Henpecked killer Anthony Sherna says when wife Susie Wild spooked his dog Hubble, he finally snapped
HE was even banned from using his own toilet, but when Anthony Sherna’s controlling wife spooked his beloved dog Hubble, that was the last straw ...
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KILLER Anthony Sherna said his wife dominated his life to the point where he wasn’t allowed to sit on his own home toilet or wear work clothes of his own choice.
His wife was so controlling she made him quit weekend cricket and banned him from Friday night drinks with the guys from work.
His diminutive wife, Susanne Wild, was so stingy she controlled the finances down to the last five cents and threw beer cans at him when she wasn’t happy, Sherna said in court.
It was seven years ago this month, Sherna pleaded not guilty to the charge of murder.
It was a “pressure cooker” existence and when he killed “Susie” he snapped, he told a jury.
Sherna was either one of two types of characters — a Norman Bates-like plotter or a bloke from the awkward Norman Gunston mould.
Prosecutors painted the 43-year-old as a deadly Norman Bates variety; a calculating man capable of killing his wife, who was more like his mother.
In the Supreme Court during his trial, Sherna played a guileless Norman Gunston-type role as he told of years of verbal and mental abuse dished out by his domineering missus.
He almost appeared as a parody, much like the weedy Gunston TV character.
Whichever brand of man he was, one fact cannot be disputed: Sherna took three minutes to strangle his tiny wife with a dressing gown cord as she pleaded, “Tony no, don’t do it.”
He let her body lay around for days before he buried it in the backyard and planted over the makeshift grave.
The February 2008 death happened, Sherna claimed, after his wife yelled at him and scared their pet puppy, Hubble.
The killing occurred, Sherna added, on the back of the years of claimed torment at home.
According to Sherna, Susie — who stood at just over 1.5m tall — was a domineering ogre who abused him to his wits’ end.
He told the jury his astounding story of how she controlled his entire life.
How she verbally belittled him and forced him to change his surname to prove his love.
How she told him what to wear each day.
How she rationed out his cigarettes and money and limited his TAB phone account bets to $1.50 apiece.
How she controlled his toilet habits, and smelled his clothes for the odour of imagined love affairs.
She even stole Christmas one year, he suggested.
“In our 18-and-a-half-year relationship we never had a Christmas tree,” Sherna told the jury.
“(One year) Susie was upset with something or someone and she said, ‘You take those bloody tree and decorations back, we’re not celebrating Christmas.”
In a rationalisation for his terrible crime, Sherna told detectives: “She was always at me … I just had enough.”
In the minds of investigators and the prosecution team, Sherna was a deliberate cold killer.
And Hubble, the couple’s pet terrier pup, was an unwitting central player in the sad case.
Sherna, born Anatoli Chernishoff on July 15, 1966, was the second-youngest of eight children.
His mother, Fatina Chernishoff, was a religious Russian Orthodox woman who immigrated to Australia with her family in 1962.
Sherna led a fairly unremarkable teenage life.
He was working with the Department of Consumer Affairs when he met Ms Wild on a train in August 1989.
Sherna was immediately infatuated with the older woman.
Born in Launceston, Tasmania, she was 35. He was 23.
She did not make a great first impression on Sherna’s family.
“(She was) dominating and also very extreme in how she approached people,” one of Sherna’s brothers, Vladimir Chernishoff, would say.
Sherna said he gave up cricket for Susie.
“Susie didn’t like me sharing my time with others and she got really upset if I said, ‘I’ve got to go and play cricket,’” Sherna told the jury at his murder trial.
“It was early in the relationship and I just backed right down from any type of argument and just tried to make her happy.”
According to Sherna, Susie was still spending time with her ex-boyfriend.
“She just called me a weak little bastard for letting it happen,” he told the Supreme Court.
Friday night drinks with his work colleagues were banned, he claimed.
“I had to stop doing it altogether because when I got home Susie would grill me and say that I was womanising, or words to that effect, which was simply not true,” Sherna told the jury.
Ms Wild demanded he change his surname from Chernishoff to Sherna by deed pool to prove his loyalty.
By that stage they were sleeping in different bedrooms, he told the court.
Susie would threaten him with a knife and grazed him once, he said.
“I ended up curling on my side, protecting my vital organs, and that’s how I sleep to this day,” he told the jury.
“I don’t sleep on my back any more.”
Susie controlled the expenditure, Sherna claimed.
“Susie held all the money. She held the credit card, ATM card, bank book, cash.”
The claims continued.
“Apparently my ‘number twos’ were filthy and I stunk and (she said) I should be doing those at work and shopping centres,” Sherna said in court.
“I wasn’t allowed to defecate in the toilet (at home).”
During his first trial (which ended with a hung jury), Sherna admitted that, while he trained himself in the art of bowel control and used toilets other than those at home, long weekends “were a problem”.
It was a startling statement from a grown man.
Prosecutor Andrew Tinney, SC, took him to task on the bewildering story.
Mr Tinney: “For a wife to insist of a husband that he never use the toilet in their own house if he wants to do anything other than urinate … that would be quite demeaning and bizarre, would it not?”
Sherna: “I had to go to shopping centres and work.”
Mr Tinney: “How many years or months or days was it that you were not permitted to use the toilet at whatever house you were living in?”
Sherna: “I’d say maybe five years.”
Mr Tinney: (That’s not in your police interview) because it is a lie, isn’t it?”
Sherna: “Hell no. Why would any person stand in the dock and tell the world that?”
Mr Tinney: “You were telling the police about your life and you did not tell them anything about this very notable claim that you now make of not being able to use your own toilet?”
Sherna: “Yes … to me that was everyday. That wasn’t unusual.”
The couple finally bought a home, in Tarneit.
They moved there in June 2002.
Neighbours Mark and Anthea Rose were the first local couple to greet them.
The Roses were due to have a baby, and Sherna and Ms Wild took a bottle of champagne over after the birth.
Ms Wild began an argument about the dangers of dogs near babies, and she and Sherna were asked to leave.
“Susie said something that got the pair of us off-side with the Roses,” Sherna said in court.
Ms Wild made breakfast and lunch.
Lunch was always three sandwiches a day.
Sherna told the jury: “One was to be eaten for morning tea. Two for lunch.”
His barrister, Jane Dixon, SC, asked: “What about if you wanted to buy lunch at work?”
Sherna: “No, no. I was never given any money, especially any lunch money.”
Of a night time, according to Sherna, prepared meals would be heated in the microwave and it would be lights out on Susie’s say so.
“If Susie was tired, the household was tired,” Sherna said in evidence.
“(It would be) ‘Off with the telly, we’re going to (our separate) beds.’ That was it. Didn’t matter if it was the last quarter of the Grand Final. Too bad. Bed.
“It was best to let her be when she was on her bandwagon.”
There was an Australia vs. India 20/20 cricket match being played at the MCG on the Friday night Susie Wild was to die.
One of Sherna’s workmates had invited him to the game, but he refused.
Earlier that day, according to Sherna, his wife had informed him about a mobile phone bill that arrived in the mail two weeks earlier.
His phone had since been disconnected.
Sherna was annoyed about that.
After drinking some beers at home that evening, Sherna went out the back for a cigarette and let Hubble do his “toilet business”.
While he was outside, Ms Wild made an emotional phone call to her mother, Lorna Brazendale, in Tasmania.
Sherna said he was in the laundry rocking Hubble to sleep to radio tunes when his wife stormed in about 11.45pm.
Her yelling scared Hubble, Sherna said.
“Susie came in ranting and raving,” he told detectives Nigel L’Estrange and Vic Anastasiadis.
“It was loud and Hubble was shaking like a leaf. I was really angry.”
Sherna said he “lost all rationality” when his wife then taunted him about the hidden phone bill.
In the kitchen, he wrapped his dressing gown cord around her neck.
“I had a surge of emotion,” he would tell the court.
After the killing, Sherna stood and took a drink.
He knows exactly what time he killed his wife because he spied the oven clock as he rocked his head back to take a slug of Toohey’s Red.
In what Mr Tinney described as “entirely frightening” behaviour after the killing, Sherna left his wife’s body where it lay and went and played poker machines and booked some time with a prostitute.
“He grabbed some clothing, got himself dressed and he left his de facto wife dead on the kitchen floor, sort of crumpled there, and his dog asleep in the laundry and he went out drinking and gambling at a pokies venue at the Werribee Plaza,” Mr Tinney said.
“After a few hours and many drinks there he went off to a brothel, where he spent some time with a prostitute.”
Sherna told the jury: “It was totally out of character. I never do that and my dear old mother would be so upset with me.”
After waking the next day about noon, Sherna dragged his wife’s body on to her bed.
That afternoon he made several phone calls — none of them to police.
He called sex chat lines, the brothel he’d attended and made several bets via his TAB telephone account.
“I think I had the radio on the horse channel,” he admitted.
Ms Wild’s body lay on her bed for two days in the February heat.
Sherna rang work on the Monday and asked for the week off because his wife had “left him”.
Later that day he wrapped the body in bed sheets and plastic.
While drinking beer he dug a shallow grave in the hard backyard clay.
About 1am the following morning — Tuesday February 5 — he dragged the wrapped body into the back yard and dumped it in the hole.
Mr Tinney said Sherna treated Ms Wild like she “was some sort of animal”.
After sunrise, Sherna planted rose bushes along the edge of the garden atop the covered grave.
Even in death, Susanne Wild was still on the wrong side of the roses.
On Saturday February 9 — his last day of freedom — Sherna drank, played with Hubble and placed a dozen bets on the horses via his phone account.
Mr Tinney: “You were at home listening to the races, were you?”
Sherna: “Yes, no doubt.”
Mr Tinney: “Putting on bets at your leisure.”
Sherna: “I wouldn’t have put it like that, but yeah. I was putting on bets.”
Mr Tinney: “I would suggest that you didn’t really have any particular regret about what you had done other than in respect of how it was going to affect to you.”
Sherna: “I had absolutely heaps of regret.”
Police arrived on Sherna’s doorstep on the night of February 9 in answer to a missing-person report regarding Susanne Wild.
“She’s dead,” Sherna confessed.
“I just had enough. I strangled her to death then buried her.”
During his police record of interview, Sherna summed up his life like this: “Every day was a pressure cooker day. A pressure cooker.”
Prosecutor Tinney said the killing was a deliberate and conscious act.
“(Susanne Wild) could be the worst and most unpleasant and controlling person in the world, but she deserved a bit better than to be strangled to death in her own house, wrapped up and buried in her own back yard.”
The jury acquitted Sherna of murder but found him guilty of manslaughter.
Justice David Beach sentenced him to 14 years’ jail with a minimum of 10, a substantial term for manslaughter.
The judge said he did not accept the prosecution case that Sherna’s tale of life with Susanne Wild was a fabricated one.
“However,” Justice Beach said, “in my view the account you gave in evidence was an exaggerated one which overemphasised some of the negative aspects of the relationship.
“It is likely they did not have as great a significance (on you) as might have been thought from your description of them in evidence.”
Justice Beach went on: “This is not a case where someone in a fit of anger lashes out and kills with one blow.
“This, on your own evidence, was a case where you took two to three minutes to strangle the life out of the deceased.
“It was, on any view, a brutal attack perpetrated by you on a person who was smaller and weaker than you were.”
Sherna unsuccessfully appealed the length of his sentence.
This article first appeared in February 2014.
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