THE CCTV camera perched up high in a boutique on Maitland Road was pointed at the front door and captured just a sliver of what was happening in the outside world.
A woman returns to her van, leans in to grab something and then the bottom half of a man comes into frame.
Over the next 36 seconds or so, the woman is attacked from behind, grabbed around the throat and sexually assaulted.
She tries to scream, but her voice won't come out, like a "kink in a hose".
"It was hard for me to [scream] as his hand was putting a large amount of pressure on my throat," the woman, aged in her 20s, told a jury in Newcastle District Court last week.
The woman struggles and lashes out, punching the man in the head 10-15 times.
Distraught and becoming exhausted, the woman is told "no one is going to hear you scream" as the man puts his hands over her mouth.
"I was in disbelief," the woman said. "It sounded like something out of a movie and I freaked out even more. It was beyond anything I could imagine someone saying in that moment."
Greentree was taken back behind bars and will face a sentence hearing in December.
It was a completely random and brazen attack; a shocking sexual assault on a stranger that occurred on a busy street almost blanketed by CCTV cameras in the lead-up to Christmas, 2021.
But when detectives visit Greentree at work a few days later and tell him of the allegation, he seems shocked too.
"I am not saying I didn't do it, I am just saying I don't have a memory of it," Greentree tells police.
Greentree, now 50 with no prior criminal record, had been out drinking with colleagues for their work Christmas party on the night of the attack and had just minutes before separated from the group after being denied entry to The Newcastle Hotel.
He is shown CCTV stills from the camera in the boutique and picks himself out as the man who approached the woman while she is leaning into her van.
After being interrupted and challenged by a passerby, Greentree flees, leaving his sunglasses behind.
Greentree tells police that he lost his glasses during the night and, shown a photo of the pair found in the woman's car, agrees they look like his.
The police strategy is clear; get Greentree to pick himself out of CCTV stills before telling him the allegation.
He is patient at first, taking detectives through what he says he can remember of the night.
But eventually he wants to know exactly why he has been arrested at work and is now sat in a police interview room.
Finally, he is told what he is capable of; randomly attacking a woman, grabbing her, choking her and raping her.
But despite putting himself there at the time of the attack and saying he has no memory of what happened, Greentree maintains he did not and would not have sexually assaulted the woman.
He denies it to police when he is first informed of the allegation, his voice raspy as he is overcome with emotion, his head in his hands as he rocks back on his chair and cries.
"No way," Greentree says after a long pause. "That's crap. I didn't. I swear I didn't do it. I can't remember but I didn't do it. I'm not that person. I am just not that person. I didn't do it."
And Greentree maintains that position and pleads not guilty before being granted bail this time last year because he had spent 22 months behind bars awaiting a trial that was now another year away.
Fast-forward to last week and Greentree is in the dock, denying what the woman said happened in the van on the basis that, essentially, he is just not that kind of person.
The issue for the jury was relatively straightforward; accept the woman's evidence as truthful and reliable and they would be left with no doubt that she had been sexually assaulted and the man responsible was Greentree.
And on Thursday afternoon, after deliberating for less than two hours either side of lunch, the jury returned and found him guilty.
After the verdict, Greentree wanted to fight off a prosecution detention application, but Judge Jennie Girdham said the offence was committed on a complete stranger in a public place and the time he had already served would not be enough.
He hung his head before being led away again, a convicted rapist who says he doesn't remember what he did to land him where he is.
And while he may not be able to remember, it is something the victim will never be able to forget.
