Man attacked sick girlfriend

Horror bashing lands him back in jail

A MAN who bashed his terminally ill girlfriend — until her bowel protruded from her hysterectomy wound — has copped more jail time in an ironic twist after he successfully fought to have his initial sentence quashed.

Leigh John Parker, 56, struck the woman’s head with her mother’s teapot, just months after she’d been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, at their Murdunna home during September 2017.

Then the woman’s carer, after being released from jail for unrelated offending, Parker also pushed the 53-year-old, with her fall causing a surgical wound from weeks earlier to split open.

Parker told a neighbour her

“guts were hanging out” as she lay unconscious in the driveway, collapsing after she’d tried to run away.

Parker called triple-zero and put a blanket on the woman before asking the neighbour for a cigarette, saying he thought the victim was dead.

Parker was initially given a jail term of four years and three months, with a non-parole period of two years and nine months, but successfully appealed in October this year and had the sentence quashed.

The Court of Appeal accepted his argument the facts had not been resolved before he was jailed, with the judge overlooking Parker’s version of what happened that night.

But on Wednesday, Chief Justice Alan Blow said he was not convinced Parker acted in self-defence when he pushed the woman after she’d allegedly bitten his ear — despite having just removed her false teeth.

He also found the victim, who fled to Western Australia after the attack, was “more vulnerable on the night in question than I had understood”.

Parker had confessed to two counts of assault following a plea deal, downgrading one of the charges from grievous bodily harm.

Chief Justicce Blow increased Parker’s head sentence to four years and six months’ jail, but fixed the same nonparole period.

The woman fled Tasmania after undergoing an emergency laparotomy and receiving nine staples in her head from the teapot wound. She is now in palliative care with post traumatic stress disorder.