BRISTOL – A jury was selected yesterday in the case of a man accused of murdering landscape architect Joanna Yeates.
Vincent Tabak (33) denies the premeditated killing of Ms Yeates, whose body was found on a snowy roadside verge on Christmas morning last year.
The bespectacled Dutch engineer spoke just twice publicly to confirm his name and to confirm that he understood the process of selecting the jury at Bristol Crown Court.
Wearing a dark grey suit, pale blue shirt and dark blue tie, he sat impassively in the dock of courtroom one to watch as a panel of 32 potential jurors was eventually whittled down to 12.
The trial judge, Mr Justice Field, told the selected six men and six women to consider overnight whether there were any reasons why they could not be empanelled as one of the jurors.
Prosecutors will claim that Mr Tabak, who lived in a ground-floor flat adjoining Ms Yeates’s home in Clifton, Bristol, murdered the 25-year-old after she went for festive drinks with colleagues.
She was reported missing two days after disappearing when her boyfriend, Greg Reardon, returned to their shared flat after a weekend visiting family in Sheffield.
Following a string of appeals by relatives and police, her frozen corpse was found by dog walkers three miles from her home on a lane in Failand, north Somerset.
Mr Reardon and Ms Yeates’s parents, David and Teresa, are expected to attend the trial, although none were present today.
Mr Tabak, an engineer, is being represented by William Clegg QC. Nigel Lickley QC leads the case for the Crown. – (PA)