NSW killers exposed: Comanchero bikies, prison inmates and jealous lovers
From brutal bikie slayings to jealous lovers and friends who turn on each other, these are NSW killers who took a life and are now paying the price.
Police & Courts
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From bikie wars to prison slayings and the senseless killing of children, when killings occur they rock communities to the core.
Some were callously planned while others were committed in a fit of rage towards some of society's most vulnerable.
These are the deaths that shocked NSW and the killers with blood on their hands.
‘COLD-BLOODED’ BIKIE KILLING
Sydney drug dealer Joseph Gatt shot a teenage Comanchero bikie in the neck as he sat in his car in Bexley after being blaming by his best friend for the killing.
Joseph Gatt killed 18-year-old Bassil Hijazi in 2013, and was sentenced to 21 years behind bars in 2018 over the murder.
Gatt, 28, was sentenced in the NSW Supreme Court to a maximum 28 years in prison with a non-parole period of 21 years.
Gatt testified he wasn’t even carrying a firearm, and it was his friend George Borg who pulled the trigger in a cannabis deal gone wrong. Borg had already been sentenced after pleading guilty to murder.
Justice Monika Schmidt labelled the murder a “cold-blooded execution” after a jury found Gatt guilty.
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SENSELESS STABBING
Mother-of-seven Sharee Turnbull was put behind bars last year until at least 2032 for the “senseless” murder of her friend in Camberdown in 2019.
The court heard the 41-year-old long-time drug addict repeatedly stabbed Jack Mulligan, 25, outside a notorious Sydney housing complex and gave no motive for the shocking killing.
Turnbull was on parole in September 2019 when she attacked Mulligan from behind in the garbage room of the Johanna O’Dea Court housing complex, the court heard.
Mr Mulligan was riddled with 18 stab wounds and later died in hospital.
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LURED TO HER DEATH
The callous murderer of Chinese student Qi “Kathy” Yu has had his prison time increased on appeal in April after it was found his initial 13-year jail sentence failed “to consider the protection of the community”.
Shuo Dong, 21, was sentenced to 18 years in prison, with a 13.5-year non-parole period, in September last year after pleading guilty to the murder of Ms Yu, aged 28.
No motive was ever discovered.
The Court of Criminal Appeal increased Dong’s prison sentence to 21 years in April.
It was found on sentence that Dong shut off the power in their Campsie apartment to lure Ms Yu from her bedroom with the intention of killing her.
Dong then drove her body to a spot beside the M1 Motorway near Ku Ring Gai train station and dumped her at the bottom of a gully, the court heard.
A few days later he met with police and denied having anything to do with Ms Yu’s disappearance.
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‘DESPICABLE’ DOUBLE KILLING
The man who murdered mother Karlie Pearce-Stevenson and her daughter Khandalyce was sentenced to life behind bars for the brutal killings.
Daniel James Holdom, 44, was sentenced in 2018 for the double-murder which Justice Robert Allan Hulme described as “despicable”, being of “extreme gravity, depravity” and falling within the worst category of murder.
Ms Pearce-Stevenson’s remains were found in the Belanglo State Forest in August, 2010.
She had cracked ribs and police long suspected she was murdered but she wasn’t identified until five years later in a remarkable breakthrough.
In July, 2015, Khandalyce’s skeleton was found inside a suitcase dumped on the side of the Karoonda Highway in Wynarka in South Australia.
There was duct tape wrapped around the toddler’s skull and dishcloths in her mouth.
A tip-off to Crime Stoppers helped identify the little girl three months later and eventually led police to identify Ms Pearce-Stevenson.
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SAVAGE CBD KILLING
There was a cry of “monster” from a full public gallery in the Supreme Court in May when Mert Ney was jailed for at least 33 years over a brutal stabbing in the Sydney CBD in 2019.
Ney was sentenced to a maximum of 44 years in prison for the savage murder of Michaela Dunn, 24, inside a Clarence Street apartment and the serious wounding of Lin Bo as he ran through Sydney CBD streets.
Justice Peter Johnson said Ney adopted the “trappings, gestures and language” of a terrorist on the day he boarded a train from Blacktown station with a knife and balaclava in his backpack.
His terrifying rampage through the streets, still armed and covered in Ms Dunn’s blood, included repeated shouts of “Allahu Akbar” and a one-fingered salute adopted by terror group ISIS.
Along the way he yelled for people to “shoot me” and would later tell a court he hoped police would kill him.
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BRUTAL PRISON SLAYING
NSW prisoner Richard Reay was found guilty of killing his cellmate after he claimed he attacked him after complaining their TV was too loud.
Reay, 46, was sentenced in the NSW Supreme Court in May after pleading not guilty during a judge-alone trial to murdering Geoffrey Fardell, 52, in Cell 234 at Kempsey’s Mid North Coast Correctional Centre in June, 2019.
The court was told a cleaner who was delivering milk to inmates at dawn had discovered Mr Fardell lying face down on the floor when Reay said to him: “My celly is dead”. Investigators later found he had been strangled to death.
Reay, who wanted to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter, claimed Mr Fardell had set upon him after complaining about the volume of their cell’s TV before he used an underwear clothesline to strangle his attacker.
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MURDER AFTER AFFAIR
John Wallace Edwards was sentenced to 24 years in jail with a non-parole period of 18 years for the murder of his estranged wife Sharon.
Having maintained his innocence for two years, Edwards, 62, was found guilty by a Coffs Harbour Supreme Court jury after two days of deliberation in late 2019.
Mrs Edwards, a Grafton schoolteacher and beloved mother and grandmother, disappeared without a trace in 2015. Her body has never been found.
Over the three-week trial the court heard of a long-term affair between Ms Edwards and another man. The court heard the couple reconnected decades after their initial relationship in the ’80s and planned to spend their future together.
They were together the night of Ms Edwards’s death, and it was the prosecution’s case Edwards worked himself into a rage at the prospect of her bringing Mr Mills back to the home he had paid for to spend the night and lay in wait until she returned home alone.
The court was told by witnesses who later spoke to the killer a fight broke out between the two.
The Crown case was Edwards put his wife’s body in the back of his ute and disposed of it in the Lawrence region.
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SON ATTACKS ELDERLY MUM
Boutros Mouawad went to his local RSL club for a few hours after attacking his mother in the backyard of their Illawarra home and wrapping her head in a plastic bag to stop the blood flow making too much mess.
Late last year Mouawad, 57, was jailed for at least six years for her killing.
Mouawad said he thought his mother was dead when he struck her again, wanting to make sure “to shut her up, so that she could not say anything anymore or bother him for the rest of his life”.
The disability pensioner, who was originally charged with murder, pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Hind Mouawad, 72, in February 2019 at their home in Woonona, in northern Wollongong.
Judge Christopher O’Brien jailed him for nine years with a non-parole period of six years.
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WIFE STABBED 14 TIMES
Bangladeshi national Shahab Ahmed murdered his wife after he found out she was having an affair and a court heard he then took “cruel and deliberate” steps to ensure she was dead.
Ahmed, 35, stabbed Khondkar Fariha Elahi 14 times as she begged for forgiveness in the bedroom of their Parramatta unit in February 2017.
The Bangladeshi national waited until she had stopped breathing before using her thumb to unlock her phone and call triple-0.
Justice Monika Schmidt, who found Ahmed guilty of the domestic violence murder in 2019, said it was “yet another such case” where a woman who wanted to end a relationship was attacked for expressing her wish.
The judge jailed Ahmed for 27 years with a non-parole period of 20 years and three months.
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CHILD KILLER SENTENCED
Coffs Harbour man Thomas Lock was sentenced to 36 years imprisonment for the murder of a two-year-old girl in 2014.
Thomas Lock, 27, has been sentenced in the NSW Supreme Court in Coffs Harbour before Justice Megan Latham after being found guilty by a jury.
The earliest Lock, 30, will be eligible for parole will be 2041 after serving a non parole period of 27 years.
The child, who cannot be named for legal reasons, died of blunt force trauma injuries on Easter Sunday.
The court was told during the hearing that a blow from Lock tore the small intestine of the toddler from the abdominal wall causing rapid bleeding.
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Investigation underway after teenage boy shot in leg
Police were called to Bankstown Hospital on Friday night, after a 17-year-old boy presented to the Emergency Department with a gunshot wound to the right leg.
Minns to probe hate crime jail fail
Premier Chris Minns has ordered a review into why a high-profile anti-Semitic arsonist was not prosecuted in a court that could issue a harsher sentence than the 10-month minimum he received.