ATTORNEY Courtney Rowe on Thursday directed some tough questions at a detective constable in the Home Circuit Court in Kingston as he sought to discredit voice recordings and other evidence presented by the policeman in the murder trial of Everton “Beachy Stout” McDonald and Oscar Barnes.

McDonald and Barnes are on trial for the July 20, 2020 murder of McDonald’s second wife, Tonia, on the main road in Sherwood Forest, Portland.

The recordings being challenged by Rowe were allegedly done by Denvalyn “Bubbla” Minott, who was convicted for the murder after he confessed to being the contractor in the killing.

He claimed that McDonald gave him a $3-million contract to murder the 32-year-old woman, but he had subcontracted the hit to Barnes, who allegedly stabbed Tonia to death and cut throat before setting her and the car she was driving on fire.

Tonia’s body was found partially burnt while the Toyota Axio motor car she was driving was reduced to a shell in a blaze.

The recordings being challenged by Rowe were allegedly made by Minott on a Samsung A31 cellular phone. They are purported to be conversations between McDonald and Minott discussing the murder.

On Wednesday roughly a dozen of those 38 recordings were played for the seven-member jury. On Thursday, Rowe, who is one of five attorneys representing McDonald, contested that the recordings were fabricated.

Rowe delved deep into the possible origins of the recordings and had a difficult time cross-examining the witness.

“All you have presented to us is a fabrication by you and the lead detective. You could not have gotten the files from an SD card. The Samsung A31 was used by someone before you did your extraction,” Rowe said to the witness.

Rowe made the point that, in the report presented to the court, the file pathways for the recordings and photos allegedly found on Minott’s phone, when he gave it to the police, do not include the words Samsung or SD card.

“When you add information from a laptop to an SD card and you do a logical extraction, you would see a file pathway that indicates SD card, correct?” the attorney asked.

The detective constable responded saying, “You don’t have to do an extraction to see a pathway. Pathway simply shows where a file is stored.”

Rowe asked him if the extraction report he presented to the court has any information about SD being part of a file pathway name.

The detective responded, “Normally when you do a logical extraction it would not show you a pathway directly from the root folder, but actually the folder from which you did the extraction from. A physical extraction would show you from the root folder all the way to the existing files.”

Rowe instructed the detective to open a folder on his computer with the name Samsung. He then told the cop to click on a PDF file, before he started drilling the detective with more questions.

“Isn’t the name of the root file for that document ‘media’?” Rowe asked.

The detective responded “Yes”.

Rowe then said, “So you agree that when you do a logical extraction, the extraction report does show you the root folder?”

The detective responded, “In this event, sir”.

Rowe then asked him if he agreed that in the file pathways there is no information about anything relating to a Samsung A31 or SD card, which the recordings and photos were allegedly found on.

The detective said, “I don’t see that information there, sir. I don’t see anything about a Samsung Galaxy A31, but the data was taken from a Samsung Galaxy A31. It is taken from the device even though the file name says nothing about Samsung A31.”

Rowe’s suggestion that he could have possibly tampered with the file pathways was met with “No, sir.”

Touching specifically on the call recordings, Rowe got the policeman to admit that nowhere in the file pathways does it have the words Kingston Micro SD card.

He again made the point that it was the defence’s view that the recordings, which all bear the name SIM1, were fabricated.

The controversial recordings were said to have been done on a Samsung A31 and saved to an SD card, based on what Minott told the court previously during his testimony as a prosecution witness.

The other attorneys representing McDonald are Earl Hamilton, Christopher Townsend, Ryan Jon-Paul Hamilton, and John Jacobs.

The attorneys representing Barnes are Earnest Davis and Vincent Wellesley.