EX-COP GIVEN LIFE FOR MURDER:

A little girl’s words haunt Lainie’s family

OF THE many harrowing and poignant moments for murder victim Lainie Coldwell’s family in the weeks following her death came from her then three-year-old daughter.

After Lainie’s de-facto Louis James Mahony was found guilty of her murder by a Toowoomba Supreme Court jury, Lainie’s niece Georgia Grant, surrounded by family, read a victim impact statement to the court expressing how Lainie’s death had devastated their tight-knit family.

In the weeks after her death, Lainie’s daughter Dakota had often asked where her mummy was.

Told that “mummy is now an angel”, the three-year-old had replied: “I don’t want an angel, I want my mummy”, Ms Grant said.

After 13 days of evidence, the jury took less than four hours to find Mahony guilty.

Mahony, 44, sat without expression as the verdict was announced and remained stoic as Justice James Douglas told him there was but one sentence he could impose, that of life imprisonment.

Having served two years in pre-sentence custody, Mahony will have to spend at least another 13 years in jail before he is eligible to apply for release on parole.

A number of Lainie Coldwell’s family cried “Yes!” as Justice Douglas pronounced sentence.

By its verdict, the jury had found Mahony to be the manipulative, lying, greedy philanderer that he was portrayed to be by the Crown.

Witnesses had given evidence that Mahony regularly said no-one would take his daughter from him, but Lainie had told her family that she was leaving Mahony and taking their daughter because of his affairs with other women.

The jury also accepted the Crown case that Mahony struck Lainie in the back of the head causing an horrific injury which proved fatal and then placed her body at the base of a gum tree in the yard of their Charleville home on the afternoon of August 23, 2009, to make it look as if she had fallen from the tree while removing party lights.

He murdered Lainie while Dakota slept inside.