A caretaker allegedly murdered a missing woman and placed her body in a bin before it was incinerated at a rubbish processing plant, a court has heard.
Maureen Gitau, 24, was last seen by her family as she left her aunt’s birthday party at the address where they both lived in Deptford, south-east London, on December 5 last year.
Her family reported her missing five days later.
She left the birthday party, where she is said to have been “in a good mood, playing with the children”, to meet 55-year-old Mark Moodie, who is accused of her murder, the court heard.
It is claimed he took her to a block of flats where he worked and that she never left the building alive.
Prosecutor Jocelyn Ledward told Woolwich Crown Court that he was seen moving a large communal waste bin around the basement of Richmond House in Deptford, and it was later seen outside the cleaners’ room by some of the block’s residents.
He later allegedly placed it back in the bin store and covered her body up with rubbish, the court heard.
The prosecutor told jurors: “The prosecution case is that Maureen Gitau never left that building alive and therefore, on the face of it, simply vanished into thin air… in a quite horrifyingly literal way.
“The rubbish was collected a few days later, and taken to a processing plant, where it seems inevitable that Maureen Gitau’s body was incinerated very quickly, possibly even before she was ever reported missing.
“Certainly, her body has not been recovered despite an extensive search.
“In a nutshell, the defendant must have murdered Maureen Gitau that night and disposed of her body in the rubbish bin, disposed of her mobile telephone and made false statements to the police about her movements and his knowledge of her whereabouts, in order to cover up his crime.”
The court heard the pair had both worked as cleaners at the Oval cricket ground in the summer of 2022, where they are said to have been “more than just work colleagues”.
They were in phone contact almost every day between July and September that year and kept in touch far less frequently until the night of the alleged murder, the prosecution said.
When interviewed by police on December 16 2022, the defendant claimed she had phoned him to ask if they could meet after work on the night she was last seen.
He said his phone showed he called her around an hour after he agreed to meet her after work and that he travelled by bus to meet her in Deptford Bridge.
He claimed he found her at a bus stop there, gave her £10 and a cigarette and spoke to her for around five minutes before returning home.
Ms Ledward said “many aspects” of his statements to officers were “entirely untrue, as the police investigation would later reveal based on a combination of Oyster card data, CCTV and telephone evidence”.
He instead contacted her just before 6.30pm that evening but had deleted evidence of those and other conversations in the weeks before the alleged murder from his phone, the court heard.
The defendant, from Woolwich in south-east London, denies murder and two counts of perverting the course of justice.
The trial continues.
