By Cam Lucadou-Wells
A man charged with chopping into his estranged wife with a small axe in Fountain Gate shopping centre had been introduced to her new partner the day before the attack, according to a police evidence brief.
The 45-year-old man, who legally cannot be identified, pleaded guilty on 10 August to a charge of intentionally causing serious injury to his wife in circumstances of gross violence.
Prosecutors dropped an attempted murder charge against the man, who appeared via a prison video-link, at the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court hearing.
The wife’s police statement, tendered at court, said she and her new partner were approached by her estranged husband at a Fountain Gate vegetable market on 26 March.
After she introduced the men, the accused allegedly asked her several times: “Are you happy?”
“I’ll come to see you tomorrow. I need you to sign something.”
The wife stated: “The way he talked to me, it’s not normal, it’s quite arrogant and I saw anger in his eyes.
“I knew something was going to happen.”
Her partner described in a police statement that after the meeting, she was shaking and couldn’t drive home.
She unsuccessfully tried to swap her next-day shift, she stated.
On 27 March, the accused arrived at her Fountain Gate workplace, took an axe out of a yellow bag and hacked her 24 times to her head, face, arms, chest and legs, she recalled.
Finally, he punched her in the face.
In a police statement, the wife’s workmate recalled trying to find security to help during the attack. She recalled the wife lying on the ground, saying: “I don’t want to die, I love my children” as the man stood in a corner.
Witnesses, in their statements, commented on how people yelled out at the man to “get off her” and “stop hitting her”.
A nurse, who had been shopping nearby, told of how she came to the victim’s assistance and tried to stem the bleeding.
A shopping centre cleaner described the former husband as “relaxed”.
“I’d like to take you outside and beat the hell out of you,” the cleaner said.
“I don’t care,” the man allegedly replied.
A police senior constable wrote in his statement that he thought the woman was going to die and requested an air ambulance.
“I can only describe the crime scene … as one of the worst I have seen in my policing career.”
The wife, in her statement, remembered waking up six or seven days later with multiple surgeries to her wounds.
She was unable to sign her statement, made in hospital a month later, due to her hand injuries.
For a long time, the man had been selfish, controlling and jealous, the wife recalled. She had been too scared to report his frequent bashings of her.
“This is all about jealously (sic). I was happy and having a really good time.
“Next time he’s going to kill me I’m 100 per cent sure.”
On an earlier occasion, the man had been arrested and served an intervention order after sending multiple texts threatening to kill her and telling her this was her “last day”, she said in her statement.
She had requested her husband still live with her, thinking she could fix the situation, she stated.
He had long been jealous of other men looking at her in public and falsely accused her of having affairs while she was at work, she stated.
“You are a bitch, you are a prostitute,” he allegedly told her.
He had also controlled her finances and opposed her learning how to drive.
In the period after their separation, she received abusive texts, blocked his phone calls and had been told he was stalking her at work, she stated.
Police also submitted a letter allegedly by the man complaining of men’s lack of power in Australia.
In the letter addressed to High Court judges, Australian police and the Australian government, he described himself as an accountant and finance manager who migrated with his family from Sri Lanka in 2011.
The letter states that intervention orders were used by women to “do anything” against their partners.
“Always ladies win the game.
“I didn’t expect anything to harm my wife at all but misleading information from third party divorced ladies and behavioural changes and double-crossing led to this situation as I cannot bear this anymore.”
Police also submitted evidence that an axe and mattock set was bought by a man in a Keysborough Bunnings store five days before the attack.
The man was remanded to appear at a plea hearing on 29 January.
