COURT: Yes, the defendant can stay seated while I deal with sentence. This was a most brutal killing of a lady aged 64 who had done the defendant no harm whatsoever. In fact, Janet Gilson, had devoted her adult life to the Salvation Army, doing things for other people. She came to Hong Kong to visit her niece and her niece’s three year old daughter on Lamma, just the sort of thing that people with family do all the time.
Her niece, Julia, was just a few week’s away from being divorced from the defendant, yet Janet was murdered by the defendant in Julia’s home where Janet was, of course, staying. It was a place where the defendant had no right to be. The Family Court had issued a non-molestation order about a year earlier and it is an order which it is plain from the evidence in this trial, that the defendant was in the habit of disregarding.
The motive for killing Janet Gilson is unknown, but it is quite clear that the defendant has a very bad temper and that can be told even from the events on Sunday 11 March when, for very little reason, he lost his temper outside Julia’s house, banging on the windows, kicking the door and, as it was said, “swearing horrendously”. All because he was prevented from getting into Julia’s house. In fact, he threatened to cause her, in his words, “Big trouble” if Julia had him arrested. Quite understandably, she did have him arrested. But some time from Julia’s house, the keys which were kept as spare keys were taken.
On the day of the murder, 15 March 2011, no sign was left by the murderer, or at least no obvious sign, of the fact that there had even been a disturbance in the house. The defendant locked both doors when he left the house after killing Janet and, later, using Janet’s mobile phone, the defendant, it must have been, who sent a text to Julia to set a false trail, making out that Janet had gone to Aberdeen. In fact, of course, she was dead.
These were the acts of a calm and very calculating killer and I have no doubt whatsoever when the mood takes this defendant that he is highly dangerous.
What you did to that defenceless lady amounted to a living nightmare for her, because she was alive when you put a rope around her neck. It was a rope that you had used at work. And you then attached the other end of that same rope to her wrists and tied them together. You had hit her in the region of the forehead, causing a huge bruise and it was said that this may well have been done with a heavy object and may have caused concussion. You had broken her nose, flattening the nasal bridge. Dr Lai told us that it was with something like the force of a karate kick that had broken three of her ribs, one of them in two places, so that she was left with four fractures to her ribs, and she was still alive when you gagged her with a large towel stuffed into her mouth, well behind the teeth. Inevitably she died from suffocating and ligature strangulation.
Finally, you placed her under the very large sofa in the sitting room. She was hidden there for days before she was discovered in a hollow-out under the sofa which you had made by cutting the material at the bottom of the sofa. Fortunately, with the advances of science, particularly in the field of DNA, your guilt was exposed from all the telltale signs on your jacket and your other clothes.
There was no doubt whatsoever that you killed Janet Gilson. Her blood on your shirt and jumper and trousers and jacket speaks louder than any words ever will that it was you who killed her. There were many other forensic clues as well in the form of fibres that were transferred from your clothes on to her body and from her clothes, her night clothes, on to your clothing. She was still wearing her nightwear when she was killed.
The evidence of your guilt is overwhelming. You have committed the ultimate crime and you did so in a fashion so terrible, that words failed to describe the true horror of what she had to go through and of what you did.
You will go to prison for life.