This was why his friends and family were so puzzled when he got engaged within weeks of meeting his future wife Katie at a Brisbane bar.

But they never could have predicted the woman would go on to kill him because he returned home two-hours late from work one night.

Days after Katie Castel was sentenced by the Brisbane Supreme Court to nine years’ jail for stabbing Jarred to death, the slain 35-year-old’s family have revealed the years of domestic violence hell he endured before the mother of his child threw a 20cm kitchen knife into his heart and killed him, hours after he closed a business deal that would have transformed their lives.

The Sunday Mail can also reveal the bizarre religious letters Katie penned to her husband’s grieving family from jail.

Former businesswoman Katie Anne Castel pleads guilty to manslaughter of husband Jarred Castel

FAIRYTALE BEGINNING

Jarred met Katie by chance at Brisbane institution the Royal Exchange Hotel in 2008 after she had been stood up.
Two weeks later the pair were secretly engaged.

They moved in together months later and were married by mid-2010.

From the start, friends and family noticed the couple were oddly close.

“They were the kind of couple who were very, very physical in public,” a friend said.
“It was young love and we were all in our 20s but they were particularly all over each other.

“They had nicknames for each other — ‘Lamb’ and ‘Bean’. It was like they had a different language and they just interacted in a way that was unlike other couples.”

Their wedding day was “all about Katie”, Jarred’s sister Jay Geddes said.

After the wedding things began to change.

“Those undercurrents and undertones that were always within Katie really started to come out,” Ms Geddes said.

DOWNWARD SPIRAL

Katie was a senior nurse at The Wesley Hospital.

Jarred was a property consultant and shopfitter and owned two houses before age 21.

“He had a plan to get himself ahead so that in the prime of his life he could relax and have a family,” Ms Geddes said.

When Katie fell pregnant with their son she quit her job and returned to university to study literature before starting a fashion business.

“They were very stand-off-ish after they were married,” Jarred’s father Tony Castel said.

“I think I had one meal at their house in all the time they were together.”

Jarred’s close friends said Katie was “all about control”.

She caused rifts between herself and Jarred’s friends and stopped attending social gatherings.

“Jarred started coming alone or make an excuse to leave and slowly over time that dropped off,” a friend told The Sunday Mail.

“More and more and he would say: ‘I can’t stay, I’ve got to get home’.

“She had put him in a place where he couldn't go out without her wrath.”

Jarred worked hard.

“Katie would always be quite angry if he didn’t come back home from work on time and that was always a big issue for them,” his brother Ryan Castel said.

The family say the argument about him returning home at 8pm, which lead to Jarred’s death, was the “sixth incident” of domestic violence against him that day.

After Jarred was killed, Ryan noticed a wall in his brother’s dining room had been replastered.

“I later found out Katie had thrown a chair at him and Jarred had gone and plastered the wall back up,” he said.

Tony said the family were kept “at arms length” from the couple but he knew something wasn’t right.

“There is just this bland assumption that DV is a male attacking a female and there is a lot of that but what I think people don’t realise is there is a lot the other way around,” he said.

“If it had been a man killing his wife, not the other way around, he would have gone to trial for murder and they never would have accepted his plea to manslaughter.”

FATAL NIGHT

ON the night of December 20, 2017, Tony took a call from Katie.
He’d spoken to Jarred only few hours earlier, so thought it was a bit strange.

“He had just won a massive contract at work that would have completely altered his business and he’d just closed the deal so called to tell me,” Tony said.

“I was in Melbourne for work and Katie was on the phone, hysterical, saying Jarred had been stabbed and was on the way to the hospital.”

Ryan raced to the hospital but learned on the way Jarred had died.

At the same time, his mother, who has terminal cancer, was leaving home in an emergency.

“The police walked down the driveway and told her what had happened as she was getting in the car to leave for the hospital,” Ryan said.

“I spent the whole night with mum and held her while she cried: ‘My baby, my baby’.”

Initially, the family believed it was a terrible accident, it wasn’t until later they found out the truth and that Jarred’s four-year-old son saw the incident unfold.

LETTERS

Katie was charged with Jarred’s murder six hours after he died.

One month later, she penned a bizarre 12-page letter to his parents from prison telling them to “rest in Jesus”.

“The night I lost Jarred they put me in the Brisbane Watchhouse — it was truly the bowels of hell, a concrete cell with a tiny window I couldn't see out of, graffiti on every inch, no underwear and a couple of plastic-covered cushions,” she wrote.

Katie described herself in the missive as a “novelty in jail” and the only person “who doesn’t have a drug charge”.

“I’m glad I have had an open mind … and I sometimes feel it’s a privilege to be living among the most vulnerable and marginalised in society,” she wrote.

In a similar letter penned to Justice Jean Dalton, Katie tried to minimise her culpability.

“I hope these thoughts will give you some understanding of who I am as a person, how sorry I am and how my husband’s death has affected my life,” she wrote.

“I feel deeply the shame of being a prisoner. It is utterly demoralising and demonising to be inherently mistrusted, to have your individuality ignored, and be herded and lined up and counted like livestock every day.”

She goes on to describe her role in prison to bring “salvation” to others, in the letter that Justice Dalton described as “very odd”.

Jarred’s family told The Sunday Mail domestic violence killers should receive mandatory sentences.

“The rights of the child left behind should also be forefront when balancing the visitation rights of the incarcerated against the impact on the child,” Tony said.

“Offending of this kind should have its own piece of legislation, with mandatory sentencing and a framework into the future.”

A GoFundMe page has been set up for Jarred’s orphaned son: gf.me/u/rjm4w9