BASHING PRECURSOR TO CHILLING MURDER

GUNMAN HID IN WALK-IN ROBE BEFORE FIRING 10 TIMES

HE was a troubled businessman, she was a former prostitute, her lover was a callous killer.

Shyam “Sam’’ Dhody met a brutal end, found dead in his bed on July 5, 2013, after being shot in the face 10 times while he slept in the Gilston home he shared with his partner, Melissa Leigh Shaw.

The horrific executionstyle murder, days before his 38th birthday, was initially a baffling case for Gold Coast detectives.

Mr Dhody had moved to the Gold Coast from India in 2000 to complete his masters degree in information technology at Griffith University. He would go on to become a semi-successful property investor, before his businesses and life came crashing down.

Two banks sued Mr Dhody to recover debts in 2012, the Commonwealth Bank launching legal action in the Brisbane District Court in March and Westpac in the Southport District Court in August.

In the months before his brutal murder in 2013, the banks were circling.

He had more than $1 million worth of property seized by the banks and the corporate regulator had moved to shut down one of his companies.

Then in March that year, Mr Dhody heard a noise while he was inside his Molendinar home. When he stepped outside to check on it, he was set upon.

An unknown attacker beat him severely with a crowbar and a concrete pot.

The assailant gave him a chilling warning: “I will finish the job, I’m going to kill you.’’

The assault only stopped when a 17-yearold girl walked by and witnessed the beating.

Inside the home was his partner Shaw and her two children.

Soon after that attack Shaw made an impassioned public plea for her partner’s attacker to hand himself in.

“My partner was on the ground and there was blood everywhere,” Ms Shaw said at the time.

“I thought he was going to be dead in a couple of seconds.’’

Months later, Shaw would walk into the master bedroom of the Gilston home that they had moved into weeks earlier, and find her partner dead – shot in the face 10 times by a .22 calibre rifle.

Police launched a huge investigation, with detectives looking into Mr Dhody’s business dealings and trying to learn if he had any enemies.

Days after the murder his family flew from India to the Gold Coast and called for anyone who knew anything to come forward.

Mr Dhody’s parents, Kavinder and Sushma, and brothers Sanjeev and Vivek made the public appeal.

“We are shattered and devastated,” Sanjeev said, speaking on behalf of the family as his mother wept. Weeks after the family’s plea for help in solving the case, police held another press conference, calling for information on a crowbar they believed was used in the March assault. It appeared the initial bashing and the murder were linked.

Then on July 26 detectives raided two homes, at Bribie Island and Lismore.

A month went by and nothing. Detectives were building their case.

Then on August 19, his partner Melissa Leigh Shaw, 27, was charged with his murder and attempted murder. Hours later, Gold Coast detectives charged her lover, Adam James Gooley, 32, with the same offences.

The whole sordid affair unravelled. It turned out Shaw had asked her lover, Gooley, to kill Mr Dhody.

In March 2013, Gooley tried to beat him to death with a crowbar and the concrete pot, before he was interrupted by the 17-year-old girl who was out walking at Molendinar.

Months later Shaw called him after learning her fiance was due home early from a business trip.

Gooley had been hiding in a walk-in cupboard, let in by Shaw. He had borrowed his father’s gun and gone to the Gilston home between 6am and 7.40am.

Gooley took the .22 calibre rifle and shot Mr Dhody in the face 10 times at point blank range. He later took the rifle back to his father in Lismore – his dad none the wiser it had been used in an execution.

It came out in court that Mr Dhody had met Shaw while she was a sex worker. She had told fellow prostitutes that a rich client was going to set her up. But he was bankrupt at the time of his death.

Meanwhile, Gooley was being kept alive by an artificial heart, with his lawyers claiming he could die before the case was even heard. That was in October 2013.

But Gooley survived and on August 1, 2015, he pleaded guilty to the murder and attempted murder of Dhody.

On September 4, 2015, he was sentenced to life in prison. He told detectives he acted alone out of a hatred for Mr Dhody, whom Shaw claimed was abusing her.

Justice David Boddice gave Gooley the minimum mandatory punishment for murder – life imprisonment with no parole for 20 years.

It was clear Gooley had acted out of “a misguided sense of loyalty” to his lover but there was no justification for the “brutal and cowardly slaying”, the judge said.

The cold and calculating Shaw finally had her day in court on April 5, 2015.

On the first day of the trial she was compared to Helen of Troy, described as “the face that launched the murder” of Dhody.

Crown prosecutor Dennis Kinsella told the jury Shaw procured Gooley to kill Mr Dhody, who – it was claimed – used to beat her after she met him in her work as a prostitute.

On April, 20, 2016, Shaw was found guilty of murder but not guilty of attempted murder.

Shaw wept in the dock and dabbed her eyes with a tissue after the verdict was delivered.

Justice Peter Flanagan sentenced Shaw and said: “In light of the verdict of the jury, they have accepted you were a party to a premeditated and persistent plan to kill Sam Dhody.’’

Shaw was sentenced to life in prison with a nonparole period of 20 years.

The brutal 2013 crime left Dhody’s son and daughter from a previous relationship – who had been living in Perth with their mother – without a father, while it left Shaw’s two daughters without a mother.