It was a wet January weekend when Indigenous teenager Mark Haines was found dead on train tracks.
It was also a wet January weekend when boxer Eddie Davis left his family home, only to return and urgently ask to do a load of washing.
The timing of the two events was pointed out to Mr Davis's former partner Cherrie Dunning during a police interview in 2001, more than a decade after the 17-year-old's body was found in Tamworth, NSW.
"Something's ... hit me," Ms Dunning told police during the interview, before falling silent.
An inquest has revisited that interview while examining widespread local rumours that Mr Davis, a Tamworth sportsman, was involved in Mr Haines' death in January 1988.
Barrister Jalal Razi, for Mr Haines' family, suggested to Ms Dunning that the police questioning made her realise the weekend her then-partner went away was the same weekend the teenager died.
Ms Dunning told investigators Mr Davis left to sell a car on a rainy January weekend and wanted to do some washing immediately upon his return, the inquest was told.
"Do you think Eddie could have had something to do with it?" Mr Razi asked Ms Dunning at the inquest in Tamworth courthouse on Monday.
"I couldn't say," Ms Dunning said.
She acknowledged she must have had her suspicions about Mr Davis in 2001.
"I never had it out with him about it, I wasn't game to," Ms Dunning said.
"I told him that people ... were talking about it. He told me it was rumours and not to get involved."
After Ms Dunning ended her relationship with Mr Davis, she lived with some friends in Sydney about 1990.
One friend made a statement to police in 1999, recalling Ms Dunning talking about how she was scared of Mr Davis partly because of his involvement in Mr Haines' death.
"You said ... that Eddie had put the young fella on the railway track and put a pillow under his head?" counsel assisting Chris McGorey asked.
"(You) also said Eddie had bashed him with an iron bar?"
But Ms Dunning denied she had that conversation.
"I might have mentioned that he was being accused of it ... but I never mentioned that he'd done it because I didn't know."
An autopsy showed Mr Haines, a Gomeroi man, died from a traumatic head injury.
An initial police investigation concluded he laid on the tracks either deliberately or in a dazed state, something his family has never believed.
A coroner returned open findings in 1989, with the new inquest re-examining the circumstances of the death and the original investigation.
Mr Davis is due to be called as a witness at a later date.
The inquest continues before deputy state coroner Harriet Grahame.
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