Tabak drank champagne ‘night after killing Yeates’
The 33-year-old man was described as “tired and disinterested” after allegedly strangling Yeates with his bare hands the previous evening.
But he still found time to drink champagne as he joined girlfriend Tanja Morson at a friend’s birthday party on Bristol’s harbourside, the jury heard.
Yeates, meanwhile, was said to have told friends she was “dreading” spending the weekend alone on December 17 last year, hours before she was strangled to death by next-door neighbour Tabak.
Linda Marland said she had chatted to Tabak the next day as her daughter, Elizabeth, celebrated her 24th birthday at a bar.
She said Elizabeth had stayed in Tabak’s spare room while he was working in Los Angeles in the autumn.
Marland told Bristol Crown Court: “Vincent sounded tired and disinterested. He was being short with his answers, not elaborating.
“I found it quite difficult. He only looked at me once. The rest of the time he was staring up the room. I got the impression Vincent was bored with my conversation... he was drinking a glass of champagne.”
Tabak would attend dinner parties and joke about the murder inquiry in the weeks after Yeates’s body was found three miles from her Clifton home, it was claimed.
Dutch engineer Tabak admits manslaughter but denies Yeates’s murder.
The court heard from a string of friends who had drunk with Yeates on the night of her death.
Yeates confided in one colleague of her fears at being without boyfriend Greg Reardon, who was visiting family in Sheffield.
Yeates, aged 25, who worked as a landscape architect at BDP, told office manager Elisabeth Chandler she planned to spend the weekend baking.
“Jo told me that she was dreading the weekend because it was the first time she was going to be left on her own,” she said in a written statement.
Other colleagues from BDP told the trial Yeates “did not appear in the best of moods” and was “bored”.
But Irishman Darragh Bellew, a landscape architect colleague of Yeates, said she bought him a pint during the festive drinks.
When junior prosecution barrister Nicholas Rowland asked him whether she was drunk, Bellew told the jury: “Not at all, just jovial, her usual self.”
The trial continues.
