THE father of Ardrossan woman Annalise Johnstone this week demanded justice for his daughter, telling a jury his son and his girlfriend were “as guilty as each other” of her murder.

Gordon Johnstone, 44, was giving evidence in the trial of his son Jordan and Jordan’s girlfriend Angela Newlands, who both deny murdering Annalise at a witch’s monument in Perthshire last May.

He told a jury at the High Court in Livingston: “I just want to see justice, no matter what. All I know is that my daughter’s buried and the two of them is as guilty as each other.”

Mr Johnstone, from Fauldhouse, West Lothian, admitted he had fallen out with Annalise, 22, over her lifestyle about 18 months before she was killed last May.

He said: “We left on an argument. That’s haunted me to this day.”

Mr Johnstone told the jury he had gone to see his son in Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison a few weeks after Annalise’s body was found by a roadside in rural Perthshire.

He admitted he had threatened to “smash his face on top of the table” if his son did not reveal what he had done to his sister.

He told the jury that Johnstone then recounted a version of events blaming his co-accused for the murder and claiming that he had desperately tried to staunch the blood flowing from a wound in Annalise’s neck with his T-shirt before she died in his arms.

Mr Johnstone said Jordan told him he had been at the Maggie Wall’s witch’s memorial near Auchterarder with Annalise and his co-accused but had walked back to their home in Auchterarder because he was only wearing a t-shirt and was feeling cold.

“He said Angela came in within five or 10 minutes of him arriving at the house and she went straight to the sink. He went over and she was washing blood off her hands.

“He turned around and asked her: ‘Where’s Annalise?’ and Angela said she was taking pictures of the witch’s monument.

“He said he was a wee bit cautious because it was dark. He sprinted back down to the monument and he seen Annalise lying on the ground.

“He seen my daughter bleeding profusely out of her neck. He said he ripped off his T-shirt and tried to staunch the gash in her neck.

“He said Angela came driving down five minutes later. He was screaming to get the police get an ambulance. She shouted: ‘I’m not getting any ambulance’.”

Mr Johnstone said his son had also claimed that he found the implement used to inflict the fatal wound next to Annalise’s body and hid it along with other personal possessions including her mobile phone.

He went on: “He said he put it to the one side, he put it somewhere I think it was to show the police that it wasn’t his fingerprints on it.

“I think he went back up to the house and they had quite an argument. Angela was going to accuse him. She said: ‘You better take the rap for that or I’m going to tell the police you were interfering with my kids.’

“He telt me that he had to go and move her body to somewhere where she could be found because Angela was going to phone her father to take her body and put it somewhere else.

“He said he put it somewhere so that someone could find her because he was worried about her father coming down and moving the body so that it couldn’t be found.

“Jordan said that they both put Annalise in the back of the car. He didn’t go into any detail about what they did but they took Annalise and put her near to woods.”

Asked about the Traveller community, to which his family and his son’s co-accused belong, Mr Johnstone admitted there was “constant fighting through each other”.

Jordan Johnstone, 25, and Angela Newlands, 19, deny murdering Annalise by repeatedly stabbing her in the neck on 10 May 2018 and attempting to defeat the ends of justice by covering up the crime.

Last week, the jury heard agreed evidence last Friday that the cause of Annalise’s death was a deep puncture wound to her neck which severed vital veins and arteries and caused death within a few minutes.

The prosecution and the defence confirmed that her brother’s car was near the monument at the time Annalise was attacked on May 10 last year. In addition to the murder charge, both accused are charged with attempting to defeat the ends of justice to avoid detection, arrest and prosecution for the killing.

Johnstone is further accused of assaulting Annalise in Beith two days before she died. He is also charged with stealing a caravan and its contents from Carmichael Place, Irvine on May 9, 2018.

Johnstone and Newlands both face an additional charge of assaulting Nadia Johnstone in Coatbridge, on May 6, 2018.

Both accused deny all the allegations and Newlands has lodged a special defence of alibi.

The trial, before Lady Scott, continues.