Whalley told the jury Federico then left Nicoli, who was bleeding heavily on the stairs and drifting into unconsciousness, to wash the knife in the kitchen sink and then began cutting carrots.
Whalley alleged Federico then waited before calling triple zero to help her partner, who died six days later from irreversible brain damage due to the blood loss.
“The state’s case is that the only reasonable explanation for that conduct (cutting the carrots) was that the accused was going to have to explain why she had a knife in her hand,” Whalley told the court.
“She had to explain why she had a knife in her hand when they met up on the stairs.
“Anyone who had been using a knife for culinary purposes would have left it on the worktop before going to do something else in the house.”
But Federico’s defence lawyer Jonathan Davies told the court the argument between his client and Nicoli had died down by the time she began to cut carrots, and a “loud noise” from upstairs caused her to run from the kitchen, knife in hand, and up the stairs to see what was going on.
“She ascends the staircase and collides with Nicoli as he was coming down,” Davies told the jury.
“He was in excess of 100 kilograms and was somewhat clumsy. That collision caused the knife to penetrate towards the top of his right thigh.”
Federico’s young daughter, who watched the incident unfold from the doorway of her bedroom, gave evidence to police that her mother had “pretended to cut carrots” in the wake of the incident and that she told police she was cutting them for her daughter. But the child told police that she “didn’t even like carrots”.
She also told officers her mother had told her to say that “Joe ran into the knife”, adding, “but I said that’s not what happened”.
“I didn’t see mum put the knife in him,” she said to police in a pre-recorded interview that was played to the court.
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“Joe said, ‘look what you did to me’ and then he passed out.”
The now 10-year-old said that after Nicoli fell to the floor, he started making “snoring sounds” and that Federico started saying “oh my God, oh my God”.
The girl testified that she was screaming from the top of the stairs as Nicoli was bleeding and that her mother helped her climb off the side of the stair well so she didn’t have to walk through the blood.
She then said she was instructed to take her baby brother outside while her mother was on the phone to paramedics.
The jury took two days to come to a majority verdict.
There were audible gasps from a packed gallery as it was read out on Thursday afternoon.
Federico will be sentenced at a later date.
