KNIFE FRENZY
‘HE STABBED HER SIX TIMES’
Family custody disputes are frequently fractious affairs, but the bitter battle between feuding Australian couple
Paul Turner and Sarah Thomas over their children ended in murder, when Sarah was brutally stabbed to death by her estranged partner in a Perth courtroom in 2016.
The pair had been embroiled in legal wrangling about the future of their seven year old and four year old, but on the day of the murder, they were attending a separate court hearing to examine claims that Sarah owed Turner money. Without warning, Turner, 43, produced a kitchen knife that police believe he had hidden in a lever arch file and stabbed his 33-year-old former partner six times. The fatal blow was delivered when he severed the carotid artery in her neck.
At his trial three years later, Turner maintained he could not remember the fatal attack, and his only memory was being held in a police station with blood on his hands after the incident. He claimed he had been suffering from frequent dissociative seizures as a result of a head injury he had suffered in 2015, while working as a truck driver.
But the prosecution were able to establish that Turner had extensive training in commando skills and knife techniques dating back to the early 2000s, and argued he was acutely aware that a cut to the carotid artery would prove fatal.
It took the jury at the Supreme Court of Western Australia just two hours to convict him of murder, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 24 years.
“The evidence is compelling that you went to the courthouse with the intention to kill the deceased,” said Justice Joseph Mcgrath. “You were not suffering from some sort of dissociative seizure. You calmly inflicted the lethal wound.”