R v Bookham
[2005] VSC 483
•13 December 2005
| IN THE SUPREME COURT OF VICTORIA | Not Restricted | |
AT MELBOURNE
CRIMINAL DIVISION
No. 1477 of 2005
| THE QUEEN |
| v |
| TODD JAMES BOOKHAM |
---
JUDGE: | WILLIAMS J | |
WHERE HELD: | Melbourne | |
DATE OF HEARING: | 7 November 2005 | |
DATE OF SENTENCE: | 13 December 2005 | |
CASE MAY BE CITED AS: | R v Bookham | |
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION: | [2005] VSC 483 | 1st Revision 19 January 2006 |
---
CRIMINAL LAW- Sentence- Attempted murder of former girlfriend by cutting throat- Intentionally causing serious injury to former girlfriend’s step-sister by stabbing –Stabbing in presence of victim’s six year old son- Relatively youthful offender - Guilty plea – Depressed state- Drug and alcohol abuse- Remorse - Good prospects of rehabilitation –Strong family support
---
APPEARANCES: | Counsel | Solicitors |
| For the Crown | Mr K. Gilligan | Mr S. Carisbrooke, Acting Solicitor for Public Prosecutions |
| For the Accused | Mr B. Murphy, Q.C Mr G. Steward | Garden & Green Barristers & Solicitors |
HER HONOUR:
Todd James Bookham, you have pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of Karen Lee Anne-Marie Fairbairn and the offence of without lawful excuse intentionally causing serious injury to Annette Mary Jayne Elliott at Swan Hill on 31 December 2004. The maximum penalties for the offences are 25 years’ imprisonment, in the case of attempted murder, and 20 years’ imprisonment for the offence of intentionally causing serious injury. The committal hearing took place on 2 May 2005 and you pleaded guilty to each charge on 7 November 2005 before your trial which had been fixed for 21 November 2005 at Mildura. Senior counsel submitted on your behalf that your plea should be regarded as a plea of guilty at the earliest time and there was no disagreement by the prosecution.
You and Ms Fairbairn had been involved in a relationship for approximately 12 months before the offences occurred. Ms Elliott was Ms Fairbairn’s stepsister. Your relationship with Ms Fairbairn was not going well. Indeed, you had concluded that Ms Fairbairn was having a sexual relationship with Ms Elliott. Ms Fairbairn had told you that you two needed to have a break. You were having great difficulty accepting her decision.
You had collected your belongings from Ms Fairbairn’s house on 30 December 2004, but, nevertheless, you telephoned her just before midnight, pleading with her and insisting on coming around to see her. Ms Elliott had arrived to visit Ms Fairbairn at some time after she had returned home after finishing work at the Swan Hill Club at about 9.30 pm. She had brought her six year old son Cody with her. It was Ms Elliott who came around in the car and brought you back to Ms Fairbairn’s house in the early hours of the following morning.
Ms Fairbairn told you that you had five minutes of her time. You went to sit outside side by side. You told her that you loved her and wanted to work things out between you. She said that she did not love you any more. You put your left arm around her neck and your right arm about her waist. You said: “If you move, I will slit your throat”. She said words to the effect of : “As if you would slit my throat”. She had not seen the hunting knife you were carrying. I note that I am not satisfied as to whether or not you brought the knife with you that night. You then moved your left arm from Ms Fairbairn’s right side to her left side and made a 15 cm long cut across her throat with the knife. Fortunately the incision did not injure her larynx or thyroid. She screamed that she had been cut. She put both her hands to her throat to put pressure on the wound.
You immediately stood up. Ms Elliott had opened the door. You then ran towards the open door and rushed at Ms Elliott. You pushed her backwards and were on top of her. You struggled and furniture was damaged in the process. You stabbed Ms Elliott who sustained a 4cm wound on the left side of her chest, rupturing her diaphragm and stomach. Ms Elliott’s six year old Cody was standing nearby, screaming and crying as his mother was stabbed by you in the struggle. Despite her own injuries, Ms Fairbairn rushed to her step-sister’s aid and struggled with you. You then fled. She looked out to see if you had gone. You saw her and then returned. Ms Fairbairn forced the door shut. You then stabbed the front of the door with a knife. You then fled. You were found at a local phone box calling out for help. You had called an ambulance to go to the house. You claimed, however, that you had been stabbed by your victims and dropped to the ground under a tree. You had cuts to the leg of a minor nature. The knife was found stabbed into the tree.
Ms Elliott seized Cody as she and Ms Fairbairn ran to her car and she drove them both to the Swan Hill Hospital. Ms Fairbairn suffered a 15 centimetre long wound to the neck. The cut from the knife had penetrated her skin, tissue and muscle and the strap muscles. Fortunately, her larynx and thyroid were not damaged. Her strap muscles were repaired at the hospital and the skin sutured and she was discharged a day later.
Ms Elliott had to be airlifted and admitted to the cardiothoracic unit at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne. On 2 January 2005, her left lung, perforated stomach and perforated diaphragm were surgically repaired and she stayed in hospital for about a week and a half. Her wounds became painfully infected. In her victim impact statement, Ms Elliott says that she has several large scars and dresses so as to hide them. She has been unable to sleep well and is seeing a counsellor. She works at the Swan Hill Club in the kitchen, but feels uneasy because of the presence of knives there. She is anxious if someone stands close to her. She is now very protective of Cody and very suspicious of other people. She has lost strength in her left arm. Cody has not been sleeping well and sometimes wakes screaming in the middle of the night and is unable to get back to sleep. He has become very aggressive and has been seeing the same counsellor.
In her victim impact statement, Ms Fairbairn describes the prominent scar on the front of her neck which she covers when she goes out of the house. She has bad dreams about what happened and suffers from memory flashbacks during the day. She returned to work in about mid March 2005 to work for seven hours a week. She says that she is unable to concentrate and to “get [her] mind right for working fulltime”. She does not go out socially anymore and is wary about who is around her. She is unable to trust anyone except her family and very close friends. She is receiving counselling.
The Court heard about your background and relationship with Ms Fairbairn. You were born on 18 February 1983 and were 21 when you committed the offences. You have one brother who is 23 and lives in Echuca with his girlfriend and another, aged about 18, living at home with your parents. You had completed Year 10 at school, with some difficulty in 1999. You ended up as a fourth year apprentice welder. You have almost completed your trade school requirements at TAFE in Mildura. Until early 2004 you had lived at home with your parents. You worked for a number of companies in Swan Hill to October or November 2004. The work ended from time to time when companies ran out of work or you were dismissed.
A reference from your uncle, Pastor Tony Rawson, describes you as an extremely pleasant child coming from a stable home. He said that your offending was out of character for the person he knows. Mrs Joanne Taverner also provided a reference for you. She has known you all your life and has always known you to be a caring and loyal person who has shown love and affection for her children, your three young cousins who are very fond of you. She noticed a change in you in recent years, as did your aunt Mrs Catherine Middlemiss, who describes you as a happy and fun-loving child who became a withdrawn and distracted teenager.
You suffered from depression and your mother gave evidence that, by November 2002, she was so concerned that she took you to the Baudinet Centre, where a psychological practice was carried on in Swan Hill. Ms Lynne Baudinet-Johnson, a psychologist, reported that, in November 2002, you were unemployed and had no hope for your future. During a course of three sessions, you gained work and appeared to be coping better. You were found to have a poor relationship with your father which had a significant impact on your self-esteem and coping ability. Your mother, on the other hand, was always extremely supportive of you.
From the age of 18 you had been involved in a relationship for three years with a partner who was 15 at its commencement. That relationship had ended after she had suffered a miscarriage in November 2003. You were under the impression that she had caused the termination of the pregnancy which you had planned together. In December 2003, you returned to the Baudinet Centre in an anxious and distraught state, severely depressed and suicidal. You were immediately referred to your general practitioner for anti-depressant medication and began counselling. You have been involved in a not uncommon cycle of taking medication, then stopping and spiralling into depression once again.
You have convictions for drink driving offences. You were placed on a good behaviour bond in relation to one on 20 November 2002. On 18 June 2003 you were convicted of careless driving and fined $400. On 30 July 2003, you were fined, your licence was cancelled and you were disqualified from driving for 12 months. Another conviction followed your interception by police when driving to see your partner after her miscarriage in November 2003 and, on 11 February 2004, you were the subject of a community based order with conditions requiring your assessment and treatment for alcohol and drug addiction and medical psychological and psychiatric assessment and treatment. I note that you have no other prior convictions.
Ms Baudinet- Johnson prepared a psychological report, dated 1 February 2004, at the time you were to appear before the Magistrates’ Court in relation to the charges which resulted in the 11 February 2004 orders. She expressed the opinion that your behaviour and affect were consistent with a condition known as a Major Depressive Episode. At that stage, you had taken to pulling your hair out and had to have your head shaved to deal with the problem. You were feeling worthless and were severely depressed.
Early in 2004, you moved into a house with friends and you met Ms Fairbairn. There was a significant amount of drinking and drug use in the house. In the first half of 2004 you were smoking a considerable amount of cannabis, using amphetamines and ecstasy. Your mother noticed a downturn in your behaviour. You would alternately weep and behave with great confidence. As the year 2004 progressed, your mother said that you became paranoid and showed consistent signs of drug abuse. She described you as being “definitely out of control”: you would come home, cry, bury your head in your hands and talk nonsensically to her or to yourself. She had to stand in front of her car to prevent you driving off one night when you had no licence and she thought you intended to drive into a tree to hurt yourself. You told her that you had a knife and were going to kill yourself but needed to drive away to do it. You exhibited paranoia to her.
You and Ms Fairbairn took drugs together, whereas your previous partner had not tolerated your drug taking. You also drank to excess. Two reports were tendered from Mr Ian Joblin, the forensic psychologist, in the course of the plea. Mr Joblin reports that you told him that, on the day preceding the offences, you had taken an extraordinary amount of amphetamines, smoked a large amount of cannabis and drunk a considerable quantity of alcohol as well as having taken the drug known as “ice”.
Mr Joblin’s report of 10 February 2005 indicates that your life had deteriorated into turmoil and disarray. Without medication things got worse and worse. As a result of your drug and alcohol abuse, you thought Ms Fairbairn was having a relationship with Ms Elliott. Ms Fairbairn became concerned about your behaviour and indicated that you should have a break. You had problems accepting her decision.
Mr Joblin concluded in a subsequent report of 10 October 2005 that your normal psychological functioning was disrupted by psychological and emotional factors impacting upon you. In his view “[t]here was a breakdown in rational and logical thought and behaviour. [Your] resulting behaviour has been an impulsive response to the catalyst at the time at an inappropriate level without consideration of the consequences.”
The prosecution agreed that the evidence presented by the defence in relation to the circumstances leading up to your offences is a proper matter which the Court should take into account in sentencing you. It was agreed that your drug and alcohol abuse should be taken into account, as evidence of the circumstances in which your offences were committed, rather than as a factor in mitigation or in aggravation. That is the way in which I propose to treat that evidence.
I accept all the evidence to the effect that you are very remorseful and regret what you have done. Senior counsel apologised to those you had harmed right at the beginning of the plea. You have willingly completed a number of programs to address your drug and alcohol use conducted by Uniting Care Moreland Hall.
Ms Anne Hooker, the officer in charge of the youthful offenders unit at Port Phillip Prison, also gave evidence about your active voluntary participation in the programs offered at the prison to address offending behaviour. She identified you as a person to be trusted and well behaved and described you as desperate to understand how you had got to the point of committing such very serious offences. She noted that you have the strong support of your immediate and extended family. She said that, as far as she could say, with further counselling and supervision, you have excellent prospects of rehabilitation.
I agree with senior counsel’s description of your crimes as “very, very serious”. The community must be in no doubt that behaviour such as yours, when a relationship ends, will not be tolerated. As far as your attack on Ms Elliott is concerned, I also note that I consider it significant that you stabbed her in front of her young son.
I nevertheless agree with Mr Murphy that the law requires the Court to sensibly moderate the degree to which your sentence can be imposed for the purpose of general deterrence, as a result of your depressed mental state at the time of your offences. I note Mr Joblin’s opinion that you answered your depression with alcohol abuse and drug use. This substance abuse does not excuse your offending. However, I am influenced by your efforts to obtain professional help to deal with your problems. It would seem that, given your relative youth, your lack of any relevant prior convictions, the strong support of your family and your willingness to address your problems, your chances of rehabilitation are good.
I have taken into account your early plea of guilty in relation to both offences. You are convicted of each offence and I sentence you to 8 years and 6 months’ imprisonment for the attempted murder of Ms Fairbairn and 5 years’ imprisonment for intentionally causing serious injury to Ms Elliott. Bearing in mind the principles of totality and the need to avoid a crushing sentence, I will order that 3 years of the sentence be served cumulatively upon the sentence in relation to the attempted murder, making a total sentence of 11 years and 6 months. In light of your strong prospects for rehabilitation, I will order that you serve a minimum period of 7 years and 6 months’ imprisonment before being eligible for parole.
---
CERTIFICATE
I certify that this and the 7 preceding pages are a true copy of the reasons for Sentence of Williams J of the Supreme Court of Victoria delivered on 13 December 2005.
DATED this thirteenth day of December 2005.
Associate
0
0
0