The daughter of a man accused of murdering her mother has told a jury of seeing him choke her nights before she went missing 40 years ago.
"My dad was angry and he threw his dinner plate and was shoving the food down her top," Brenda Boyd testified on Thursday.
"He was choking her and they were yelling.
"I remember holding on to her leg and yelling at my dad to stop."
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She was giving evidence at the NSW Supreme Court trial of her father, former ambulance officer, John Douglas Bowie.
The 72-year-old has pleaded not guilty to murdering Roxlyn Bowie, who was 31 when she vanished from their Walgett home in northern NSW.
The Crown alleges the former ambulance officer killed his wife on or about June 5, 1982 so he could have an unfettered relationship with another woman.
Her body has never been found.
Boyd said she was aged six on June 5 and remembered her parents arguing a little before her mother put her younger brother to bed with her help.
"I remember saying goodnight to my mother and the next morning she was not there," she said.
When she asked her father where she was, he read her a note he said he found.
"He said she was sorry and she had to leave and he didn't know where she was."
The conversation was quite short and her father didn't seem upset.
"I remember crying. I was eating a pie and I remember the pie coming out of my mouth."
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After a few days, her father took her and her brother Warren – who has since died – to their grandparents' home in Killara, Sydney.
"I remember playing with my dolls and my father was packing up the house," she said.
She also remembered meeting a woman called Gail Clarke and her children, after her father told her they were going to have a new family and she would have a brother and a sister.
Earlier, the jury was read notes of a police interview on April 24, 1988 with Gail Clarke, who has since died.
The divorced woman said she met Bowie in his capacity as an ambulance officer in the May school holidays in 1982 when she was staying in a caravan on the banks of the Barwon River at Walgett.
"She was previously informed by John Bowie that he and Roxlyn led different lives, and she had a boyfriend," the notes said.
She said they formed a relationship for the duration of the holidays before she returned to her Sydney home.
Some weeks later he phoned her before coming to her home towards the end of June 1982.
He told her his wife had left him and suggested he move in with her.
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Clarke said she refused his request, but saw him on a number of occasions before terminating the relationship after two to three weeks and never saw him again.
She said he was extremely keen to form a serious relationship but she never entertained the idea.
Boyd said her father once told her her mother had left with her boyfriend, a bank manager, while another time he said his wife told him if he went out on the night of June 5 she would not be there on his return.
Before her seventh birthday, Boyd said she, her brother and father moved into a unit with a woman called Ann whom he married.
She said the couple both drank a lot and their relationship was quite violent, involving choking, punching, kicking and screaming on both sides.
Her father once kicked her stepmother in the knee and she was in a cast for quite a while.
Under cross-examination, Boyd denied that her evidence relating to when she was aged six was substituted memories from speaking to people over the last couple of decades.
The trial continues before Justice Dina Yehia.
