Source : Perth Now news
Zumba instructor Mark Sheridan Waden has been convicted of the 2018 murder of his former de facto partner, Priscilla Brooten.
The jury retired to begin deliberations on Monday morning following a gruelling and highly charged circumstantial trial.
By Tuesday morning, they returned to the courtroom with a unanimous verdict, rejecting Waden’s claims of innocence and finding him guilty of murder after five hours of deliberation.
Reacting to the verdict at Brisbane Supreme Court, the 50-year-old said: “It wasn’t me.”
The trial centred on the disappearance of Ms Brooten, a 46-year-old US citizen who vanished from the couple’s Bracken Ridge home in July 2018.
Because her body has never been found, the prosecution relied on a complex web of circumstantial evidence, mobile phone tower data, and Waden’s own extensive web of lies to secure the conviction.
Crown Prosecutor Andrew Walklate argued that a “pressure cooker scenario” had built up in the household, driven by financial strain, job instability and Waden’s infidelity with a 21-year-old colleague, Desiree Hatzipapas.
The catalyst, the Crown said, came on July 4, 2018, when Ms Brooten accessed Waden’s Facebook account and discovered messages exposing the affair.
According to the prosecution, this triggered a violent confrontation from which she would not escape.
“The events of the 5th of July 2018 did not occur in a vacuum,” Mr Walklate told the jury.
“It had background. It had hatred. It had violence.”
The prosecution also pointed to evidence that Ms Brooten’s personal belongings, clothing, makeup, a notebook and other possessions at the Bracken Ridge home.
In that notebook, Ms Brooten wrote about threatening to expose Waden.
“I have threatened to ruin his life by exposing his weed business or posting my injuries from when he almost killed me,” she wrote.
The prosecution said Ms Brooten was killed on or shortly after July 5, and Waden immediately launched a meticulous, multi-year cover-up.
On the morning of July 5, the day Ms Brooten vanished, Waden urgently hired a contractor via AirTasker to dig a trench beside his driveway. The Crown argued this was intended as a temporary gravesite.
In May 2019, directly coinciding with tightening police inquiries, Waden excavated more than 800kg of soil from his yard and transported it across three trips between the Nudgee waste facility and his parents’ home.
Prosecutors said this was done to permanently dispose of forensic evidence, and he later pressure-washed his wheelie bin.
The prosecution also pointed to a bizarre phone call made to the US Consulate in Sydney, where a man with an Australian accent claimed Ms Brooten had fled to a non-existent town in Maryland and was being held against her will.
Mr Walklate said Waden impersonated Ms Brooten’s long-term ex-partner Steve Thompson to insert “misinformation into the system” and divert the investigation.
“The significance of every lie that took place post the evening of 5th July 2018 was to distance Mr Waden from the consequences of this crime,” Mr Walklate said.
“Because he knew that the truth would incriminate him.”
Defence barrister James Godbolt strongly contested the Crown’s case, highlighting the lack of direct forensic evidence linking Waden to a murder.
The defence suggested Ms Brooten, who had a history of major depression and was living in Australia illegally, may have disappeared voluntarily or taken her own life.
However, the jury ultimately accepted the prosecution’s forensic timeline.
The defence argued that cell tower logs placed Waden at his parents’ home in Lawnton on the evening of July 6, 2018, while Ms Brooten’s phone was pinging towers 25 minutes away in Scarborough, claiming he could not be in two places at once.
The prosecution countered that Waden had orchestrated the movement of devices to create a false alibi.
Prosecutors also highlighted that text messages sent from Ms Brooten’s phone to Steve Thompson on July 6 were inconsistent with her usual communication habits.
For a decade, the pair had exclusively used WhatsApp due to international costs, and the sudden shift to standard text messaging, sent via a tower near Waden’s route, was said to indicate manipulation.
The jury was also persuaded by what the prosecution described as Waden’s “consciousness of guilt” after the disappearance.
Rather than acting like a distressed partner, he gave away Ms Brooten’s phone, makeup and clothing to his new girlfriend, Ms Hatzipapas.
When police left a calling card for Ms Hatzipapas in December 2018, Waden attempted to take his own life.
While in hospital, he told a mental health nurse that police were tracing a missing person case back to him.
He later told Ms Hatzipapas, “They’ll get me on circumstantial evidence.”
The Crown also rejected the defence theory of suicide or voluntary disappearance, noting Ms Brooten was actively planning her future and attending therapy.
She had also obtained a new US passport in January 2018, which Border Force records showed was never used to leave Australia.
Prosecutors said it was implausible that Ms Brooten would cut contact with her mother, particularly as she later became ill and died in the United States.
Ultimately, the jury found the combination of the timeline, the trench excavation, the removal of soil, and Waden’s efforts to mislead investigators pointed to only one conclusion, that Waden killed Priscilla Brooten.
While the legal proceedings have concluded, the mystery of where Ms Brooten’s body is remains unsolved. Her family and friends are left without answers or the closure of a burial.
Following the verdict on Tuesday, Waden was formally convicted of murder and remanded in custody ahead of sentencing.
