Caution to readers: Contains graphic content.

She’s the girl in the basement.

She’s the nearly nude body on the screen.

She’s the university student whose soiled panties were pulled from a brown paper bag — crinkle, crinkle — sealed inside a cardboard box and man-handled on the stand, stretched this way and that.

All this is the indignity of a murder trial. Because a courtroom is possibly the most invasive place on Earth, an exercise in voyeurism and intimate details disclosed. The dead are rarely afforded any considerations of modesty.

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Why it was necessary to leave the image of Qian Liu’s lifeless, exposed corpse on the monitor — dark hair fanning around her head, blood caked on her cheeks and encrusted on the floor, naked buttocks displayed — through much of the day is difficult to comprehend. Except if the objective was to sear that ghastly tableau in the jury’s mind, with a weeping mother and stoic father in the front row.

Yet this trial turns very much — at least in scene-setting — on what was visible to the eye, what was heard, from the other side of the planet, through the medium of social connectivity. The “Webcam Murder” it was called, from the moment that investigative facts were first revealed three years ago.

Liu, a 23-year-old overseas York University student, was on Skype with her former boyfriend, Xian Meng, in Beijing late on the night of April 14, 2011. They were communicating via both the web camera program and exchanges typed through a messaging service called QQ, akin to MSN.

Everybody lives online these days. Liu died online, as a horrified Meng watched and listened.

The alleged attack, however, was not captured by webcam because Liu had moved off-screen. Her computer has never been found, only the wires that were later unplugged, and a mouse on the desk.

Cause of death is believed to be asphyxia caused by some form of neck compression. There were no knife or bullet wounds.

Brian Dickson, a York political science student and fellow tenant in the student building, has pleaded not guilty to a charge of first-degree murder. Last Friday, before the jurors had been chosen but in front of the jury pool, Dickson attempted to plead guilty to the lesser offence of manslaughter. It was rejected by the Crown.

Monday, in his brief opening remarks to the jury, Dickson’s lawyer, Rob Nuttall, said: “First of all, this is not a who-done-it case. This is a what-happened case. The mechanism of death is very significant evidence in proving whether the Crown has made its case.”

In her opening, Crown attorney Christine Pirraglia laid out a summary of the case she will put to the jury over the next few weeks. Most of what she presented — apart from the video and photographic exhibits of the crime scene entered through a forensics officer, and a 9-1-1 call played for court with another witness on the stand — is not yet evidence, merely a preview of testimony Pirraglia said will be introduced.

That story, said Pirraglia, begins with the diminutive Liu, dressed for bed, in her tiny one-bedroom basement apartment on Aldwinckle Heights, just south of the York campus. She and Meng were chatting. It was some time after 1 a.m. when there was a knock on her door. According to Pirraglia, Meng watched Liu open the door and engage in a brief conversation with a male.

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“After a short time Mr. Meng observed the man make an attempt to hug Ms Liu. She tried unsuccessfully to push the man out the door. He managed to push his way in, closing the door behind him. He shoved Ms Liu, causing her to fall off-camera in the direction of her bed.”

Meng, continued Pirraglia, could no longer see Liu but did hear her say “no” in both English and Mandarin. He then heard what sounded, to him, like “two muffled bang”.

“He never heard a sound from Ms Liu again.”

In distant Beijing, Meng “sat helplessly” in front of his computer. “He saw the man return to the door, lock it, turn off the lights and go off screen again. The next and last time the man appeared on the screen, he was naked from the waist down. He approached the computer and turned it off.”

Meng, said Pirraglia, was able to figure out Liu’s QQ password and used that information to gain entry to an online chat group, frantically sending out messages to users asking for help. Not until the following morning was Meng able to reach anyone who knew Liu’s current address. Finally, the landlord was notified and he opened Liu’s apartment with a master key, finding her body on the floor, nightgown pulled up around her chest but otherwise naked.

Because of language issues, another tenant, Soham Joshi, was summoned to speak with a 9-1-1 operator. “They were paranoid and panicking,” Joshi testified, speaking of the landlord and another resident who was present outside the apartment that morning. “The girl in the basement could be murdered, could be dead ...”

On the 9-1-1 recording, the operator can be heard urging Joshi and the others to check for any signs of life, see if there was anything in the woman’s mouth to obstruct breathing. But the body, lying face down, was stiff, Joshi told court, and he was unable to turn Liu over. At that point, paramedics arrived.

Joshi said he knew Liu and Dickson only in passing.

A pathologist took swab samples before Liu’s body was removed, clipping her fingernails for possible DNA traces. Sgt. Todd Carefoot, the forensics officer, collected additional samples, including swabs of a dry, white substance from Liu’s upper thigh and groin area.

Dickson, who lives in a first-floor room at the residence, became a suspect after Meng provided a description of the man he’d seen enter Liu’s apartment.

DNA taken by a surveillance team from two cigarette butts Dickson had discarded was matched against the swabs for DNA analysis. In a subsequent interview, Dickson told police he’d been in Liu’s room briefly that night but had never embraced her, never tried to kiss her, never had sex with her and denied killing her.

But Pirraglia told the jury that DNA of swabs taken from Liu’s breasts and compared with DNA from the cigarette butts shared the same male profile to a high degree of probability. “That is, the probability that a randomly selected individual unrelated to Mr. Dickson would share that same profile was estimated to be 1 in 25 trillion.”

Swabs taken of the white substance on Liu’s abdomen and upper groin contained semen that matched Dickson’s DNA to a probability of 1 in 2.7 quintillion.

A small blood stain on a blue T-shirt seized from Dickson’s room revealed female DNA that matched Liu’s profile to a probability of 1 in 140 quadrillion.

That number looks like this: 140,000,000,000,000,000.