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Hells Angels 'made me murder'
by Karen Michelmore
February 25, 2005
From: AAP 
A TEENAGER told police he killed two Thai prostitutes as a "favour" for the outlaw motorcycle gang the Hells Angels, a Darwin court was told today.
 
Ben William McLean, 19, said he owed the gang $50,000 and they had threatened to kill him unless he removed the two women from the streets of Darwin.
"They said that they will knock me off unless I do them a favour, to repay the money," Mr McLean told police shortly after his arrest, in an interview replayed to court today.
 
"What was the favour?" Brisbane police asked in the tape.
 
"Get two prostitutes off the street. They said I had to kill them."
 
Mr McLean and friend Phu Ngoc Trinh, also 19, are standing trial in the Northern Territory Supreme Court over the drowning murders of the two women in the crocodile-infested Adelaide River, south-east of Darwin, last year.
 
The floating bodies of Phuangsri Kroksamrang, 58, and Somjai Insamnan, 27, were found in the river by crocodile-spotting tour operators.
 
Mr McLean told police Mr Trinh had agreed to help him kill the women after he had been approached in a Darwin pub by two Hells Angels two months earlier, the court was told.
 
The men had shown him photographs of the women and told him their names.
 
"I was using speed and I ripped them off," Mr McLean told police, explaining why he did what they wanted.
 
However, Prosecutor Rex Wild, QC, had previously told the jury to disregard any suggestion the Hells Angels had anything to do with the murders.
 
He told the jury in his opening the defence had admitted it was an "untrue story".
 
The court heard today that Mr McLean told police Mr Trinh had picked up the two women and taken them to his parent's farm in rural Darwin, where Mr McLean was sleeping.
 
The women stayed for three or four hours at the property, with Mr Trinh having sex with both women and Mr McLean having sex with the younger of the two.
 
The teenagers then told the women to sit on a couch while they bound their ankles and wrists with cable ties.
 
Neither woman screamed, Mr McLean said, but one resisted and he held her in a "hug", before both women were placed in the back of the Trinh family van.
 
Mr McLean drove to the Adelaide River, while Mr Trinh strangled or suffocated the women in the back, the court heard.
 
"We pulled over and went to dump them off the bridge ... and they were already dead," Mr McLean said in the interview played to court.
 
"They weren't moving or kicking or anything.
 
"If anyone's going to throw me off a bridge I'd be kicking or saying something."
 
The court has previously heard tests showed the women were alive, but possibly unconscious, when they went into the water.
 
The pair put batteries on the women's legs, "to supposedly hold them under", Mr McLean said in the interview.
 
"We picked them up and dropped them off one by one."
 
The pair then drove back to the Trinh family farm and slept until the next morning, when they went back to work picking vegetables.
 
"We had to pick ochre because you can't miss it for a day, it goes too big," Mr McLean told police in the interview.
 
The trial continues.
 

 

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