Woman lied in hunt for knifeman,court told

A WOMAN lied to police when officers raided her home looking for her partner in connection with an attack on a legal official, a court heard yesterday.

Mary Ann O’Neill told officers she did not know where Robert Graham was – but he was on the other side of the world and had phoned her hours earlier.

Ms O’Neill, 26, said she had been so shocked by the early-morning raid that she did not have time to think.

“I was not truthful … it just came out instinctively,” she said.

Graham, 46, denies attempting to murder Leslie Cumming, 68, then deputy chief executive of the Law Society of Scotland, in January 2006 in a lane at the rear of his home in the Murrayfield area of Edinburgh.

It is alleged he slashed and stabbed Mr Cumming repeatedly on the face and body with a knife to the danger of his life, causing permanent disfigurement.

In a special defence, Graham stated that the offence was not committed by him but by a third party, whose name he did not know.

Ms O’Neill told the High Court in Edinburgh that she had met Graham, 20 years her senior, when she began to work in a sunbed shop he ran in the Morningside area of the city.

The shop ran into financial difficulties about the end of 2005. By then, Ms O’Neill was in charge, and Graham had taken scaffolding work. He was fired from his job just before Christmas.

Prosecutor, Lesley Thomson, QC, the Solicitor-General for Scotland, asked her about the police arriving with a search warrant at her home in Pilton Avenue, Edinburgh, in June 2009.

Ms O’Neill said she had been pregnant with her third child.

It was early in the morning. Graham was not there.

Ms O’Neill said: “I told them I didn’t know. I was not truthful. He was in Australia. I knew he didn’t do it. I was shocked. I didn’t have time to think. It just came out instinctively. But I knew as soon as I said it, it was wrong.”

The family had planned to move to Australia and he had gone on ahead.

The trial continues.