A murder accused ‘threatened to kill a man and said he would chop his head off with an axe’, a court has heard.
Steven Dickie, along with Callum Davidson and Tasmin Glass, are on trial accused of murdering Arbroath offshore worker Steven Donaldson and setting him on fire in Kirriemuir last year.
The High Court in Edinburgh heard that another witness, Nicola Matthews, had been a high school sweetheart of Steven Dickie.
Dickie and Davidson also face charges of making threats against a number of people, including Sam Wilkie, to whom Miss Matthews had a child in January 2018.
She went back to Dickie while she was heavily pregnant, leaving him again after a short time — and learned soon after that he was seeing Glass.
The second day of evidence at the trial focused on a number of other charges on the indictment, during which the court heard from Mr Wilkie.
The 29-year-old told the court of a series of phone calls in early January 2018 in which Dickie “ended up going crazy down the phone”.
Mr Wilkie added: “I heard Callum in the background saying ‘You’re getting killed, I’m gonna kill you’.”
The witness said Dickie made another call the same day from Kirrie Hill in which he again heard Davidson in the background, saying: “I’ve got an axe, we’re going to find you at some point, there’s no point hiding.”
Defence advocate Jonathan Crowe, representing Davidson, put it to Mr Wilkie that he had made up the story, which he denied.
Miss Matthews, 24, was with Dickie for four years until around 2014-15 when she started seeing Mr Wilkie. They had an on-off relationship and she went back to Dickie during the breaks.
It eventually ended in late 2017, and she stayed with Dickie until the following spring.
Ninewells Hospital clerical worker Miss Matthews told the trial she had heard a conversation between Dickie and Davidson saying they were going to “go after Sam”.
Asked by advocate depute Ashley Edwards if there was any information about where that might be done, the witness said it was to be on Kinnordy Road, which runs past Kinnordy Loch.
“He said he was going to get Sam and chop his head off. He went out, got an axe out of the back of his car and then drove off,” said Miss Matthews.
The trial continues.
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