Lifetime of evil led to murder
ANTHEA Mari never stood a chance.
As she slept beside her two young children, she was murdered by a coward in the night.
Sleeping on a mattress in the family living room Ms Mari, struck down by a terrible bout of gastro, had a sheet wrapped around her neck, a pillow placed over her face and was smothered and strangled.
Why Jacob Michael Smith, 41, murdered Anthea Mari still remains unknown, but the idea to strangle or smother a person could have been born during a chaotic and callous criminal history that started when he was 18.
The chequered history of the killer, with a lengthy rap sheet, is varied and violent.
In 1997, in the midst of one of the most brutal parts of Queensland prison history, Smith was serving time at the Woodford Correctional Centre, when prisoner Scott Douglas Mill was strangled with a cord.
Mill’s death would become part of a sweeping review into the state’s prison system, with police reopening investigations into the deaths of 12 inmates at both Woodford and Sir David Longland Prisons.
With an affinity for armed robbery, Smith would serve a stint behind bars for the January 2001 robbery of the Suncorp Metway Bank at Harbour Town. He was charged with armed robbery with actual violence, three counts of deprivation of liberty, possessing a sawn-off shotgun and car theft.
Six months later, and four years after his time inside Woodford Prison, Smith, aged 26 in 2001, was charged for his involvement in the death of Mill. It was alleged Smith stood lookout while two other inmates strangled Mill.
Justice Martin Daubney said in the Supreme Court in Brisbane this week: “It is perhaps no coincidence that the mechanism by which those two inmates killed a person back then when you were acting as their lookout bares some similarity to the mechanism in