A 27-year-old Irish woman has told a Sydney court she tried to leave her fiancé multiple times over the course of their abusive relationship before she killed him in February 2017.
On Tuesday, Cathrina Ann Cahill, who has pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of David Walsh, faced the final day of her sentencing hearing in the New South Wales Supreme Court.
According to a set of agreed facts in the case, which Justice Peter Johnson described more than once as “unusual”, Cahill killed Walsh in the early hours of Feb. 18, 2017, after he violently assaulted one of three friends Cahill had returned home with after a night out drinking.
She inflicted a fatal stab wound to his neck as the chaotic scene unfolded at the home she and Walsh shared in the southwest Sydney suburb of Padstow.
The pair were both Irish nationals in Australia on working holiday visas.
Cahill was originally charged with murder, but on Oct. 23 pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter on the basis she was substantially impaired due to an underlying mental condition at the time.
She cried in the witness box as she was handed a photo from New Year's Eve 2016, the night of their engagement, that shows Cahill smiling and displaying her ring next to Walsh, six weeks before she fatally stabbed him.
Asked by Johnson, who described the relationship as one of “two-way domestic violence”, why she had agreed to marry Walsh, Cahill said: “He told me he was going to change.”
She had packed her bags many times to try to leave the abusive and dysfunctional relationship she had with Walsh, Cahill told the court, but he would always return and perform small kindnesses, such as making her dinner or buying her flowers or a teddy bear.
Two or three weeks later the relationship would inevitably once again sour.
“I think because I loved him I did believe that David would change, but every time he said he would change, it would just go back to the very way it was,” she said.
In part of her evidence, she stood up and approached the bench to point out to Johnson a scar on her lip.
“How did you get that scar?” asked her barrister James Trevallion.
“I was asleep in bed and David came home drunk and woke me up by hitting me in the face with an iPhone charger,” she replied.
When Johnson asked Cahill why she had stayed with Walsh, who she agreed was a “controlling, unpleasant person” who she had a “pretty stormy” relationship with, she answered: “I loved him very dearly.”
“He had good features. Davey had good days. But when he had bad days he had bad, bad days,” she said.
She said she feared “getting in more trouble” with Walsh if she told police the truth about their relationship, saying: “He would call me a rat and a dog.”
Eleven members of Walsh’s family in Ireland submitted victim impact statements to the court, including his brothers, sister, former partners and young relatives.
Kalem Walsh wrote that he was “overcome with grief” to hear of his brother’s death and that it had been very hard on him.
“My life will forever be altered by his absence, a part of my life will be gone forever, I am resentful of this,” he wrote. “This crime has changed me as a person, the seriousness and pain has made me more bitter and far less trusting. Losing David was like losing part of my world, he was always supportive of me and my ambitions.”
Crown prosecutor Nanette Williams told the court that Walsh’s death had been “brutal and violent” and that Justice Johnson should find Cahill intended to kill Walsh when she stabbed him.
Deliberate killings are always tragic, Williams said, but this one was particularly so because Walsh was living overseas, away from his family. “Effectively he had to die alone on a footpath in a foreign country,” she said.
Williams accepted that the relationship was mutually abusive but argued the evidence showed that the domestic violence from Walsh towards Cahill was “much more limited” and did not extend to the use of weapons.
She said that Cahill had launched “serious counterattacks” on Walsh, using a knife in October 2015 and a glass candleholder in November 2015.
Cahill was convicted of reckless wounding over the November 2015 incident, in which she threw the glass candleholder at Walsh and caused three deep cuts to his forehead as the pair fought. Cahill said Walsh had thrown the candleholder at her first.
Williams said ensuring intimate partner violence was “powerfully denunciated by the courts” was an important factor in sentencing Cahill.
She argued that Cahill's actions could not be explained by saying “I was in love, I couldn't leave” in the particular context of their relationship, and said, “ultimately there is a human responsibility of not allowing this terrible violence to eventuate”.
Trevallion said the evidence showed that his client was a victim of “degrading, demeaning, and abusive behaviour” from Walsh, and that at least from November 2015 to February 2017 it was “all one-way”.
“There’s no evidence the offender ever struck the deceased without any provocation,” he said.
Trevallion also pointed out the size discrepancy between the pair, saying Walsh had stood at around 5 foot 8, or 5 foot 9. “He was a builder, a trained boxer. She’s barely 5 foot,” he said.
He said the large number of repeated calls from Walsh to Cahill’s phone as she was out drinking with friends on Feb. 17 was “the regular pattern of her life”.
She was remorseful for her crime, he said.
Cahill gave evidence that Walsh would access her phone and delete messages from it after she went to sleep at night.
“He’d get mad and accuse me of doing other things wrong if he didn’t know my password,” she told the court.
Trevallion also said Cahill had undergone extensive counselling while on remand, which suggested good prospects of rehabilitation.
At the time Walsh was killed, he was wanted in Ireland on charges alleging he had assaulted police, assaulted his former partner, and bitten off part of a man’s ear.
Cahill told the court “he used to laugh” about the charges and bragged to her about appearing on an Irish crime show.
She will be sentenced on Dec. 12.