‘Paranoid’ Queenslander who shot fleeing friend found guilty of murder

A Queensland man has been found guilty of murder for shooting a friend who was trying to escape with his wife after a night of drug-taking.

Charles Compton, 38, died after being shot in the neck on a driveway in Warwick, south of Toowoomba, on April 5, 2020.

Benjamin James Nunns, 34, had pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to manslaughter, arguing diminished responsibility due to an “abnormality of mind”.

During the two-week trial in the Supreme Court in Toowoomba, the jury heard Nunns invited Mr Compton and his wife Karen to his Warwick home, where the trio drank and smoked methylamphetamine.

The court heard that in the early hours of the next morning, when Mr Compton suggested the couple leave the house, Nunns became suspicious of his motivations and struck him repeatedly over the head with a metal pole.

As Mr Compton and his wife tried to escape in their car, Nunns fired a shot down the driveway and a second shot through the car windscreen.

The second shot struck Mr Compton in the neck.

Nunns’s defence team argued he was suffering from paranoid delusions in the years leading up to the fatal shooting and evidence was given by a number of psychiatrists and his former partner, Amber Linais.

Ms Linais told the court Nunns believed he was receiving signs and messages through lights, colours, geckos and crickets.

“He’d talk to me a lot about the voices that he’d hear,” she said.

‘It was a warning shot’

Nunns testified that he thought Mr Compton was a danger to him that night and had tried to construct a bulletproof vest out of a pram while they “hung out” in the shed.

“I thought they’d done something to the [drugs], because it tasted funny as well,” he said.

He told the court he was not aiming when he fired the fatal shot.

“[Charlie] wasn’t going so I went ‘bang’ and shot closer … it was a warning shot.”

The prosecution rejected Nunns’s manslaughter plea at the outset of the trial and put to the jury that he was suffering from drug-induced psychosis on the night.

Prosecutor Matt Le Grand said Nunns had embellished his symptoms after his arrest.

“What you’re dealing with in this case is simply a man who murdered another man,” Mr Le Grand said.

The jury of five men and seven women deliberated for a little more than three hours before handing down the verdict.

Mr Compton’s family said they felt relieved at the conclusion to their four-year ordeal.

Nunns will be sentenced on June 12.