Mary John Ayuel pleaded not guilty to her two arson-related charges when her judge-alone trial started in the ACT Supreme Court. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
A true “whodunit” began in the ACT’s courts when a woman was accused of starting fires at two homes while those who lived there, including at least one child, were still inside.
Mary John Ayuel, a 27-year-old from Moncrieff, pleaded not guilty to two arson-related charges when her judge-alone trial began in the ACT Supreme Court on Monday (3 November).
She was close friends with a woman for years before the pair had a falling out, prosecutor Nathan Deakes said he expected the court would hear.
He stated that on the night of 10 September 2023, this woman was at her home in Moncrieff with her partner and six-year-old son when the smoke alarm sounded.
This woman later told the court that she had seen smoke coming from under the garage door, so she went to investigate.
“You couldn’t see anything at all, besides the fire,” she said.
“The whole garage was engulfed in fire.”
She said she was wearing hair extensions at the time and the heat burned the front of her hair when she opened the door.
The woman said she ran, grabbed her son, and took him outside while her partner called Triple Zero.
The fire caused extensive damage to the garage and engulfed the car parked inside it before it was extinguished, Mr Deakes said.
In a separate incident, Mr Deakes said police were called to a disturbance at almost midnight and spoke to Ayuel and her neighbour outside their homes in their apartment complex.
The officers thought Ayuel was under the influence of alcohol at the time and wasn’t making any sense when she was speaking to them.
Early the next morning, on 11 September, the neighbour heard her smoke alarm go off and saw smoke coming from under the front of her apartment.
The neighbour asked her daughter to call the police, and she did. This fire damaged the front door and the surrounding floor.
Mr Deakes alleged Ayuel, who was arrested after the second fire, lit both fires in retaliation for the perceived wrongs committed against her by her former friend and her neighbour.
He said CCTV captured a person, alleged to be Ayuel, entering and then leaving through the back gate of the former friend’s home before the fire started.
He expected the central issue in the trial would be the identity of the person who started the fires.
Barrister Travis Jackson stated that no witness claimed to have seen his client at the scene of the fires, and he argued that there was a lack of direct evidence of identification in the case.
“In some regards, it’s a very simple case in the sense of whodunit rather than what occurred,” he said.
“The only issue in this trial is identification.”
He said his client lived in the Moncrieff area, so he thought the telephone tower data would not be much help for the prosecution in proving their case.
The former friend was the first witness called in the trial, appearing in court via an audio-visual link from the Alexander Maconochie Centre as she is a sentenced prisoner.
She said she had known Ayuel for years, including by her Sudanese traditional name, ‘Adut’.
The woman said Ayuel came over to her home a few days before the fire, then “flipped out” and went home.
“I had my bike at her house at the time, and she cut my bike tyres and sent me a photo of that,” she said.
“However she gets treated in the outside, she will come and take it out on me.”
The court was shown text messages between the pair, in which the woman said Ayuel had been writing “nonsense”.
Ayuel appeared visibly annoyed at times while her former friend was testifying, either shaking her head or rolling her eyes. She sat in the courtroom’s dock as she is currently in custody.
The trial is expected to run for three days before Acting Justice Patricia Kelly.
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