.

Llewellyn said that McLean had skilfully planned how he was going to kill the victims and that he killed them all with precision, except for the child who was buried, as all five victims died from a clean cut to the neck. However, she said “there is no perfect crime”.

She told the jurors not to forget that McLean was the last person who was seen with his girlfriend, Terry-Ann ‘Teeny’ Mohammed, and her grand-niece Jihad McCool, whose body was found in a shallow grave in St Mary. Llewellyn said, too, that the person who killed them had in his possession something to cause fire, because Mohammed’s torso had been significantly burnt and pieces of burnt wood were found in the dense area where Jihad’s body was found.

Additionally, the prosecutor asked the jurors to reject the story that McLean had given, blaming gunmen for killing the other four victims.

“The Crown’s case is solid and it points in one direction and one direction only, that between February 25 and 26, he engineered a diabolical plan to make blood sacrifices attached to obeah, to overcome weakness and impotence below his waist, and to pay back Teeny,” Llewellyn said.

She warned the seven-member jury, “Do not let him get away. It is wrong and what he did to this family was wrong.”

Meanwhile, attorney Carlton Colman, who assisted the accused, in his closing argument, said that the police were not interested in uncovering the truth but instead had done everything to identify his client as the person responsible for the murders.

Colman pointed to evidence given by his client that he informed the police, two weeks before the victims were killed, that men had raped his girlfriend but they did not look into the reports, which he said was an “affront and insult to common sense”.

The attorney also urged the jury, which consists of four women and three men, to rubbish the claim that obeah was the motive for the murders.

“They want you to believe that the motive is obeah, but the real motive is violence that ended up in the death of Teeny and her family, yet they did not investigate it,” he said.

He also told the jurors to bear in mind that McLean had given the police the names of two individuals who he said were responsible.

As it relates to the accused man’s story that men had accosted him and killed his girlfriend and Jihad, Colman said the men who had murdered the victims left McLean behind so that he could be the fall guy.

Colman also implored the jury not to act on the prosecution’s advice to convict McLean, as the Crown’s case lacked substance and was essentially a “slap dash” investigation.

“Don’t buss you brain. If you don’t feel that way (that McLean is guilty) don’t feel guilty,” he said.

Colman further told the jury: “Having seen the case die a natural death, you don’t try and revive it. So you just come and return a not guilty conviction.”

McLean is being tried on six counts of murder for the death of Mohammed and her nine-year-old son, Jesse Ogilvie, along with her niece, Patrice Martin-McCool, and her children, Lloyd McCool, Jihad and Sean Chin, who were all killed between February 25 and 26.

Mohammed’s badly burnt body was found in bushes in the community of Needham Pen, while Martin-McCool and her children were found with their throats slashed in bushes near Prospect beach in St Thomas.

Justice Bertram Morrison is expected to start summarising the case today.