‘When the shark bites with his teeth dear Scarlet billows start to spread.’
—‘The Ballad of Mack The Knife’, Bertolt Brecht
TASMANIANS hate the mainland cliché of parts of their island being a creepy hillbilly backwater dotted with Neanderthals and sociopaths. Some visitors tease that the island’s expanses of lowly populated countryside are teeming with incestuous two-headed families, locals who don’t like yer type round here, duelling banjos, and sodomising Deliverance-style rapists.
Many of the stories emanate from around the areas of Black Bobs and New Norfolk, and commonly feature a father character called Black Bob. There are dogmen (often without limbs) being kept on leashes, and sightings of strange bumpkins with enormous foreheads or who appear as just heads on legs. One Black Bob story has it that a social worker visited Bob and told him he had to stop his offspring fornicating with each other as it was not good for the gene pool. Bob drew a line down the centre of the room, separating his offspring according to gender and guarded it with his shotgun into the night. In the morning he was dead. He had been gutted. Another version runs that Black Bob died a natural death and his kin carried him into town to be buried. Tiring of the weight and ever-pragmatic, they stopped, gutted the corpse, then continued on with their lighter load.
The teasing clichés and local tales might contain a grain of truth. It seems at least some have real origins in the accounts of social services case workers who encountered feral families living in shacks in the bush. Even sober-minded residents believe there is incest, in-breeding, little education, DIY burials, and horrible conditions among some families that civilisation forgot. Nevertheless, most inhabitants of the Apple Isle prefer to see it as a place of pristine natural beauty, a kind of comfortable Middle Earth dotted with agreeable little towns with names like Snug, Penguin and Nook.
On at least one occasion, though, the reality of wholesome genteel coastal village life in Tasmania has been invaded by the tourists’ abrasive and twisted myths. The Penguin tomahawk massacre was one such event. Not quite as bloody as the events that inspired the Texas chainsaw massacre, it was equally chilling and dramatically more immediate for a small town of just a few thousand. It put the hamlet, named for its cute, fluffy visitors, on the map for an altogether less cute and fluffy reason.
RHONDA Hampson had been a close friend of 84-year-old Lehman McHugh for thirty-five years, and a good friend she was too. She visited Lehman every day and often took him to his medical appointments. When Lehman had a hip replacement she ran a raffle and raised $1300 for him. ‘He was a lovely friend, a real gentleman,’ she said.
On the night of Friday 17 September 2004, Rhonda, on her way to work at a nearby hotel, popped in on Lehman and his son Tony and left them a lasagne. Rhonda returned around lunchtime on Saturday to pick up Lehman’s bets, which she would often place for him, but the house was as quiet as a grave. ‘I walked up and saw the glass smashed in the door,’ she said.
Rhonda warily entered the silent house step by step, calling out to Lehman. Eventually she saw blood in Tony’s room. ‘I didn’t know what happened and I ran to get [neighbour] Mr Smith,’ she said.
Lehman and Tony McHugh were dead. The bloody scene inside the brick home on the outskirts of Penguin left no doubt that it was foul play. The bodies had been struck dozens of times with a tomahawk. The victims looked like they had been savaged by a wild animal. When a photo of the carnage was later shown in court a juror fainted and collapsed in the box.
The crime rocked the 3000 friendly, close-knit residents of Penguin—a town that had only ever been known for the fairy penguin colonies that dot the island’s northern coast. It was a grim attack. The use of a tomahawk to rain down more than eighty savage blows on the victims in a prolonged, relentless murder was bizarre. It spoke of a random frenzied attack by a psycho-killer or killers against a harmless old man and his middle-aged son. It would emerge, however, there was more motive in the mayhem than had at first appeared.
DARRYN Stokes was bored and bisexual in Ulverstone but he had the will to sit around his house hatching nefarious plots and, once hatched, he had the energy to try to conscript accomplices to these plots. He even had the vim and vigour to follow a horrific task through right to the end. But after being in two car crashes he reckoned he was unable to work a regular job. So instead he did nothing in Ulverstone, a place not quite large enough to be a city but nevertheless Tasmania’s biggest town.
Stokes had been married, with children, but had separated from his wife Liz. He lived with a succession of dodgy lodgers in his house and had been in a casual sexual relationship with fellow Ulverstonian Tony McHugh for a decade. There was a decent age difference between the occasional lovers: Stokes was thirty-four, Tony McHugh sixty-two.
When Tony McHugh’s father Lehman McHugh got sick Tony moved out of Ulverstone and into his father’s house in Penguin to look after him. Under the old man’s will Tony would inherit the whole of his father’s estate except for a legacy of $5000. The beneficiaries of Tony’s will were a little more surprising. The intermittent but longstanding relationship between Darryn Stokes and Tony McHugh saw Stokes wheedle his way into the older man’s affections to the point where he was included in Tony McHugh’s will. And not just Darryn but his ex-wife Liz too. Oscar Wilde said no good deed goes unpunished. And making his lover Stokes a beneficiary and telling him about it was a kindly but ultimately fatal gesture for Tony McHugh.
Like a lot of people, Lehman McHugh mistrusted banks and the share market. He was of a generation, recently vindicated, who figured their money was safer buried in the backyard or hidden under the bed than in the hands of fat cats practising voodoo economics. There were rumours in the Penguin community that Lehman had a lot of cash savings stashed away at his home. And it seems Darryn Stokes had some specific inside knowledge on the topic from his casual trysts with Lehman’s son.
With nothing better to do, Darryn Stokes obsessed about the two sources of McHugh money—his beneficiary status under Tony’s will and old man Lehman’s cash stash in his Penguin house. For a while Stokes had a housemate called Walter Williams. The pair discussed money and Stokes tried to convince Williams they should go lighten Lehman McHugh’s domestic bank account.
‘He told me there was $150 000 to $200 000 at this house in Penguin—Mr McHugh’s,’ Walter Williams said. ‘He said it was under Mr McHugh’s bed in a suitcase. He said we would have to be careful because an old lady next door kept an eye on the house. He suggested he go in the front because the old lady kept an eye on the back.’Williams said he didn’t want anything to do with it. A week later Stokes once more tried to rally him to the kleptomaniacal cause. He refused again and soon moved out, thinking nothing more of it.
By September 2004, Stokes and Tony McHugh hadn’t met to have sex for three months. For one reason or another, things had cooled off and Tony McHugh was telling friends he wanted Stokes out of his will.
Stephen Gale had met Tony McHugh when they were both stallholders at a church market. Mr Gale said his friend regretted making Stokes a beneficiary. ‘He said he wanted to take Darryn out of his will,’ Gale said. Another friend of Tony McHugh’s, Malcolm Donald Elmer of Devonport, was also told by Tony he wasn’t happy about the will and was to change it to make sure Stokes didn’t get anything.
Stokes had other will worries. He was concerned that, if the old man shuffled off the mortal coil, Tony would fritter away the McHugh inheritance—money Stokes had come to regard as his own. The twin sources of McHugh money occupied Stokes’s every waking thought. He told many in the small community about the cash stash in the Penguin house as well as his status as beneficiary.
Stokes by now had got some new housemates: his sister, Kylie Stokes, and her 13-year-old boy Corey; and Kylie’s boyfriend, Bradley Lambert. Lambert, twenty-eight, had an alcohol problem and a violent disposition. His girlfriend Kylie was in fear of him and there were whispers of domestic violence. If Darryn Stokes knew about his sister’s suffering—and it would be surprising if he didn’t—he didn’t let it get in the way of a blossoming friendship between him and Bradley Lambert.
STOKES broached the subject of raiding the McHugh house with Lambert. Only he was no longer being coy about the fact that the robbery would be a kill-and-grab mission. If they bumped off both McHugh men, Lehman’s estate would pass to Tony and with Tony dead it would all pass to Stokes. Even if they could not find the cash stash in the house and left empty-handed, inheritance laws would soon see it raining money for Darryn Stokes.
Initially Lambert knocked back Stokes’s proposal but by September he, Kylie and Corey were on the eve of a trip to Queensland and he needed the funds. Lambert, through Kylie, let Darryn know that if he raised the idea again, this time Lambert might be up for it. Lambert flagged his change of heart while getting ‘a carton of piss’ down the street. Bradley Lambert told the court:
Me and Kylie went down the street. I was talking to Kylie about it. I said to Kylie, well next time Darryn mentions it I’m just going to say to him well if you want to do it we’ll do it. And with that, I went back home, started on the piss, pretty well drunk all our carton, and then Darryn had started bringing it up again. I said well if you want to do it Darryn let’s go and do it then. Let’s go and rob these people of their money. And I dunno it was about twelve, one o’clock, bit later, we decided we was going to go over there.
Stokes had spent many hours obsessively thinking through his plan. Later, when trying to make a distinction for police between the plan he detailed to flatmate Walter Williams and the eventual bloody deed, he said: ‘I had nothing to do with this and if I did I would, if, if I wanted money … I’d wait until, ’cos Lehman was going into hospitals quite often to get things done. Tony used to drive him, like I knew when the house was empty and I would do it [that] way, that would be the only way to do it.’
But while Stokes watched the footy that Friday night with Lambert—a man partial to a few cones of marijuana and who thought nothing of knocking off twenty-four stubbies of beer in one sitting—even logic such as this, cold and criminal as it was, went out the window. ‘I suggested the money at Penguin and this time someone took me up on it,’ Stokes said in court.
The chance of one man in a small part of a small island being comfortable with such a maniacal homicidal plan would, one would hope, be slim. But somehow, in Lambert, Stokes had found a kindred spirit who apparently found nothing morally objectionable about the plot. Kylie Stokes was a third person who did not see anything particularly wrong or unseemly in the murder of two innocents for profit. There was never any suggestion that either of the McHugh men had done anything to slight or anger any of the plotters. For the murderous misfits it was just a cold, unemotional and very bloody way to win the lottery. The decision was made, the switch flicked, and the two McHughs were as good as dead men sleeping.
The murder plot was discussed openly in front of Kylie Stokes and young Corey. The men didn’t bother disguising themselves because they intended there to be no living witnesses. There was later some dispute over who did what but it seems Bradley Lambert grabbed his tomahawk with the blue-and-yellow handle and Darryn Stokes pulled a large kitchen knife from the knife block. In the flat Lambert waved the miniature axe around and talked about how he would hit the men if they resisted. Stokes, with his kitchen knife, said he would finish the job if Lambert couldn’t. In the early hours of Saturday they drove the fifteen minutes west from Ulverstone across the top of the island to Penguin.
When the killers smashed a window in the front door of the Penguin house, it alerted no one, not even the occupants. Lehman McHugh was deaf and Tony McHugh routinely took sleeping pills. The two intruders entered and the dastardly deed was done. Tony was sleeping in his bed when he was first hit with the tomahawk. He struggled for life after the rude awakening. His body told the tale of how he tried to shield and defend himself with only his arms as he was struck seventy-two times with the savage weapon. A doctor said a wound to the back of Tony’s head would have required moderate to severe force, cutting through his skull and into his brain. Old man Lehman was next. He appeared to have been woken by the noises in the nearby room. He had time to get out of bed, tried to shield himself with his arms, but died while being struck fifteen times with the tomahawk. To say the men were butchered would be to sanitise the grim reality. Butchers use sharp implements and make their slaughter quick. A gun, a knife or even an axe would have been kinder. But the two innocent victims were robbed of even the cold compensation of a relatively fast and painless death. An eighty-four year old and a sixty-two year old—defenceless men—were left lying dead beside their beds, victims of blunt instruments.
Stokes claimed Lambert emerged from the bloodbath and said: ‘The young one wouldn’t fucking die.’
The killers had hoped to find a chest or suitcase containing up to $200 000 cash. But they left empty-handed. They hid the kitchen knife in the bush. Bradley Lambert had blood on him, so they drove back to Ulverstone to the home of a cousin of Lambert’s called Robbie. ‘[I told] my cousin Robbie that I’ve just been bashed, you know been in a fight down the street of, um, Ulverstone,’ Lambert said. ‘So I went, went in there and said to Robbie that you know I just got into a fight down in Ulverstone and can I burn me clothes here because if I get pulled in by the police I’ll go to jail.’
Lambert and Stokes told Robbie they had ‘flogged’ their attacker. They burnt the clothes and Stokes had a cup of tea while Lambert showered and then had a couple of cones. As they drove back to Stokes’s place Stokes cleaned the tomahawk and threw it in the Leven River. The killers then went to bed.
WHEN the sun came up on Saturday 18 September the grisly discovery was made and sent shockwaves through Penguin. Residents feared that a psychopathic serial or spree killer was still loose in their area and targeting their town. In a state rocked by the mass murder perpetrated by Martin Bryant years earlier, the possibility was frighteningly real.
Police attending the scene found what the killers had not: an old metal trunk. A sergeant took it to the Burnie Police Station, where it was opened in front of other officers and a Justice of the Peace. It contained nearly $40 000 in mixed denominations, with a lot of older grey $100 notes and some old paper notes.
The killers acted as if nothing had happened and went about their abnormal lives. Stokes was nothing if not bold and conniving. He brazenly fronted police the day after the murder claiming he just wanted to feed Tony McHugh’s cats. He even attended his victims’ double funeral at Penguin, blending in with the hundreds of genuine mourners. As the local media took images of the crowd they had little idea they were also photographing the killer. Stokes even cleaned out Tony McHugh’s unit, selling off the furniture and buying himself a new ute with the proceeds. While Darryn Stokes kept up appearances, Bradley Lambert and Kylie Stokes took off to Queensland.
On the Tuesday after the murders, police interviewed Stokes, who was widely known to have been one of Tony McHugh’s partners. Stokes muddied the waters, telling officers that a number of Tony McHugh’s lovers and their friends could have been responsible for the killings. He even named two men as possible suspects in a statutory declaration to police. Stokes also provided a stat dec with a false alibi detailing his made-up movements during the relevant times: he and Lambert watched football on the night of the murders and stayed home all night.
Police were not so easily turned from Stokes as a suspect, however. The wills gave him motive and his widely broadcast plans over the years to burgle the McHugh house had reached their ears. On Thursday they brought him back and this time interviewed him under caution as a suspect. That’s the caution that says ‘You are not obliged to say anything.’ But Stokes did not avail himself of his right to silence. Instead, asked about his one-time flatmate Walter Williams’s claims about his plan to rob the McHughs, Stokes flatly denied going to the McHugh house on the murder night.
It took days for Stephen Gale to learn of the death of his friend Tony McHugh. The weekend after the killings he visited Stokes. ‘I just blurted out that Tony was dead, and he just said “What?”,’ Gale said. He said he was surprised to see there was no reaction from Stokes to the news. The next month police divers found the tomahawk in the Leven River.
In the meantime Bradley Lambert and Kylie Stokes were having dramas on the road and returned to Stokes’s Ulverstone home. In the course of a blistering row Lambert had told Kylie he had killed before and would do it again. It seems there was another blow-up and some kind of domestic incident between the pair and the police got involved. As officers spoke to her just before Christmas 2004, Kylie, angry at her boyfriend and knowing she held a trump card, dropped hints that she might know some things about the murder of the two McHugh men. In the following days she laid it all out. In late December police, armed with a warrant, searched Stokes’s home and arrested him. Bradley Lambert, not long back on the island, was picked up too. Both men’s early denials of any involvement buckled quickly. Each man then began in earnest to frame the other as the criminal mastermind and scrambled retrospectively to put the tomahawk in the other’s hand.
Stokes went as far as swearing on his children’s not-yetexistent graves that he didn’t commit the murders. He said that if he talked Lambert would have him killed inside prison. Stokes said he stayed outside the McHugh house while Lambert shocked him by going on a killing spree inside; all Stokes had intended was a robbery. This was despite the fact that Stokes was the one who knew the layout of the house, including his lover’s bedroom, and supposedly all about the cash stash.
Lambert said Stokes planned it all and wielded the tomahawk while Lambert waited outside but that they swapped clothes afterwards so that he got the bloody ones to sell the fight story to his cousin. ‘He said, “If you say anything to the police about this I’ll be looking for you to kill you”,’ Lambert said. As he was being questioned about the killings, Lambert got visibly upset. Asked by police why he was upset, he said he was leaving for the mainland and wouldn’t see his young relatives for a long time.
Each man was charged with two counts of murder.
WHEN the double murder trial began, the killers’ tall tales continued, albeit in slightly more polished form. Stokes claimed that, after making it his life’s work to plot robbing the McHughs, he was nonchalant about attending (and originally wasn’t even going to partake in) the criminal foray. Stokes claimed Lambert had originally been going to rob the house on his own but didn’t know where to go. So basically in the end he attended as navigator.
‘Apparently he didn’t know Penguin too well so decided I was going as well,’ Stokes said. He told the jury he went to the house with Lambert and then waited at their car nearby for him to return with the money. ‘I heard glass break. I had a couple of cigarettes and thought it was taking a long time—all he had to do was get a trunk. I went to get him. I heard some banging and thought he’s making a lot of noise—he’ll wake up half of Penguin.’
Stokes claimed he found Lambert in the doorway to the house. ‘I said “What have you done?”And he had a lot of what looked like blood on him,’ he said. Stokes claimed that, after they left the house, Lambert said he would harm Stokes’s family if he said anything about the murders. Lambert claimed he was the one threatened with death: ‘And then when he did turn up he’d um threatened me with the block bust, with the, with the axe, the tommy axe, saying that if I had have said anything to the police that I would have been murdered meself,’ Lambert said in his police interview.
The prosecution line required less suspension of disbelief: ‘It’s up to you to judge but we suggest each accused’s case is completely ridiculous,’ the Crown argued.
Having encouraged a robbery with weapons, Kylie Stokes was not the world’s most untarnished witness, but she was still a devastating one. On the stand she wept when the tomahawk was produced. Then she skewered her brother’s claims of non-violence.
KYLIE: He said they would have to kill them so they wouldn’t be recognised.
PROSECUTOR: Was there any discussion about who they would have to kill first?
KYLIE: Yes, the old man would have to go first so that what he had would be left to Tony, then Darryn would get everything.
Darryn Stokes hit back from the stand, saying it was Kylie who had suggested offing the men and that she had gotten away with murder. Darryn Stokes’s defence lawyer outlined how the whole murder was planned with Kylie’s 13-year-old son in the room.
KYLIE: Nothing.
DEFENCE LAWYER: Your partner and brother are planning to take the lives of two human beings and you didn’t say anything?
KYLIE: No.
Corey Stokes gave evidence that his uncle Darryn had raised the murder plot: ‘He said they should kill them and get the money.’ He said that they would have to kill them and get in quick and quiet.
BETWEEN witness evidence, weapon and wound evidence, and terrible suspect interviews, it was a near-perfect prosecution case. The physical evidence itself—extreme and swoon-inducing—prevented claims about accidental death. It locked in intent to kill and made impossible any arguments against it being murder. Under police questioning Stokes’s own version slid from ‘I didn’t go there that night’ to ‘I didn’t think Lambert would do what he did but I didn’t go inside’ to ‘I left the house and went outside after seeing blood on Lambert’. You could almost hear the cogs turning as Stokes the terrible liar tried to match wits with his police interrogator.
POLICE: Why did you take a knife?
STOKES: Oh, I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking straight.
POLICE: Kylie states that you said, you encouraged Bradley [Lambert] to kill the occupants of the house and that you said you would take a knife in case he couldn’t finish the job.
STOKES: Bradley said, Bradley said take this and if I don’t, if something happens and they have to be killed and when I hit ’em and it doesn’t work, you finish it.
POLICE: So do you agree that both you and Bradley planned to go and rob the house.
STOKES: Yeah.
POLICE: And that in the planning of that robbery you both accepted that two people may have to be killed.
STOKES: Ah it’s not the, um, the, ah, yeah I suppose I’ll have to because I, I didn’t, if I’d have known he was going to do that it wouldn’t have happened.
At another point in the interview Stokes let slip that he actually knew a lot more than he was pretending about the particular type of cash that was to be the booty from the fatal burgling raid he had initially denied being part of.
POLICE: We’ve interviewed Corey [Stokes] and Corey states he overheard a conversation on the night of the murder where you and Bradley planned to do the murders. And that in fact you planned to hide the money in spare tyres. Is there anything you would like to say about that?
POLICE: Why wouldn’t you know Darryn?
STOKES: Because I can’t remember.
POLICE: Corey Stokes also stated that you planned with Bradley to reintroduce that money into your own lives via adding a couple of extra hundred dollars to yourself each payday. So not only did you plan where to store the money, but you were planning how to spend, how to launder that money effectively. Is there anything you would like to say about that?
STOKES: Well, you couldn’t do that with old notes. Could you?
Later, after admitting to being involved in the burglary, their suspect threw another petulant tantrum in reaction to police prompting.
POLICE: So you’re actually there to do a robbery for between $150 000 to $200 000?
STOKES: Mmm.
POLICE: And you took with you a knife which you planned to use to kill the people if something went wrong.
STOKES: But I didn’t.
POLICE: If that was your plan … well, can you tell me what the plan was at the house? What you told Bradley to do at the house?
STOKES: No, well, I can’t tell you ’cos I can’t remember. But you’ve obviously got enough shit from other people so you must know enough. Like Kylie and Corey must be filling you in enough so I can’t … If I said any of that that they’ve said well I can’t remember it.
POLICE: But do you deny any of that?
STOKES: That’s why I can’t deny it if I can’t remember it, can I?
When truly cornered by police, Stokes got philosophical.
POLICE: And that’s why you took an axe, that’s why you took a tomahawk and that’s why you took the knife.
STOKES: Yeah, well I couldn’t go through with any of it, so I stayed outside.
POLICE: Whether you stayed outside or not is incidental.
STOKES: Yeah, I know. I’ll go to prison for longer than he did because you fellows are stating I planned it so.
POLICE: Well, you did plan it didn’t you?
STOKES: Well, basically yeah.
POLICE: And you’re the one who got Brad to help you.
STOKES: Yeah, well you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
Lambert, interviewed by the police, wasn’t much better. He accidentally went ‘bump’ in the night when he meant to go ‘rob’.
‘Oh well, prior to that, yeah, days before that, Darryn had been talking about going to bump, like going to rob these two blokes over in Penguin,’ Lambert said. ‘And the two blokes that he was going to rob was the two blokes in question. Um, the two blokes that have been murdered.’
It was clear from the interview that Lambert was either dyslexic, not Tasmania’s answer to Einstein, or had done his brain a bit of damage with dope and alcohol.
LAMBERT: And when we got over there, oh well before we’d left I grabbed a knife out of the kitchen, kitchen, I dunno what you call ’em, what are they called, oh statue sort of things. Um …
POLICE: Knife block.
LAMBERT: Knife block, that’s what they are, yeah.
POLICE: Go on.
LAMBERT: A silver-handled knife out of the kitchen block and …
Later Lambert almost clarified his case out of existence.
POLICE: So your version of events, as I understand it, correct me if I’m wrong, what you were going to do is go over and knock these two out and steal their money. Is that right?
POLICE: Lehman’s eighty-four years old, Tony’s sixty-two.
LAMBERT: Mmmm.
POLICE:Would you agree that knocking out an 84-year-old man could be very hazardous to his health?
LAMBERT: [silent]
POLICE: And it’s a very, a very real possibility that knocking out an 84-year-old man could kill him.
LAMBERT: Just didn’t think about it at the time.
POLICE:You’ve never heard of people being knocked out, hitting their head and dying?
LAMBERT: Yeah.
POLICE: So it’s a probable consequence of knocking someone out that they may die, isn’t it?
LAMBERT: Yes.
POLICE: And yet you went over there with the full knowledge that there was a strong possibility that one or both of these two individuals would die.
LAMBERT: Yeah.
POLICE: Did you not?
LAMBERT: Yeah.
POLICE: So it really makes no difference about who did the killing, does it?
LAMBERT: No.
The authorities had all this even before a crown barrister would get a chance to twist the Tasmanian devils’ stories into knots. (Lambert, but not Stokes, declined an encore on the witness stand during the trial.)
Any decent lawyers would have told the two defendants that their case was terrible, urged them to plead, show remorse and scratch some years of freedom back from what would still be a hefty sentence. And that is most likely what the two men’s lawyers did do, and probably many times. But whatever deluded screw-the-system confidence and self-belief had led Stokes and Lambert to think they could get away with their crime had not been vanquished in their capture by authorities. The impulse not to quit while they were behind stayed strong, even as Stokes and Lambert must have learnt the prosecution witness list was full of old friends—Williams, Kylie Stokes, even little Corey—with whom they’d intimately shared their criminal intentions. The killers chose not to apologise, not to admit all, but to fight the murder rap. Stokes, in particular, seemed to believe that his scam of killing two people to have the whole estate pass to him was so transcendentally clever that it would somehow protect him from conviction over the burglary killings.
THE JURY took four hours to untangle the web of lies, cruelty and betrayal and deliver unanimous guilty verdicts against Stokes and Lambert.
The men’s lawyers had tried to paint the bloodbath as a botched robbery, not a planned double killing. But in reality the opposite was true. The money, it seemed, was just an excuse for the two men to indulge a bloodthirsty adventure, possibly to relieve boredom. Evidence at the scene showed that the McHughs were murdered soon after their attackers entered the house.
When it came to sentencing, the extreme nature of their crime saw both men get some of the severest sentences ever dished out in the former penal colony. Stokes and Lambert each copped forty-two years in jail with a 28-year minimum stretch. There was little reaction to the guilty verdicts from the killers or their relatives, who had sat through every day of the trial. Only Australia’s worst spree killer, Martin Bryant, who gunned down thirty-five people at Port Arthur and got life without parole, and sex killer Jamie John Curtis had been set longer non-parole periods in Tasmania. The judge described the crime as an horrific and terrifying ordeal for both victims. ‘Crimes like these cause fear in the community, particularly in a small and close-knit one such as Penguin, and people who live alone and in isolated residences become very anxious over these types of tragedies,’ he said.
The killers later attempted to appeal their 2005 convictions, stating that the defence criticisms of key prosecution witnesses were not properly summed up by the judge in his charge to the jury. In considering the appeal, the judge dipped into Tasmania’s rich legal history of axe-murder-on-the-Apple-Isle precedents and found a guiding authority from the 1980s. In that case—R v Unsworth—the prosecution were pursuing two men who had gone to the home of another man to get money. The homeowner wound up dead—killed with twenty-nine blows from an axe. Each defendant, in what appears to be something of a quaint Tasmanian criminal tradition, blamed the other for wielding the axe and landing the blows. After considering authorities like this, the appellate judge had apparently had his fill of lethal lumberjacks. The appeals by Stokes and Lambert were thrown out.
The two Tasmanian devils now have a long time behind hard stone to contemplate where it all went wrong. Stokes, his bloody insurance scheme thwarted, will have three decades to obsess over his next money-making master plan. Lambert will also live with the same arduous 28-year stretch before he can attempt to swing parole, let alone a handled weapon.