A woman accused of plotting the murder of her former partner, whose body was fed into a woodchipper near Gympie, had a premonition about someone being injured in a terrible land-clearing accident only weeks before he died, a jury has heard.
Sharon Graham, 61, and her partner Gregory Roser, 63, are charged with the murder of Bruce Saunders, who died in November 2017 while tree lopping at a property in Goomboorian.
The couple pleaded not guilty last week at the start of their Supreme Court trial in Brisbane.
It is claimed that Mr Roser killed Mr Saunders before he and another man, Peter Koenig, put his body in the machine at the request of Ms Graham, who was to benefit from his $750,000 life insurance policy.
Ms Graham has denied instructing anyone to murder her former partner, while Mr Roser accepts that there was a plot, but has accused Mr Koenig of carrying out the killing.
On Wednesday, Ms Graham's former partner Barry Collins gave evidence, telling the court in the weeks before Mr Saunders died, she told him she thought someone was going to get hurt while clearing land.
She said she had a premonition that there was going to be a terrible accident.
According to Ms Graham's lawyer, Mr Collins accepted that he only provided this information to the police after he was arrested for drug trafficking in 2019, and he received a reduced sentence for his co-operation.
Before that, the court heard that Mr Collins had provided a character reference for Ms Graham in support of a bail application, telling her lawyer she was an honest, timid person, I cannot believe she would be involved in anything like this, he told the lawyer.
The court heard that he said to a second lawyer that Sharon put this together because she was a sheep If the crime was committed, it was not her doing, he told the second lawyer.
A friend of Mr Roser's, Joan Balfour, also testified about conversations she had with him about four months before Mr Saunders' death.
She said he was very stressed and worried.
He told me that he wanted to get rid of her partner at the time. Ms Balfour told the court Mr Roser's girlfriend, whom he never named but she knew to be a blonde woman, wanted Greg to shoot her partner, and he told him not to do that obviously, she said.
Ms Balfour told the court, in a second conversation with Mr Roser, he said he had a small gun and it was in the boot of his car.
He told me that last time he saw his girl that she sent him to her friend's house and that friend gave him a gun, she said.
The court heard that Mr Roser told Ms Balfour his girlfriend had provided him with the names of streets and times Mr Saunders would be driving and asked him to carry out the shooting on one of these routes.
Before we finished our conversation, Mr Roser agreed with me that it was stupid and he wasn't going to do it, Ms Balfour said.
The court heard from several other witnesses, including Mr Saunders son, his former wife and his former brother-in- law.