Vincent Tabak told guests at a dinner party that Joanna Yeates’ killer must have been a “totally crazy detached person”.
The man accused of murdering the architect also joked about the investigation, saying police could find her body in his drawer, the Jury at Bristol Crown Court heard today.
In a police statement read out in court, Andrew Lillie, who hosted Tabak, 35, and his girlfriend, Tanja Morson at a dinner party on January 15, they had discussed Yeats’ death.
As another party guest, solicitor Sarah Maddock speculated that the murder was mystifying, Tabak joined the conversation, Bristol Crown Court heard.
“Vincent just said a small remark about opening a drawer so they could look for a body,” Lillie added.
Earlier, a partygoer and a neighbour both told the court how they heard screams on the night of Miss Yeates’ death but dismissed the noise as students.
Harry Walker told the court he heard a yell at about 8.30pm as he prepared to sit down for pudding with his girlfriend.
He told jurors: “I would say it was definitely a human noise. It was definitely not an animal.
“At the time I thought it must have been students out in the road as it was the end of term. But it was a bit early for that.”
The court heard Miss Yeates had been her usual “jovial” self on the night she was killed.
Darragh Bellew, a landscape architect colleague of Miss Yeates, said she bought him a pint during post-work festive drinks.
Before leaving the Bristol Ram pub to walk back to her flat on December 17 last year, she told him she was planning to bake cakes and bread, Bristol Crown Court heard.
Within hours she had been strangled by her next-door neighbour Tabak, jurors heard.
When prosecution barrister Nicholas Rowland asked him whether she was drunk, Mr Bellew told the jury: “Not at all, just jovial, her usual self.”
CCTV footage showed Miss Yeates and Mr Bellew leaving their office on Park Street, using a cashpoint, then walking up the hill to the Ram.
Bellew told how colleagues and friends from an Irish Gaelic football team were joining them in the pub, which was packed with Christmas revellers.
When asked whether she left before other drinkers, Bellew said: “She would always leave before most of us – when we would go on drinking she would go to be with Greg (Reardon, her boyfriend) really.”
Bellew asked her what she had planned for the weekend.
“She replied that she was going to bake some cakes and bread over the weekend because Greg was away,” he told the court.
“We had a joke and said she was going to bring them in to the office on Monday morning.”
The landscape architect’s body was found on Christmas Day next to a rural road on the outskirts of Bristol. Tabak admits the manslaughter of Miss Yeates but denies her murder.
Jurors heard the first witnesses this morning after yesterday visiting Yeates’s home which had been preserved with personal belongings and Christmas decorations since she was killed at her home in Clifton.
