Christine Lyons found guilty of murdering mum of four Samantha Kelly
A WOMAN has been found guilty of murdering her housemate in Bendigo so she could take her kids and raise them as her own, as relatives of the victim declare “the jury got it right”.
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A WOMAN has been found guilty of murdering her friend so she could take her kids and raise them as her own.
Christine Lyons is now facing the prospect of life behind bars following the verdict over the murder of mother of four Samantha Kelly in the Bendigo home they shared.
Co-accused Ronald Lyons, who is not related to Ms Lyons, was found not guilty of her murder.
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It took the Supreme Court jury of 12 one week to reach the unanimous decision following a trial that lasted five weeks.
The pair were found guilty of attempted murder over a series of failed attempts to kill Ms Kelly in the lead up to her bloody death in January 2016.
Christine Lyons cried as the verdicts were read out. Ronald Lyons simply shook his head from side to side.
Before the jury entered, Justice Stephen Kaye warned everyone in the court to remain silent throughout the verdicts.
“There will be no outbursts,” he said. “Whatever the outcome, the jurors are to be completely respected.”
They were remanded to return to the Supreme Court on August 15.
Ms Kelly lived in the bungalow of a home shared by Ronald Lyons, Christine Lyons and her husband Peter Arthur.
It was Arthur, a Walker, Texas Ranger fan and bourbon swilling layabout, who bashed Ms Kelly to death in the bungalow before he and Ronald got rid of her body.
The court heard the trio then lied to police after Ms Kelly was reported missing, telling them she was a junkie who had walked out and never returned.
But it was a story suspicious detectives found hard to believe.
Ms Kelly was missing for weeks before her body was finally found, but all fingers had been pointing to the trio in that time.
They were arrested the day before Ms Kelly’s body was discovered. When it was, Christine dobbed her husband in immediately.
Arthur made immediate admissions, begging police to let his wife go. For months he maintained that he, and he alone, was guilty over Ms Kelly’s murder.
He’d even written to Ronald Lyons, apologising that he had become embroiled in the mayhem of a murder investigation.
But when the harsh reality of being locked up for murder started to hit, Arthur changed his story and implicated both his wife and Ronald Lyons.
They had all together, he said, agreed that Ms Kelly had to be killed.
They’d plotted for weeks and bungled several attempts at fatally drugging her in the lead up to the murder.
It saw police charge Christine and Ronald with murder.
They had previously been charged only with being an accessory to murder.
As the prosecution’s key witness Arthur spent three days in the stand outlining the cruel plot.
It was all done, he said, so his infertile wife could take Ms Kelly’s four children and raise them as her own.
Even before she was killed, Christine Lyons had already started calling Ms Kelly’s children by different names, Arthur testified.
Outlining how the jury were to treat the evidence Justice Stephen Kaye said to return a verdict of guilty they had to accept this motive.
Arthur came under fire from both Christine and Ronald’s legal teams who accused him of making up the story they described as “nonsense”, “rubbish” and “cock and bull”.
But he angrily rejected the claim saying he wanted justice for Ms Kelly.
“The truth means a lot,” he said.
“I’ve got my responsibility and I’ve taken … why don’t you look at (Christine and Ronald) and ask them to take their responsibility.”
Arthur said he blacked out while attacking Ms Kelly in the bungalow of his Bendigo home.
But he said flashbacks had reminded him about what really happened in the lead up to her death.
“When you’ve been through what I’ve done then yes, you have flashbacks and bad nightmares,” he said.
Arthur said he repeatedly lied to police to protect his wife and Ronald, who had three sons.
But he said he decided to change his statements “to get all the truth out”.
He rejected suggestions he was motivated by self-interest.
Arthur previously had repeatedly told police no one else was involved in the killing, begged them to release his wife from their custody following her arrest and apologised to Ronald.
In a letter written from prison Arthur told him: “sorry for what I have done, f***ng up your life like this. I did not mean to.”
After Arthur finished testifying Justice Stephen Kaye told the jury to take care in accepting his evidence.
They did, and rejected his version of events.
Arthur, who describes himself as a ladies’ man, said he watched Walker, Texas Ranger DVDs before the killing and drank four cans of Jack Daniels to “get up the Dutch courage” to kill.
He killed Ms Kelly by repeatedly striking her in the head with a hammer.
He is serving a minimum 13-year jail term for the murder.
Outside court, Ms Kelly’s brother Michael Kelly, who with his partner Danielle Stevenson now has custody of her children, told of his relief his sister’s killers had been jailed.
“We got justice — the jury got it right,” Mr Kelly said.
“We are absolutely stoked.”
Ms Stevenson added: “It just means, with this verdict, Samantha didn’t die for nothing.”
Mr Kelly remembered his sister as “a loving, doting mother” and a “very caring lady”.
“She’d give you the shirt off her back if you needed it,” Mr Kelly said.
He said he constantly reminds her children of how she would give them kisses and cuddles on the lounge, and have fun playing together on outings at the park.
“The biggest thing we have to tackle at the moment is to keep on reminding them that she loved them and wasn’t the lady who just left them in the middle of the night,” Mr Kelly said.
“She didn’t leave them, she was taken away by murder.”
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