R v Murphy
[2001] VSC 58
•8 March 2001
| SUPREME COURT OF VICTORIA | |
| CRIMINAL DIVISION | Not Restricted |
No.1817 of 2000
| The Queen |
| v |
| Wayne John Murphy |
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JUDGE: | Bongiorno J | |
WHERE HELD: | Melbourne | |
DATE OF HEARING: | 23 February 2001 | |
DATE OF SENTENCE: | 8 March 2001 | |
CASE MAY BE CITED AS: | R v Murphy | |
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION: | [2001] VSC 58 | |
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CRIMINAL LAW – Sentence – Murder – Wife – Premeditated – Breach of intervention order – Crimes (Family Violence) Act 1987
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APPEARANCES: | Counsel | Solicitors |
For the Plaintiff | Mr. B. Kayser | Solicitor for Public Prosecutions |
| For the Defendant | Mr. L. Hartnett | Victoria Legal Aid |
HIS HONOUR:
Wayne John Murphy you have pleaded guilty to the offence of having murdered your wife on 3 April 2000. You have no prior convictions and now come before this Court to be sentenced for the offence you have committed.
I have read the depositional material which forms the basis of the case against you and I have heard a plea on your behalf by your counsel, Mr Hartnett. I have heard evidence from Mr Bernard Healey, a clinical psychologist, concerning matters within his expertise which might be of assistance to me in determining an appropriate sentence.
You were born on 2 December 1956 and are accordingly now 44 years of age. You had a rudimentary education, leaving school at the age of 16 and eventually became a taxi driver after some years in other occupations. Your childhood and early life appears to have been uneventful in any relevant sense.
It was whilst driving taxis that you met your wife and began a friendship with her. You shared a residence with her for a time as a housemate although it was not until many years later, in about 1995, that you commenced a serious relationship with her which led to marriage. In the intervening period she had been in one or more other relationships although you continued to keep in contact with her.
You marriage was tumultuous and punctuated by a series of separations, the last of which occurred on 5 January 2000. It would be impossible for me to make any definitive finding as to the cause of the unhappiness between you and your wife on the sparse material I have available. It is unnecessary for me to do so. However, it appears that whatever might be the truth, you believed that your wife was drinking too much, gambling too much and associating with other men in inappropriate circumstances. You described all of these matters in your frank answers to police questions after the tragic event for which you are about to be sentenced.
It appears that on each occasion that you had separated from your wife in the past a reconciliation of sorts had occurred within a relatively short time. Some of your answers to the police suggests that you believed the same would occur with respect to the separation of 5 January 2000 although you also asserted somewhat anomalously that since that time it had been your intention to kill her.
After separating in January last year you went to live with your brother in Canterbury Road, Surrey Hills leaving your wife in the flat you had previously shared in Hawthorn. She began a relationship with another man although you continued to have contact with her from time to time.
On 23 March 2000 the deceased was walking home along Riversdale Road, Hawthorn when you pulled up beside her in a car and assaulted her by grabbing her around the throat. Following this event she obtained an interim intervention order from the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court pursuant to the Crimes (Family Violence) Act 1987. This order was served upon you at the Box Hill Police Station on 27 March 2000. The making and service of the intervention order seemed to have an adverse effect upon you. Your brother deposed that on several occasions after that you told him that you wanted to kill your wife although you did not go into detail as to how you would achieve this object.
On Sunday 2 April 2000 you commenced working as a taxi driver at about 7.00 am and worked throughout the day although, during the morning, you uncharacteristically spent some time at a Catholic church in Hawthorn. Why you did so is unclear. Perhaps the enormity of what you were clearly planning caused you to have second thoughts.
Between about 7.00 and 8.00 pm on that Sunday night you returned to your brother’s home where you took an axe which you secreted in the boot of your taxi. You did this in such a way that your brother’s child (or children) who was watching television did not see what you were doing. You took the axe to your wife’s home at No. 5 Summerlea Grove, Hawthorn and hid it in the garden with the intention of returning later in the night to carry out what had, by now, become your clear intention to murder her.
You continued your taxi driving activities until about 2.00 am on the morning of 3 April when you returned to Summerlea Grove, Hawthorn, found the axe, and entered your wife’s flat through what you believed, correctly, would be an unlocked window. After entering the flat you made your way to what you knew to be your wife’s bedroom only to find that she had just got out of bed, possibly because she had heard you enter through the window I have referred to. She was standing beside the bed when you struck her three times on the head with the back of the axe, swinging it as you did so through an arc over your shoulder. No words were exchanged between you and your wife from the beginning of this episode until she collapsed on the floor, dying or perhaps even dead.
Throughout this episode you did not switch on the light but performed your murderous deed using such natural light as was available. As your wife lay on the floor you switched on the light, not to see what damage you had done to her, but rather to see whether there was any blood upon you or your clothing. You saw no blood either on yourself or on the axe and so you left the house and returned to your taxi which you had parked a short distance away. You then drove to Salvation Army clothing bins in suburban streets in Camberwell and Balwyn and disposed of your shoes and jeans. The axe you took to a location in East Doncaster, perhaps with the intention that it would be appropriated by someone to their own use and not connected with you.
After disposing of these items you returned to your brother’s home where you watched television until, about 7 o’clock, you had a conversation with him in which you told him what you had done. It was probably at his suggestion that you then accompanied him to the Camberwell Police Station where you arrived at approximately 7.35 am. You placed a copy of the intervention order to which I have referred on the police station counter and told the desk sergeant, Sergeant Cross, that you had hit your wife over the head three times with an axe.
Over the next 24 hours you were interviewed on a number of occasions by police officers and in those interviews, which were taped, you made a full and frank confession of the deed you had performed. It is significant that on more than one occasion during those interviews you told the police that you had had the intention of killing your wife since you separated from her in January of last year. In describing what you had done, in answer to police questions you said at various times:
“I just had enough. Once she put that order out on me, that was it. Done nothin’, she goes – goes out rootin’ around an fuckin’ forgets about you know, the guy who was with her for 16 years and fuckin roots around on him. Fuck that”;
“And come 2 o’clock I said, ‘Right. It’s time to’ – I had it in my – I had it in my mind to do it that night. I thought I’ve had I have, I have had it bein’ treated like a dog for 16 years and that’s my exact words. She treated me like a dog and all her friends just laughed at me”;
“… its been stirring up in me since I left on the fifth of the first. I was actually gonna do it that night because she had come home – she did not come home until 12.30 that night and the fifth of the first was either a Thursday or a Friday night and all I wanted was about two hours so we can sit down and have a meal, a talk and she was down partyin’ until half past 12 at night, talkin’ to her piss mates”;
“I’ve been plannin’ it for months, mate, ever since the fifth of the first. If it hadn’t have been – if I hadn’t have done it last night, it would have been the next night or the night before. I just had to pick the right time.”
and finally
“My purpose was she treated me like an animal, so I treated her like an animal. You hit animals over the head with an axe.”
The pathologist’s report shows that your wife suffered a number of head injuries associated with underlying skull fractures. It was his opinion that any one of these injuries would have been of a severity sufficient to cause unconsciousness. They were individually and together capable of causing death.
In the course of a plea made on your behalf by Mr Hartnett of counsel evidence was led from a psychologist, Mr Bernard J Healey. Mr Healey was of the opinion that you suffer from a personality disorder of a fairly long-standing nature reflective of a high level of inadequacy. He described you as a private, introverted individual who has not matured emotionally or mentally and has no developed capacity for depth and meaning in inter-personal relationships. He considered that you had no mental impairment, that you were in no sense actively delusional but that you became somewhat obsessed about what was happening between you and your wife. He noted that there were some indications that since the murder you had gained some insight into your problem and that it might be possible, particularly during the period when you will be on parole, to institute a regime of treatment which could be effective.
Further, it appears that in 1997, whilst driving your taxi, you were the victim of a viscous armed robbery in which you received a number of stab wounds. Mr Healy considers that you may well have suffered from some post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of this event although how severe and for how long he was unable to determine. Whether it had any causative effect on your mental state at any time relevant to this event is impossible to say. I mention it merely as a part of your life history.
Your counsel conceded that the only mitigating factors applicable in your case were the fact that you pleaded guilty together with such remorse as is demonstrated by that plea and your full and frank cooperation with the police.
I am required by the Sentencing Act 1991 to take into account not only your plea of guilty but also the time at which that plea was made or offered. In your case it is clear that from the moment you walked into the Camberwell Police Station you were, in effect, pleading guilty to murdering your wife even though, for forensically sound reasons, you reserved your plea at your committal. Indeed, you could hardly have done otherwise than plead guilty. In all the circumstances the tracing of your wife’s murder to you would have been a matter of comparatively easy investigation.
Your plea of guilty has saved the family of your deceased wife the suffering which would have been inflicted upon them by having to endure a trial. It probably represents some degree of remorse on your part although the exact extent of remorse demonstrated by a plea of guilty is always difficult to assess. It certainly saved the agencies of the State the expense and inconvenience of an investigation and trial. All of these matters enure to your benefit in the sentencing process.
The act for which you are about to be sentenced was clearly pre-meditated. Indeed you may have formed the intention to kill you wife as early as January 2000. Whether that is so or not it is clear that at least from the time you took the axe from your brother’s home and hid it in your wife’s garden your course was firmly set.
Further, you murdered your wife in circumstances where she was not only entitled to live in the peace which the law seeks to provide for all citizens equally but she was also entitled, by virtue of an order of a court, to be protected from any approach, much less an assault, by you. The intervention order which she obtained was specifically designed so that family members who are put in fear by the actions of those closest to them can obtain some legal protection from, at best harassment, and at worst vicious assault. The Crimes (Family Violence) Act 1987 was passed by the Victorian Parliament for that purpose. People who obtain intervention orders under the Act are entitled to the fullest protection from assault by those to whom such orders are directed as the law can provide. Tragically, in this case, the law was unable to provide your wife with the protection she sought. That you committed this crime whilst there existed an intervention order in favour of your wife directed against you is undoubtedly a significant aggravating factor to be taken into account on the question of sentence.
To act in contravention of an intervention order is itself a criminal offence. The sentence imposed upon you must reflect the seriousness with which the Court views an already heinous offence when it is committed in circumstances where there is in place an intervention order designed to prevent the very violence which in fact occurred.
In your case the sentence which I am about to impose must punish you to the extent the justice of this case demands. It must deter you and the community generally from committing offences of the same or a similar character. It must take into account the possibility of rehabilitation. It must manifest the denunciation by the Court of the type of conduct in which you engaged. Finally, it must protect the community from you for such period as is just in all the circumstances.
The maximum penalty prescribed for murder is life imprisonment. There is no offence of greater gravity known to the law. Your culpability for the offence is total and, having regard to the victim impact statements which I have read, the effect of the offence on those closest to the victim has been and will be enormous.
Taking all the matters to which I have referred into account as well as the other matters required to be taken into account by the Sentencing Act 1991, the sentence of the Court is that you be imprisoned for 19 years and that you serve a minimum of 14 years six months before being eligible for parole. I declare that the period to be reckoned as already served under the sentence is 340 days including today’s date and I direct that there be noted in the records of the court the fact that such declaration was made and its details.
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