R v Hemming
[2014] VSC 521
•24 October 2014
| IN THE SUPREME COURT OF VICTORIA | Not Restricted |
AT MELBOURNE
CRIMINAL DIVISION
SCR No. 0085 of 2014
| THE QUEEN |
| v |
| THOMAS JAMES HEMMING |
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JUDGE: | KING J | |
WHERE HELD: | Melbourne | |
DATE OF HEARING: | 13 October 2014 | |
DATE OF SENTENCE: | 24 October 2014 | |
CASE MAY BE CITED AS: | R v Hemming | |
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION: | [2014] VSC 521 | |
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Plea — two charges — Murder — inexplicable ‘thrill Kill’ — Young offender — Early plea, limited remorse — lack of empathy.
Sentence — 32 years, minimum 27.
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APPEARANCES: | Counsel | Solicitors |
| For the Crown | Mr Gavin Silbert S.C. | Office of Public Prosecutions |
| For the Accused | Mr Damien Sheales | Haines & Polites, Queen St Melbourne |
HER HONOUR:
Thomas James Hemming, you have pleaded guilty to the murders of Robert Malcolm Adamson and his wife Cheryl Celeste Adamson. Both murders occurred in their home in Murrumbeena on the morning of 19 February 2014.
The maximum penalty for each of those offences is life imprisonment.
The plea of guilty in respect of each of these offences is significant, and pursuant to s 5(2AC)(2) (e) and s 6AAA of the Sentencing Act a matter which I must take into account in mitigation of penalty and I am required to state the reduction in the sentence imposed upon you, by declaring the sentence that I would have otherwise passed but for your pleas of guilty. Whilst I do not think that you are particularly remorseful, that is because I am not confident you have the emotional understanding to be truly remorseful. Despite that, the sentence shall indicate that you have received a significant and appropriate reduction in the sentence reflecting your early plea, and limited remorse, limited only for the reasons outlined.
At the time of the commission of these offences, you were aged 21 years, having been born on 27 November 1992 and you are the youngest of the children in your family. You are still currently only aged 21. You come before the court without any prior convictions, although it appears from the psychological material that has been tendered that you may have had a minor involvement with the police in respect of what appears to be shoplifting and a fight with another youth of a similar age at a railway station when you were younger, and you were cautioned, Neither matter has any relevance to the sentence I must impose today.
The couple that you murdered on this day were aged in their 60s, Robert having been born in March 1948 in England and Cheryl in March 1953 in the United States of America. You did not know them. You had no animosity towards either of them, but you had seen them occasionally in the area and, particularly in respect of Robert Adamson, you had noted him walking his dog. The circumstances of your offending are entirely inexplicable and incomprehensible to anyone involved in this matter, and accordingly as a result unnerving to every member of the community in which we live.
The only explanation offered by you is that which is contained in your record of interview at questions 771ff, as follows:
Question:Can you tell me, I suppose in your fantasy of you know what you wanted to do, is it a general fantasy or was it specific?
Answer:It wasn’t specific at all, it was just – I just kind of find myself thinking about killing people. Just don’t even realise, like I just yeah, and you know, in no specific ways.
Q 772:Yep.
Answer:- - - kind of thing.
Q 773:So no specific ways?
Answer:Yep.
Q 774:Specific people?
Answer:Not really, no.
The reference that the officer makes to your fantasy within the record of interview, relates to your fantasy of killing people; strangers, persons unknown to you, for no reason that can be discerned by any rational member of our community. These crimes can only be described as bizarre and it is undoubtedly incredibly distressing to the family and friends of the Adamson’s to know that they were murdered for no other reason than to satisfy your fantasies and desires to know what it was like to kill someone.
Unfortunately, and no doubt to the distress of all concerned, I need to outline the circumstances of this offending in more detail. You resided with your family at 4 Joyous Gard Court, Murrumbeena. That address was approximately 160 metres walking distance from the home of Robert and Cheryl Adamson. The Adamson’s were reasonably well-known within the Murrumbeena area, and particularly the local area, as Robert worked from home and spent time walking the family dog. Both Cheryl and Robert, or Robert alone were often seen with the dog in an area known as Boyd Park and Springthorpe Gardens, very near to their home.
On 18 February 2014, you went to work in the bottle shop at the Woolworths supermarket in Carnegie. You were working a shift from 5 until 10pm. You had been engaged in this type of employment for some years and particularly again since ceasing your university studies. Whilst you were working that shift, you had contact with a friend that you had made during your time in secondary college. That contact was via Facebook and you arranged with your friend, Krys Smith, to get together that night after work and indulge in a drinking session at your home. You did not have a licence for a motor vehicle and, on my understanding, Smith picked you up after work and together you drove to a bottle shop and purchased a bottle of whisky. You returned to your family home, went to your bedroom and together you consumed a quantity of alcohol, listened to music and spent time wrestling each other. The quantity of alcohol you consumed was sufficient to make you feel ill and you vomited in the rear of your premises.
At some time after that, between 1 and 3am on the morning of 19 February, together with Smith, you left your house. You walked past the house of Robert and Cheryl Adamson towards a walking track next to Springthorpe Gardens.
You told the police in your record of interview that you had nothing to drink from the time that you left your premises in the early hours of the morning, and that nothing was consumed in the park. You remained in the park until around 4am. During your time there, you had some sort of panic attack, causing you difficulty with breathing, and Smith was able to assist you with that. At around 4am, the two of you walked back towards your home. Smith’s car was parked on the way to your premises, he got into his car and commenced to drive home, and he observed you continuing to walk back to your house, as he drove off.
According to your record of interview, you then entered your house, went to your bedroom and determined to act upon the fantasy that you had had for some months. That fantasy was that you wanted to know what it was like to kill someone. The admissions you made to the police in the interview occurs after you have spent some hours denying any involvement, until at question 547 you say:
Yeah I did it, I’m responsible for it.
You are then asked by the police at question 550:
Q:Now you just tell me everything that you know and what you think is important and just go from there.
Answer:Well, most of what I told you is true. I was with a mate but we walked back up to – you know we were walking around at the house and stuff, a bit of drinking. We walked back up to Omana Road and then we said our goodbyes and I just kind of had a fantasy, I guess, and I was drunk and it was impulsive. Didn’t really have the common sense at the time, really to do anything about it, or you know, to think about it too much. So I went home and got, the knife that was there, a pair of gloves and just kind of went out and just kind of walked around for a bit. And I was on my way back home and just decided to knock on the door and yeah, that’s all. I don’t remember everything that went on that well, but yeah I knocked on the door, asked to use their phone and they let me in. And yeah when they did I pulled out the knife and attacked them.
What you did on your return to your home was to locate your black leather gloves, your black leather jacket and armed yourself with a knife that you had purchased earlier, a model called a ‘cold steel marauder’, which you had purchased in November of 2013. You had originally ordered a different knife from Extac Australia Pty Ltd (an online supplier of knives) but the knife you ordered was out of stock. You had originally placed your order on 9 October 2014, which was around the time that you were expressing to your mother that you were having distressing, violent thoughts. A matter to which I shall refer subsequently. That knife being unavailable, you changed the order to the ‘cold steel marauder’ — a large and lethal looking knife.
You obtained that knife from your wardrobe, you attached the knife sheath to your belt, and placed the knife within it. You left your premises and you then walked around the area of Murrumbeena, including the area of the park, near to the Adamson’s home, for some 90 minutes or so. It was not until approximately 6am, that you entered the front yard of the Adamson’s home. You knocked on their front door. Cheryl Adamson opened that door to you and you told her a story relating to needing to use the phone, the details of which are unknown to me. She went and located her husband, who was in all likelihood asleep, and they returned to the front door. You repeated the story, and they kindly allowed you into their home to use the telephone, which was the only request of which I am aware. The Adamson’s walked ahead of you to the living area, where the phone was located. They clearly suspected nothing, and were behaving as good, decent, caring neighbours and community members.
Once you had all arrived in the living area, you removed the knife from its scabbard. I am unable to know if it was carelessness, eagerness or enthusiasm, that caused you to cut the front of your own jeans and cause a small laceration near your groin, when you were removing the knife from its scabbard, but once you did you started to stab Robert Adamson in the back, and you stabbed him multiple times. His wife, Cheryl Adamson, came to his defence in the best way that she could, grabbing a broom, that must have been located nearby, and attempting to hit you, to cause you to desist from stabbing her husband. The consequence of her actions was that you turned your attention to her, and stabbed her multiple times.
The post-mortem reports of Dr Dodd are chilling, as they show a degree of ferocity in the blows inflicted, in that they were deep and penetrating, as well as numerous.
Cheryl Adamson died trying to protect her husband first, and then herself from your vicious attack. She had deep lacerations to her hand consistent with defensive wounds, demonstrating her attempts to protect herself from the knife you were wielding.
Doctor Dodd, in his report at page 289ff in respect of the death of Robert Adamson, said that the immediate cause of death was one of acute blood loss, secondary to multiple stab incised injuries. He noted that, many of the incised injuries resulted in trauma to vital internal organs, including the heart, aorta, neck, lungs, diaphragm, stomach, liver, spleen and left kidney. The stab wounds and incised wounds were of varying depth and trajectory.
In relation to Cheryl Adamson, a similar finding was observed. The knife was still in Cheryl Adamson’s upper, right neck, shoulder area. She also had a multiplicity of stab and incised injuries; approximately 17 in number. He noted many had caused deep trauma to the internal organs, including the heart, aorta, left lung, diaphragm, oesophagus and liver, as well as noting the prominent injury to the palm of her right hand. These attacks can only be described as savage, with you wielding this knife with a great deal of force. You have caused so many internal injuries, in varied locations to each of the Adamson’s, that the ferocity of your attack can be gauged, to a degree.
You left the premises, leaving the knife, as I indicated, in the neck of Cheryl Adamson, walked out the front door, which had remained open and returned to your own home. You became aware that your father was already up at that stage, and you removed your jacket due to your fears that it was bloodstained. In fact, all of your clothing was bloodstained; your jacket, long-sleeved t-shirt, jeans and your boots, but the black colour was able to mainly obscure the blood staining. You hid that jacket and gloves outside, went in and spoke to your father in such a manner that he certainly did not ascertain that anything of this nature had occurred. You told him you had been out searching for the lost phone of your friend, Krys Smith. You also indicated that you had lost your jacket.
When your father was no longer present, you went outside and collected the black leather jacket and gloves that you had left. You then concealed them, together with the jeans and long-sleeved black t-shirt you were wearing, under your mattress and above the slates of your bed. You returned the knife scabbard, to your bedroom cupboard, before going to bed.
You stated to the police in your interview that, although you went to bed, you found it difficult to sleep, and you got up about 11.30am.
In relation to the fantasy that you had, in respect of killing the deceased couple and your thought processes, together with your reaction to what you had done, there are questions in your record of interview, to which I shall now refer.
Q 575:Yeah, okay. And what were you thinking as you were attacking them?
Answer: I honestly don’t remember.
Q 576: Tell me about the fantasy that you had, or that you’ve had.
Answer: It was — I don’t know, I guess, just kind of leading up to it. I just kind of found myself thinking about killing people. You know, I didn’t even really notice that I was doing it that much. It just kind of ---.
Q 577:Yep.
Answer:You know.
Q 578:For how long have you had this fantasy?
Answer:A while.
Q 579:What’s awhile mate?
Answer:Few months maybe.
Q 580: Yeah. Have you acted it out at all?
Answer:No.
Q 581: No?
Answer:Previously to that, no.
Q 582: Yeah, you done any research or anything on the internet, read any books?
Answer: Not particularly, just bought a knife that was ---.
At questions 843ff:
Q 843:Yeah. You’ve told me you’ve had this fantasy for a little while. Did this live up to what you thought it would be?
Answer:Not really, no.
Q 844:No. In what way?
Answer:Just cos I, it’s strange because I don’t really remember it too well or anything and, you know, in a way it kinda feels like I didn’t do it…
Q 845:Yep.
Answer:… if that makes sense.
You said, later in the interview, that the knife was not bought for the purpose of killing people, you just liked the look of it. You provided a degree of detail as to various aspects of what occurred whilst you were at the premises of the deceased couple:
Answer: I don’t really remember it and — yeah.
Q 847: Okay you’ve told me a fair bit of detail about how it all happened and, you know, even the stuff about what happened inside the house?
Answer: Mmm.
Q 848: So you have, you obviously have some memory of it?
Answer: Yep.
Q 849:… but if you’re saying, am I right, you know it’s like it’s removed.
Answer:Yeah.
Q 850:I don’t know how to explain it.
Answer:Yeah. It’s kinda like I remember the kinda vision of it, like kinda seeing it a bit but I don’t really remember how I was feeling or what I was thinking of or anything at the time.
You told the police that you killed Cheryl and Robert Adamson because you felt morally it was better to kill an old couple than someone young. This is found at question 559 in your record of interview. It was clear from an analysis of your computer that you had, subsequent to this crime, made a number of different searches on it relating to the murders of Cheryl and Robert Adamson, and the ongoing police investigation. You were, obviously, not detached or uninterested in what was going on.
Of some significance is what occurred with your mother in October of 2013. You had told her that you had been having violent and distressing thoughts. She contacted your psychologist Mr Martin, whom you had last seen in 2009, on 9 October 2013 by voicemail. They spoke on 11 October and she told him that you were distressed and had said that you were having some violent thoughts, and she wasn’t able to elicit if those thoughts were directed to yourself or to others. An appointment was made for Monday 14 October and then, on that morning, your mother left another voicemail, saying you had initially agreed and then changed your mind. Your mother spoke to Mr Martin a few days later and said you appeared less distressed, you had calmed down. The matter was not pursued again.
The law requires that there are many matters which I have to take into account, and I will mention others later, but one of the factors I have to consider are the victim impact statements, and the consequences your actions have had upon the family and friends of Cheryl and Robert Adamson.
They have two children, a son and a daughter, and as they did not request their victim impacts to be read out in court, I will respect their privacy, and just tell them I have read their statements. They are sad but restrained statements — their son was in the unfortunate position of being the person who found their bodies, and that is something it will be very difficult for him to ever erase from his memory. They naturally feel anger, grief, bewilderment, hurt and frustration that their parents were in their own home and should have been safe, but above all they feel a loss that they have lost the time which they would have had with their parents, as their lives moved on and they married, had children and developed their own lives, still intertwined with their parents in the role of parents, parents-in-law and grandparents. I also received statements from the brothers and sister of the Adamson’s. I have read all of those statements, and will take the contents into account. However, I cannot give any of you what you want, I cannot make your hurt disappear, because I am unable to return your loved ones to you. None of you, or your pain are forgotten in this process, but as I have indicated, pursuant to the Sentencing Act 1991, there are many matters that the parliament directs I must consider when determining an appropriate sentence.
One of those matters are your personal circumstances and background. You are now 21 years of age. You come from what appears to be a loving, caring and stable home life. I have no doubt that your parents and family are beyond horror at what it is you have done, but you remain their son, a member of the family, and on my understanding they are supporting you in the best way they possibly can. Your parents are both employed; your father as a teacher, and your mother is a nurse. Your sister is also a teacher. You are the second child to your parents and your mother had four children from a previous relationship. You have lived in the house in Murrumbeena all of your life. You went to primary school locally and, although you had problems at school in terms of social interaction, with limited friendships and you were disruptive at times in class, you still managed to achieve reasonably well.
You initially attended De La Salle College between the years 7 to 11, but you were often in trouble. At the age of 12, you were seen by Mr Geoffrey Martin, psychologist, who was attached to the school, and he assessed you on 17 and 28 October 2006 — when you were aged 12 years and 6 months. In relation to the referral, he said you had been referred by your Home Room Teacher, for cognitive assessment, because of concerns about your social and academic progress. In particular, teachers had noticed that you were often ‘in a world of your own’, had circumscribed interests, difficulty in relating to your peers, and organisation in terms of handing in work. You were found by Mr Martin to have a high average range of ability in respect of your cognitive abilities, at that age, but you had significant discrepancies between your verbal and non-verbal abilities. He found that you had a diagnosis of high functioning autism, but determined that you had Asperger’s disorder DSM4 299.80. He said what was of significance was your weak social skills, sensory difficulties, weak understanding of non-verbal communication, poor conversation skills and restricted range of interests. You had great interest in areas that fascinated you, such as natural history, dinosaurs, reading, sharks, spiders, and you had a history of collecting things such as rocks and minerals, which interests continued later in life. You liked routines and you lacked some motor skills. The finding was that you would tend ultimately to prefer learning that is concrete and by rote rather than learning that is complex, abstract or requires detailed analysis. Apart from your perceptual reasoning index which was average, all of your other areas were assessed as being high average or superior.
You had sessions with Mr Martin for some period of time, on and off, but not any substantial, ongoing, long-term therapy. You received, as a result of his assessment, an aide at school, but in Year 11 you left that school and attended Bentleigh Secondary College. You repeated Year 11 and then completed Year 12, obtaining an TER score of approximately 66, taking you to Deakin University. You were much happier with Bentleigh Secondary college, and you made more friends at that school. You took a gap year, initially with the idea of saving money, but ultimately, despite working, you failed to save. You then in 2013 attended Deakin University, doing biological science. Your grades initially were good, but progressively fell off during the year.
You were assessed by Dr Ruth Vine on 10 March 2014, and although the document was not tendered in court, it was passed to the Crown and to me for consideration. You were also assessed by Dr Danny Sullivan on 3 October 2014, which document was tendered, and Dr Sullivan gave evidence before me. Both of those practitioners are forensic psychiatrists.
You have a friendship group, not large according the report of Dr Sullivan, it comprises people from both Bentleigh Secondary College and De La Salle. You reported to Dr Sullivan that you had occasional anxiety, which at times would prevent you from attending work, and that when anxious you would be frustrated and grumpy. You denied any significant problems with anger. You denied any obsessional behaviour about your interests, or experiencing any auditory hallucination or psychotic symptoms. You denied using any illegal drugs for any lengthy period of time. Although you said you had used cannabis from about the age of 15 but for a limited period. You say that you had been using alcohol from the age of 13 or 14 in a regular binge pattern with your friends of the same age.
You stated, that after leaving school you would become intoxicated a couple of time per week, drinking between 10 to 15 drinks. On this night you had consumed a significant quantity of alcohol, a recognised disinhibitor.
Dr Sullivan in his report noted at paragraph 27 that preceding the offence:
For some months he had experienced increasingly angry and homicidal thoughts. Initially these were related to people at the bottle shop who stole. He told me that they became more frequent. For instance, Mr Hemming told me that at times he found himself walking down the street fantasising about how to kill people. He denied that this attached to specific individuals. He noted this was also more likely to occur if he was bored. He denied that these thoughts made him either excited or happy or, alternatively, distressed or unhappy. However, he noted that he had some curiosity and had contemplated how to go about killing someone.
At paragraph 29:
He told me that he chose the victims randomly and they were an elderly couple whom he had met before and had seen walking their dogs. He explicitly denied there had been any conflict with them. He denied any animosity or antipathy towards them. He considered that it would be better to kill them because morally he considered it was more appropriate to kill elderly people than younger ones. He denied having any significant emotional response associated with his deliberations on this cause of action.
At paragraph 30:
After the offence, which he indicated did not cause him any particular excitement or distress, he reported that he intended to dispose of the clothes he had worn.
Doctor Sullivan stated at paragraph 47 of his report:
At the time of the offence I consider that the intent of the offence was obscured and that Mr Hemming’s judgement was obscured, as set out in the judgment of Verdins. He was not obviously disinhibited, in his capacity to think clearly or to make calm and rational choices was not impaired.
At one point your counsel stated that he relied upon the case of Verdins, being the matters to which I have just referred, and I requested counsel to ask Dr Sullivan, who was at that stage giving evidence, to explain how those aspects of Verdins were enlivened, and to take him through his evidence in respect of that. Counsel asked Dr Sullivan whether his condition was a disinhibitor, to which Dr Sullivan replied no, and counsel stated that he no longer relied upon any aspect of Verdins, with the exception that his time in prison may be more burdensome than the average person, due to his having to be in protective custody.[1]
[1]Page 25-26 transcript 13/10/2014.
I also need to consider the issue of protection of the community and rehabilitation, together with the fact that you are a young offender. The law is that in respect of young offenders the courts should do all that is possible to maximise their prospects of rehabilitation. That is normally what would be done, but the unfortunate position is that you have exceedingly poor prospects of rehabilitation, and that is tied in with the issue of protection of the community. You have pleaded guilty to these offences, and you know what you did was wrong, but there is nothing to indicate that you would not do it again, as you lack an emotional connectedness with people in general. In his evidence Dr Sullivan said in response to a question I asked him, that you were not a psychopath or a sociopath, but that you had some overlap in the criteria such as lack of empathy, a lack of emotional connectedness. Dr Sullivan was asked about your risk of re-offending and stated at page 22.
It’s essentially an unknowable question. The — we don’t have an evidence base for the treatment of this type of unusual and rare event. There is some evidence for cognitive technique. So people with Asperger’s syndrome don’t tend to have emotional or social understanding and they need to rely upon intellectual or cognitive tools to manage those tasks. So in terms of rehabilitation you would anticipate that Mr Hemming would receive likely one to one psychological input I would suggest in the hundreds of hours. There is no medication that would specifically affect this condition and the risk of reoccurrence is in that sense unknowable.
One of the reasons it is unknowable is that, to a large degree, the autism spectrum disorders and Asperger’s are of recent diagnosis in the medical and wider world, meaning it has only become known, at least to the general public, in the last twenty plus years, so there is still much that is unknown.
The most unfortunate aspect is that at this stage there is no treatment that will make persons empathetic, and caring of others. That is something that may occur in the future, with the great leaps that medicine is making, but at this moment you remain incapable of feeling genuine empathy, sorrow or regret, for your fellow human beings.
I need to consider deterrence, both specific and general, and it is my view that both have application in your case. There is no doubt that you suffer from Aspergers syndrome, as I have indicated, but you also understood right and wrong, you spoke to your mother about your violent thoughts, she arranged for you to see a psychologist you had seen previously, and you caused her to cancel that appointment, telling her you did not wish to attend. You knew what you did was wrong, you lied to your father about what you had been doing, you hid your clothing outside, you reclaimed it and hid it under your mattress, you took steps to avoid being detected, not sophisticated steps, but clear and demonstrable attempts to avoid detection and arrest. When arrested you lied consistently, for some hours, before ultimately telling the police that you were responsible.
In assessing the impact of your Asperger’s syndrome, it should be noted that you were able to attain a TER of 66, you were admitted to University after taking a gap year, you had a friendship group with whom you associated on a regular basis and you had been able to hold down employment for quite some time. Those are not common signs of Asperger’s, but you did have other clear signs of that syndrome, and I accept that you suffer from the syndrome. It is not normally a syndrome that causes people to be violent, they are usually the persons who suffer violence from others. Whilst there is a need for a small degree of some moderation of your sentence, due to the difficulty you may have in serving your sentence, due to your inability to socialize in an everyday manner with the average person, that does not reduce your moral culpability.
The other limbs of Verdins were expressly disavowed by your counsel, and despite being requested to explain the connection between your Asperger’s condition and the different limbs in Verdins, that was not done. Accordingly, whilst I accept that you do suffer from Asperger’s and that your offending is linked to it to a degree, the other limbs of Verdins are not matters that I take into account in the imposition of this sentence. Your consumption of alcohol on this night may well have been a more disinhibiting factor than your Asperger’s syndrome, as Dr Sullivan said, the syndrome would not be a disinhibiting factor
Your crimes were horrific, they were motiveless, a desire to kill just to see what it was like. You knew those thoughts were wrong, sufficiently wrong to cause you to tell your mother about having violent thoughts, but when she sought to help you by making an appointment with a psychologist you had seen previously, you refused the appointment. You were obviously still having those same thoughts about killing people, and you pursued the purchase of the knife you used to kill the Adamson’s. There were actions you could have taken to help yourself, such as carrying out the appointment with Mr Martin, not consuming large quantities of alcohol, but you chose not to do that.
The result is that two decent, caring, helpful people, who were asleep in their own home, have been woken, come to the aid of a neighbour and been brutally murdered. Your actions have sent a shudder of fear through our community, people rightly believe they are safe in their own homes, that their home is their castle and your actions have all but shattered that belief for a number of people. One of the functions of sentencing is protection of the community, and at this stage you must be considered a genuine risk to the community, if you were to be released. It is to be hoped that with time, medical science will find some method of assisting you to find that empathy and humanity that you currently lack, be it with medication or some form of psychotherapy, but at the moment it does not exist. There is no doubt that some members of the community believe you have forfeited your right to walk among us as a community and would prefer that the court simply put you in prison, and ‘throw away the key’, and whilst it is possible to understand that reaction to a degree, as your actions have engendered fear and terror in the minds of our citizens about their own safety, I am bound to obey the law, as laid down in the Sentencing Act 1999.
I have to rightly balance a significant number of matters, including your youth, your plea’s of guilty, your personal circumstances, rehabilitation and how your Asperger’s may impact on that, the level of seriousness of your offending, which is at a very high level, the aspects of deterrence, denunciation, just punishment, together with the issue of totality, whilst ensuring that the sentence I impose is not crushing.
In terms of current sentencing practices, it is difficult to find a comparable case. I will, accordingly, impose a sentence by applying the principles to which I have referred, combined with my knowledge of sentences imposed in numerous murder cases, over the last few years, both from being a sentencing Judge and reading the sentences imposed in murder cases by other Judges, and the Court of Appeal. This is a unique case, in that it must be classified as a thrill kill, but it is one in which there are two victims, murdered in the sanctity of their own home, by someone who is still very young. I have not found a comparable case. Earlier this year, I sentenced a young man in Geelong, for a thrill kill that occurred in the victim’s home, to a term of 26 years’ imprisonment with a minimum 21, after a trial. He was also an intellectually high functioning man, who also had no ability to empathise or relate to ordinary human feelings. That matter has been the subject of an appeal against sentence and the appeal was dismissed.
What you have done with offending has caused nothing but sadness to all involved in this case, the family and friends of the Adamson’s, who will never have the chance to talk, touch or be with Cheryl and Robert, and your family and friends who will also be forever scarred by your actions. Sentencing offenders is always a sad task, and particularly so as your crimes have so adversely impacted upon so many lives, right throughout our community
Taking into account all of the matters to which I have referred, you are convicted and sentenced to be imprisoned for 22 years on Charge 1, the murder of Robert Adamson, and 22 years on Charge 2, the murder of Cheryl Adamson. I direct that 10 years of the sentence imposed upon Charge 2 is to be served cumulatively upon the sentence imposed on Charge 1, making a total of 32 years’ imprisonment. I direct that you are to serve a minimum of 27 years before being eligible for parole.
Pursuant to s 6 AAA of the Sentencing Act 1999, I declare that the sentence I would have imposed but for your pleas of guilty would have been an overall sentence of 40 years with a minimum non parole period of 33 years. I should add that if all of the other mitigatory considerations to which I have referred in these sentencing reasons were not present the head sentence would have been one of life imprisonment and I would have imposed a minimum term substantially higher than 33 years.
I declare that there have been 244 (two hundred and forty four) days served in pre‑sentence detention in relation to this matter and I direct that this declaration and its details be entered into the records of the Court.
Application for retention of 464ZFB(1) forensic sample is granted.
Application for Disposal Order is granted.
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