Killer wife Rebecca Payne has sentence cut to 12 years on appeal
A wife who killed her husband with drugged biscuits after a decade of “insidious” abuse has secured a huge court win.
A woman who fed her sadistic husband drug-laced biscuits will walk free from prison in less than three years after her sentence was slashed.
Rebecca Payne, 45, was jailed for 16 years in June last year after she was convicted of the murder of Noel Payne, 68, in the rural Victorian town of Walpeup.
At trial, Payne claimed she didn’t intend to kill him when she gave him temazepam-laced lemon biscuits, just that she wanted to sedate him for some time out.
Instead, she offered to plead guilty to manslaughter.
Payne appealed the conviction and sentence in the Court of Appeal, where her lawyers argued the conviction was a miscarriage of justice and that the facts of the case should have resulted in more mercy.
On Wednesday, Justices Terry Forrest, Stephen McLeish and Stephen Kaye returned to court as they refused her appeal against the murder conviction.
But they set aside her sentence of 16 years and imposed a new sentence of 12 years.
Her non-parole period was also slashed from 10 years to seven, meaning with time served she will be eligible for parole in September 2027.
In their reasons, the three judges wrote that they considered Payne’s case “wholly exceptional”.
“The sentencing task in the present case was a complex one,” they said.
“We have come to the view that this sentence, despite the acknowledged role that mercy played in the judge’s instinctive synthesis, was manifestly excessive.”
The judges wrote that while Noel Payne’s killing was deliberate, her motive had “built up and festered in the sordid and stifling environment” created by his cruel and degrading conduct.
“She had endured upwards of ten years of intolerable and seemingly escalating emotional and physical torment at the hands of the deceased. Her situation was, the judge found, inescapable,” they said.
Payne killed her husband in the evening of September 1, 2020, after feeding him biscuits laced with at least seven temazepam tablets.
His remains were discovered wrapped in a blanket and stuffed in a chest freezer by a neighbour’s son three days later.
Handing down her original sentence in June last year, Justice Rita Incerti said Noel Payne had inflicted years of depraved sexual, emotional and physical abuse on his wife.
“The abuse was insidious … You were trapped in an abusive, violent and cruel environment for over a decade,” she said.
“I accept your regrettable conduct cannot be disengaged from the abuse you suffered.”
Justice Incerti rejected an argument by prosecutors that Payne could have left her husband, but noted there was no “legally justifiable” reason to kill him.