What pushed Susan Falls to kill her husband?

SUSAN Falls didn't just snap one night - she planned her husband's death in great detail, even obtaining a gun and silencer.

Susan Falls with her husband Rodney.

RODNEY Falls was a proud man - he ran his own online business, had a family and liked his home to look good.

He liked to keep himself looking good, too, and was a devoted body-builder. Sometimes, to keep those big muscles hard, he used steroids.

The steroids were expensive so he maintained a crop of cannabis to make a bit of extra money.

On occasions the Falls family dogs would dig up his garden or damage his precious cannabis plants. He killed nine of them, mostly by drowning or beating.

"We would say that the dog ran away," his wife Susan recalled, giving evidence in court as she defended herself against murder charges.

Inside the family home, it was Susan who was the target of Rodney Falls' bouts of violence.

Over 20 years, she was beaten, burned, threatened, dragged across floors by her hair, forced to have sex and told members of her family would be killed. She tried to leave once, in 2000, after a police officer managed to make her understand one day Rodney Falls would probably kill her.

But she went back after he threatened her family and endured another six years of torture until, four years ago, she fought back.

Susan Falls has spent the past two weeks in Brisbane's Supreme Court, charged with the murder of her 41-year-old husband.

On Thursday she walked free after admitting to drugging and shooting Rodney Falls and arranging to have his body dumped in a state forest near Mapleton, on the Sunshine Coast.

For a fortnight the court heard what went on inside the Falls' homes over almost 20 years.

Susan Falls didn't just snap one night – she planned her husband's death in great detail, even obtaining a gun and silencer.

"Susan Falls was in a uniquely dreadful set of circumstances and because of the specific threats which she faced she was entitled to use lethal force to protect herself and her family," her lawyer Jeff Hunter QC said.

The Falls had been together since Susan was just 14.

"He met and married the girl next door," said his mother Margaret Van Donselaar four years ago.

Her son had always been close to his family, especially his grandmother, and had left school before he was 15 but worked hard with his uncle to obtain his air-conditioning, refrigerator and electrical licences.

"Being a very ambitious man, he then went on to obtain his builder's licence, building homes in Blacktown, Pelican Waters and Caloundra, where he lived for the last 10 years," she said.

While his mother doesn't believe Rodney Falls was an abusive husband – "I should know, I lived with him," she said outside the court this week – a cast of people said otherwise.

They told of Susan's attempts to take out domestic violence orders against her husband, of her hospital admissions and of seeing her with bruises.

What would set him off, Susan said, were little things like his Coco Pops being too soggy.

"I had to get his Coco Pops. I would know when I heard the hair dryer (he used to dry his hair) that at that point I would pour the milk so they would be just right, wouldn't be too crunchy, too soft," she said.

But what finally made Susan Falls fight back, after two decades of abuse, was a cruel gambling game her husband played.

The court heard he wrote the names of four family members on pieces of paper and made her pick one.

That was the person he would kill, he told her and named a date.

And so the 38-year-old Caloundra housewife made her own plans. She spoke to someone who knew someone who supplied her with and gun and a silencer. She filled a prescription for a bottle of sleeping pills.

For two weeks she prepared the scene, finally, on May 25, cooking her husband's favourite curried prawns and lacing them with the drugs.

He ate the meal and dozed off in his recliner.

No-one saw him alive after that meal. On June 12 his tearful wife made a public appeal for anyone knowing what had happened to him – she told the world the last time she'd seen him was when she dropped him at the Curramundi Hotel on June 1.

That was a "monstrous lie" said the Crown Prosecutor.

She was charged with his murder on June 22 after his body was found.

Falls gave police her account of what happened after her husband dozed off in his recliner.

"I waited about an hour and got a gun," she said in a recorded interview played to the court.

"I went as close as I could to him. I was really scared because I wasn't quite sure if he was truly asleep or not.

"I stood on his right side and pointed the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger."

Falls told detectives she continued to hear her husband breathe up to two hours after the first shot.

"I was scared he was going to get up.

I thought I would have to get something to put over his face because sleeping tablets and two bullets hadn't killed him.

"That's when he took his last breath."

For three days Rodney Falls's body stayed in the couple's duplex home.

Mrs Falls told police she burnt incense and put on the air-conditioner to mask the smell of death. And then she organised for three other people to help her get rid of the body.

Falls' solicitor Jodi Allen yesterday acknowledged some people would doubt Falls' claims.

"Initially, the two psychiatrists who gave evidence at the trial indicated that at first they looked at it with a little bit of scepticism, but then after hearing her version, her symptoms and her emotions. . .

"As the case progressed, more and more witnesses would come forward and give evidence about what they'd seen or heard. It certainly verified her version."