It was February 22, 2020 and the Covid juggernaut was just starting to stir, but it was yet to blanket-cover the media and all else.

At that time, domestic violence was a major public issue across Australia, with a strong focus from the national media – both regular and social – so as the Bong death was definitely a domestic crime, it received substantial coverage.

The Townsville Bulletin reported that Samantha Bong, or Sam or ‘Stumpy’ to her family and friends, was the 10th woman killed in the nation through domestic violence so far in that short period of the year.

The younger brother, Dennis William Sore, now 43, was charged with her murder within an hour of her death at the Pimlico unit where he had been staying for just two days with Samantha and their mother, Veronica Sore.

Not only was it brother versus sister, but the crime was witnessed by their mother, making it a deadly domestic with a difference.

Underneath it all was one classic and simple common denominator – alcohol. Not just a case of a big night on the grog gone wrong, but three lifetimes of serious drinking on a scale most people could never comprehend.

The court heard Veronica, Samantha and Dennis were alcoholics and their lives basically revolved around the next drink.

Under questioning from his barrister Ted Bassett, who fought for his client with his typical bulldog style tenacity, Sore told of his miserable life from an early age.

He told the court he never knew his father; mother Veronica was a long time alcoholic and drinking heavily during his childhood and teenage years.

Sore told the court of a life lived mainly on the streets, where he would drink until he passed out.

When asked by Mr Bassett what he drank, his answer was simple and illuminating.

“Anything,” he replied in his soft voice.

He explained he was drinking seriously from the age of 15 and it amounted to at least a four litre cask of wine a day. Sometimes two or three casks. He told how he had never had a job, had tried and failed in rehab three times and was tired of living rough on the streets.

Sore spoke in some bitter detail of his time living with his mother in Innisfail during his mid-teens, when his mother’s drinking was very bad. And it was clearly a period of his life that still dominated his thinking a quarter of a century later.

“I had to look after my mother,’’ he explained to the jury.

“I didn’t go to school; at 15 I did all the cleaning, cooking and shopping. Samantha would come around with her friends, they would drink, eat all the food and leave a mess for me to clean up.”

In February 2020, he had been living in Mount Isa for nine months at the Salvation Army homeless men’s shelter when he spoke to Samantha on the phone and decided to head to Townsville for a reunion.

Friends said he wanted to become his mother’s carer, which if nothing else would put a roof over his head.

He said that he organised a ride from Mount Isa to Hughenden and bought a 4L cask of wine for the 520km journey.

The court then heard that he reached Townsville by bus on the afternoon of February 20, 2020 and immediately joined Veronica and Samantha for a drinking session at the Centenary Hotel.

This was followed by more drinks back at Samantha’s unit before he slept in the lounge and everything had been amicable.

The next morning the trio were up and out to the Centenary Hotel in time for its opening at around 10am.

“I had a few vodkas and then wine and Samantha had a few vodkas and beer and we were just drinking and catching up,” he told the court.

‘Just drinking’ led to an all-day session that ended around 7pm.

On the first day of the trial, the jury watched CCTV footage of the three family members at the hotel, around the beer garden, with both Veronica and Samantha dancing.

Sore could not remember what time they left but conceded that it was dark.

Further security camera footage showed them buying more alcohol at the bottle shop – a slab of beer for the women and a 4L wine cask for Sore.

Back at the unit, they all sat around the lounge and continued drinking, talking and laughing. Samantha’s boyfriend Steven Solinas arrived with a six pack of beer and joined them before crashing in her bedroom.

Then around midnight, the mood changed.

The court heard The memories of both Sore and his mother are hazy about details by this stage, but Samantha definitely challenged her brother about not having his own home or being able to maintain one, keep a boyfriend or even look after himself, before ordering him to leave.

Statements from Solinas and two neighbours indicate she was very loud that night and most likely the verbal aggressor. Sore admitted that he called her a ‘slut and a whore’.

“She was degrading me, making me look stupid and I begged her to just let me have my drink,” he told the jury.

Tellingly he said: “ I told her to shut up, she (Samantha) made me very angry, she forgot what she had done to me, abused our home in Innisfail, made our home dirty.”

At some stage in the argument, which involved furniture and crockery being flung and smashed, she hit Sore on the top of his head with a bottle.

Whether or not he had armed himself with the large kitchen carving knife before or after he was bottled is not clear on the evidence before the court, but there is no dispute that he stabbed her repeatedly around the neck and twice fatally in the body as she tried to ward off the attack.

Sore said he wanted his sister to stop her laughing at him and he planned to do so by ‘putting fear in her’ with the knife.

“I didn’t know I was stabbing her, I thought I was hitting thin air, I couldn’t stop; I had no control,” he said in the court.

What was really in his alcohol drowned mind at that stage only he could know, but the evidence of Dr Paul Botterill, a senior staff pathologist with the Queensland Forensic and Scientific Services, was all clear and factual.

He explained that the autopsy found that the two fatal wounds to Samantha’s left lower back and upper left back that punctured the left lung were 16.5 and 17.5 centimetres deep.

Crown prosecutor Andrew Walklate, one of the sharpest barristers in North Queensland, zeroed in on Sore during his persistent cross examination.

The jury had watched police body camera footage of Sore being dealt with by a female police officer shortly after his arrest at the murder scene.

The change in his demeanour and even in his voice was quite noticeable ----he became aggressive towards the officer, the first time he had appeared so on any of the video footage shown to the court --- and it did not escape Mr Walklate, who repeatedly asked Sore if he had a problem with women in authority. Sore denied that he had such a problem.

It was a case covered in sadness and bitterness.

But in the end, nothing could save Dennis William Sore, and last Monday the jury unanimously found him guilty of the murder of Samantha Rose Bong.