Relief and pain for families
“CHRIS said to tell her Happy Birthday for today,” a soft female voice says to another woman sitting nearby in the public gallery of the Brisbane Supreme Court.
The woman who gives the message is there to support her fiancé, Gold Coast Army soldier Christopher Carter.
Carter whispered to his fianceé, Angela Slade, from the dock moments before the jury arrived on the third day of his trial to make sure the message got to his daughter.
She spent her birthday at home in Townsville waiting to find out if she’d see her father outside a maximum security prison before her 50th year.
The girl, like Carter’s two other children, will have their father around for all their birthdays now after he was yesterday acquitted by a jury of two murders.
Chris Carter cuts an imposing figure. He’s been an Army man most of his life and served several overseas tours. He doesn’t show much emotion aside from when he choked up giving evidence.
However, over the course of his two-week trial the man who admitted to killing two people appeared to be a father who cared for his children.
“How are things going? Are you all right?” Carter asked his son Harrison, from Townsville.
He motioned to his son’s tattoos: “What’s this?”
During the trial, Carter said the killings were all about his family. He told police, after being arrested, he went to work the next day before returning home to walk the dogs.
In actual fact, the court heard he contemplated suicide but could not go through with it because he was worried about his family.
On the other side of the room sits Renee Carter’s grieving parents.
“In three days he’ll be locked up,” Ms Carter’s mother Jo-anne Kuch says one morning as she exits the courtroom.
It’s the second day of the trial and she’s already had to leave the room in tears because hearing that her daughter was stabbed 10 times before she died is too much for any mother to hear.
Detectives sit with her, giving her support.
Ms Carter’s father is less vocal. It’s not until he hears the man who killed his daughter will not go to jail that he finally opens his mouth. “(Expletive) this,” he says. No one is in court to remember Corey Croft, the convicted paedophile who also lost his life. He’s originally from South Australia and his mother still lives there.
She’s been in hospital during Carter’s murder trial.
While Carter yesterday walked from court a free man, two families still lost a daughter and a son, and a young boy, who was in the house with his parents’ dead bodies for 24 hours, still wakes up without a mum and dad.