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Gable Tostee Found Not Guilty of Murdering Tinder Date Warriena Wright

New details of the Gold Coast man's "creepy" and criminal behaviour have been revealed since the verdict.
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Warriena Wright and Gable Tostee. Image supplied.

Gable Tostee, the Gold Coast man who was accused of killing New Zealand woman Warriena Wright, has been found not guilty of murder, and of the lesser charge of manslaughter, after his trial at the Brisbane Supreme Court.

Wright, 26, who was on holiday on the Gold Coast, died after falling from the balcony of then 28-year-old Tostee's 14th-storey Gold Coast apartment in the early hours of August 8, 2014.

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The pair had matched on Tinder a week earlier and, after exchanging messages for several days, met in person for the first time on August 7, just hours before Wright died.

The trial focused on the secret 199-minute recording Tostee made on his phone of the pair's increasingly ill-tempered night together. Wright and Tostee, who "regularly" made recordings of his nights out "in case something happened," met and bought beer before returning to Tostee's apartment, where they drank home-distilled vodka and had sex.

The recording captures Wright and Tostee making "drunken chatter about gods, galaxies, ninjas, and her family" according to stuff.co.nz.

Before long, the evening soured, the pair arguing and then physically fighting. The court heard that Wright was "massively" drunk when she started throwing decorative rocks at Tostee, who then pinned her to the ground and—the prosecution alleged—choked her. A transcript of the recording published in the Daily Mail records Tostee saying, "You are lucky I haven't chucked you off my balcony you god damn psycho little bitch."

Later, minutes before her death, Wright pleaded to go home, Tostee replying, "I would but you have been a bad girl," before locking Wright on his balcony. Police alleged that, fearful for her life, at 2:21 AM she made a bid to escape by climbing onto the balcony below and falling to her death. The recording then captured Tostee's panicked reaction, his calls to his lawyer, and, finally, him ordering and then eating pizza from Dominos.

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In a separate recording, made later that evening, Tostee says to his father, "Why does this shit always happen to me? I didn't ask for this."

It has since been revealed that Tostee was a "skilful forger" and had committed crimes while "heavily intoxicated" in the same early hours of the morning Wright fell to her death. He had also been banned from nightclubs for "creeping out" young girls.

At the time of his arrest for murder, Tostee was facing charges relating to a driving incident dating from two weeks before Wright's death in which he fled police in a chase that reached speeds of up to 200 kilometres an hour. While on bail for murder, he was sentenced to six months in prison for that offence.

A regular in the Gold Coast's nightclubs, Tostee was banned from one, Sin City, after owner Ty Davidson received complaints from young women that he had been "creeping them out".

The New Zealand Herald reports that this wasn't the only place he'd been making young women feel uncomfortable. Tostee once wrote on social media about a previous Tinder date, a 21-year-old, who he had taken back to that same apartment: "She's small so I go to hug and lift her up and take her inside from the balcony but she totally freaks out, mumbles something about getting back to her parents and bolts out the door… Maybe I acted too abruptly and snapped her out of her little lust-trance by manhandling her."

The jury of six men and six women, taking four days to reach its verdict, was not made aware of these details.

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