Warning: Graphic content
“Please don’t kill me daddy, I thought you loved me,” were the words a nine-year-old girl said to her father as he stabbed her up to 40 times at their family home.
The former Queensland police officer was attempting to murder his entire family and used his time in the police force to plot the attack, The Courier Mail reports.
The court heard that the man’s wife found out he had been sleeping with prostitutes – even pawning her engagement ring out to fund them. He then decided to kill his family.
He attacked his wife in her sleep and then – when he thought she was dead – proceeded to attack his seven-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter who had been woken by their mother’s screams.
His young daughter “fought back, begged him to stop … ,” Crown prosecutor Dejana Kovac said at the hearing.
“Please don’t kill me daddy, I thought you loved me,” the court heard, according to ABC.
In a victim impact statement read to the court, the man’s wife said: “My children will carry this trauma with them for the rest of their lives, lives that I hope will be long despite the attempted efforts of their father to cut them short.”
“My children are now growing up with the stigma, shame and pain of having a parent who tried to murder them.”
The man pleaded guilty in the Brisbane Supreme Court to three charges of attempted murder and has been sentenced to life in prison.
