‘In a type of limbo’: girlfriend of Sydney samurai sword killer spared jail for role postattack
A woman who helped her samurai sword-wielding boyfriend after he killed a Sydney home invader has been spared jail time.
Hannah Quinn “could never have anticipated at that time within minutes her life would change forever”, justice Natalie Adams said on Friday in the New South Wales supreme court.
“That she and [Blake] Davis would be the victims of a violent home invasion, that Mr Davis would go on to kill [Jett] McKee and she would be charged with murder.”
Quinn, 26, was sentenced to a twoyear community corrections order after she was found guilty by a jury of being an accessory after the fact.
Her boyfriend, Blake Davis, was previously jailed for at least two years and three months after chasing and striking the ice-fuelled armed robber McKee in the head with a sword in Forest Lodge in August 2018.
Davis, 31, was acquitted of murder but found guilty of the hip-hop artist’s manslaughter.
Quinn assisted Davis including by checking into and paying for overnight accommodation in the city and at Pennant Hills – and cleaning up her partner’s eye.
“Her boyfriend had just been the victim of a vicious and unprovoked assault, she simply administered aid to him,” Adams said of the eye-washing.
The judge accepted Quinn stuck with the “love of her life” out of misguided loyalty and because of her emotional attachment. “Nothing she did that weekend showed any plan to indefinitely go on the run,” Adams said.
In a letter to the court, Quinn spoke of night terrors where she thrashes around before waking up desperately crying. She said she had contemplated suicide following the ordeal.
“Every single day I wake up to my very own personal living nightmare and hell. Every day I wake up I am not living the life I chose anymore. I’m in a type of limbo,” her letter stated.
Adams accepted she had been genuinely sympathetic and profoundly affected but that she was not remorseful for fleeing and assisting her partner.
McKee was a gambling and drug addict when he needed “money urgently” and decided to rob a number of drug dealers.
Quinn submitted more than $20,000 in cash found in Davis’s bedroom was not from their “small-time” cannabis dealings but was for a planned holiday, but the judge rejected this.
Armed with knuckle dusters, pepper spray, cable ties and an imitation pistol, McKee burst in demanding money and threatening to kill.
After punching Davis with the knuckle dusters he fled with Quinn in fast pursuit “yelling very loudly”, several witnesses said.
Davis caught up and hit his samurai sword over the would-be robber’s head, which sounded very loud and crisp like a whip-cracking, according to another witness.
Despite the pool of blood and brain matter found where he fell, the judge accepted Quinn did not know he had died until Saturday when she saw it on the news.
Quinn fled with Davis and remained with him for the next few days as she checked them in and out of various hotels and bought them clothes from Kmart.
The length of her accessorial assistance was less than 48 hours, and was at “the very lowest end of the range of seriousness”, her defence submitted.
The judge was satisfied her aid to evade police ceased after Davis rang detectives on Sunday advising the couple would present to the police station on Monday after speaking with lawyers.
Quinn must adhere to a number of orders including that she receive medical treatment and not commit any offences.