Mild-mannered account manager Anthony Sherna felt the only way to deal with the anguish after strangling his de facto wife in a fit of rage was to get out of the house—and head straight to the pub to play the pokies and then hire a prostitute for an hour. Sherna was a victim of abuse, according to his account of married life: a man said to be suffering the psychological effects of ‘battered woman syndrome’. Yet Sherna was a killer who told police it took him three minutes to strangle the life out of a woman who pleaded, ‘Tony, no. Don’t do it.’ In evidence he gave during his Victorian Supreme Court murder trial, a timid-looking Sherna swore that his de facto wife Susanne Wild—who was just over a metre and a half tall—was a domineering ogre who abused and tormented him to his wits’ end. A man who claimed he was verbally belittled and forced to change his surname to prove his love, Sherna said his entire life was controlled by Susie— to the point where she told him what to wear, rationed his cigarettes and money, smelled his clothes for the odour of imagined love affairs and limited his TAB phone account bets to $1.50 a piece. She even stole Christmas, he said.

‘In our eighteen-and-a-half year relationship we never had a Christmas tree,’ Sherna told a Supreme Court jury. ‘[One year] Susie was upset with something or someone and she said, “You take those bloody tree and decorations back, we’re not celebrating Christmas.”’

Sherna told homicide detectives that he strangled his wife with a dressing-gown cord after she yelled at him and scared their pet puppy. ‘She was always at me,’ he told the detectives. ‘I reached my threshold of the horrible life that we had together. The constant put-downs of me. I just had enough.’

The final straw: An upset puppy named Hubble sparked Sherna’s brutal actions.

If Sherna’s testimony was to be believed, Susie Wild was a woman more akin to Annie Wilkes—the possessive lead in Stephen King’s Misery—than a sweet-hearted Tasmanian girl with a habit of telling tall tales. But who was Anthony Sherna? A guileless and socially awkward type, as he portrayed himself in the witness box? Or a calculating man capable of murdering a woman more akin to his mother, as was the picture painted by the prosecution? Ultimately, was he a Norman Gunston or a Norman Bates?

Sherna—born Anatoli Chernishoff on 15 July 1966—was the second-youngest of eight children. His mother, Fatina Chernishoff, was a religious Russian Orthodox woman who immigrated to Australia with her family in 1962. The Victorian Supreme Court was told her late husband was a violent alcoholic who bashed her while pregnant, injuring Sherna before he was even born. Sherna was delivered with a detached retina.

A kid keen on sports, particularly cricket and Aussie Rules football, Sherna led a fairly typical teenage life. He developed a close group of friends at high school and studied half a year of a Bachelor of Applied Science degree before dropping out of university to join the workforce. He was working with the Department of Consumer Affairs when he met Susanne Wild on a train in inner-city Melbourne in August 1989. A man in his early twenties, he was immediately infatuated with the older woman.

‘Very soon after meeting her it was Susie’s birthday and I spent an entire pay packet,’ Sherna said at his re-trial. ‘I bought a cake, flowers, put a notice in the Herald Sun and bought her a Bangles cassette tape. By the time of her birthday I spent more and more time with her and less time at both home and work, and eventually I left work altogether.’

When asked how he spent their early days together, Sherna replied: ‘Being really naughty. Drinking too much and just enjoying her company.’

But the days of wine and roses were to take a bitter turn.

Susie Wild was thirty-five years old when she met Sherna. Born in Launceston, Tasmania, on 6 September 1954, she was the second eldest of four siblings. She had a son to a Tasmanian policeman from whom she separated acrimoniously. She had lost contact with all her relatives apart from her mother, Lorna, still in Tasmania.

Vladimir Chernishoff said Susie did not make a good impression on their family after his brother brought her home. ‘[She was] dominating and also very extreme in how she approached people.’

Family friend Kellie Dower told Sherna’s defence barrister, Jane Dixon, SC, in court that it appeared ‘more of a dominant relationship on Susie’s behalf’.

DIXON: When you say it was more dominant, what did you see?

DOWER: [She was] just barking orders for a drink one night.

DIXON: What would he do if she barked an order at him?

DOWER: Get it … It was more like Tony was a possession, not a human.

When Sherna and Susie met, he was living with a friend and a Sri Lankan boarder in a house he and younger brother Peter owned in the south-eastern Melbourne suburb of Noble Park.

‘It was a true-blue bachelor pad,’ Sherna said in court. ‘We all enjoyed sport. We went to sporting events. We enjoyed partying.’

All that was to end when Susie moved in.

‘Susie didn’t like me sharing my time with others and she got really upset if I said, “I’ve got to go and play cricket,”’ Sherna said. ‘She hated it.’ He gave up his favourite sport at her behest.

‘It was early in the relationship and I just backed right down from any type of argument and just tried to make her happy.’

After Susie turned a Sherna family party into a disaster by alleging Sherna’s brothers and friends sexually harassed her, Sherna ostracised himself from his family.

‘When I was at work Susie would ring me up and say, “Your mother’s snooping around. Your brothers are snooping around,”’ Sherna told the Supreme Court.

My mother’s Russian Orthodox and they wear scarves. Susie used to call her the old scarf woman … They [my family] did knock on the door but Susie wouldn’t let anyone inside. I had to pretend that we weren’t home.

According to Sherna, Susie’s draconian rules applied to everyone but herself. He told the jury that she was still in touch with an ex-boyfriend, a man he named as Michael Bennis.

‘He had long wavy brown hair,’ Sherna recalled. ‘His mother was Egyptian and his father was Greek. As such he had like an olive complexion. He had big full lips. The reason why I remember the lips in particular is because Susie used to love kissing him because of his great lips.’

Sherna told of his first encounter with the swarthy love god.

Susie didn’t like the colour of the paint in the bathroom and she told me to paint the bathroom a different colour, so I said, ‘Yeah, no worries.’ I started painting it in the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday and I’m busily painting and six o’clock Susie rang Michael Bennis to come and pick her up, which he did. And then she went back to his place and she said to me, ‘Make sure you get this done by the time I get home.’ So stupid me was still painting away. I was drinking. It was ten o’clock. She still wasn’t back.

Susie didn’t return until the following day. When asked in court what he thought she was up to, Sherna replied: ‘Ex-boyfriend all night. Put two and two together.’

Despite apologising Susie would later pull another overnighter. ‘She just called me a weak little bastard for letting it happen,’ Sherna told the court.

The couple rented a home owned by Sherna’s mother for a short time. Before moving out, Susie cut up Fatina’s lace curtains—much to Sherna’s horror. ‘It was like a fit of rage,’ Sherna said,

and I’m like, ‘What the?’ I couldn’t believe it … [But] I just had to put all my eggs in the one basket and Susie was it. I had to make it work with Susie. Each of them [my relatives] had a few words to say about it and I ignored them because I was so infatuated.

At the time, Sherna began work as a clerk with Roy Morgan Research in the city.

At the beginning I would have a drink with workmates on a Friday night … But I had to stop doing it altogether because when I got home Susie would grill me and say that I was womanising, or words to that effect, which was simply not true. She was screaming from the top of her lungs and I’d say I wasn’t womanising and she’d just scream out, ‘Liar!’

It reminded me of family dramas when I was a kid and I would be shaking like a leaf and just frightened.

The couple moved to a flat Susie had picked out. She still was not working. Sherna was the sole provider.

‘My understanding of the relationship was that I had to provide a roof over our heads and not just any roof,’ Sherna said. ‘This place had a spa. It was unbelievably expensive. We struggled very much and had to change our lifestyle. I couldn’t drink beer any more and I had to drink cask wine.’

And Susie’s ex-boyfriend was still appearing every now and then.

‘One day I was home and lo and behold Michael goes and knocks on the door, wearing a tank top and a pair of Speedos,’ Sherna recalled.

Susie demanded Sherna change his surname to prove his love. He changed it from Chernishoff to Sherna by deed poll at the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages in the city. By that stage he and Susie were sleeping in separate bedrooms. There were verbal and sometimes physical disputes, he claimed in court.

Sometimes Susie would run in [to my room], turn the light on and just call me—what did she used to call me—a rude little bastard or words to that effect for running out on her when she was arguing.

I would get upset naturally and I’d throw a shoe at her or try and get her out of the room and shut the door. She would run into the kitchen sometimes, grab a kitchen knife, come belting back into my room and try to attack me with the knife. I’d fend her off nearly every time, except one time she grazed me along the shirt and actually cut me along the chest.

I ended up curling on my side protecting my vital organs, and that’s how I sleep to this day. I don’t sleep on my back any more.

While living in the affluent suburb of South Yarra, Susie regularly drank champagne and took Sudafed and, Sherna claimed, would treat him ‘terribly’ and start trivial arguments. Sherna blamed Susie’s bizarre behaviour on the cocktail of champagne and Sudafed. During his re-trial, Dixon asked if he tried to persuade her to give up drinking alcohol.

‘I couldn’t do anything like that, no,’ he replied.

I couldn’t tell her what to do because Susie was older and if I made the silly mistake of telling her what to do she would say, ‘I’m older than you. I know better.’ I felt so low and miserable it was just demoralising. I felt so helpless because I had no one. I had no family. No friends. My life was just one insult after another from Susie. It got so bad that I actually thought about ending my life.

I cried myself to sleep, and while I was crying myself to sleep I’d look across the hallway and there would be Susie flaked on the bed on her champagne and Sudafed. I was that heartbroken. It was terrible. I was holding down a job as a supervisor in the meantime.

Sherna became a team leader in a print room at National Mutual across the city. The only problem was his little yellow Mini Minor—with a top speed of 80 kilometres an hour—couldn’t be driven along the freeway. Susie suggested they move to Burwood East to be closer to his workplace. Susie lived like a hermit there, before they moved to a brand new unit right across the road from the sprawling Box Hill shopping complex. Sherna’s life turned into an expensive nightmare after that. ‘She went from recluse to shopaholic,’ he told the jury.

DIXON: What happened in terms of expenditure at that time?

SHERNA: Brand new unit got full of brand new furniture and accessories and more.

DIXON: In terms of the money, who was controlling the money at that time?

SHERNA: Susie controlled the wages … I would withdraw the entire week’s wages, hand the money to Susie and she would then hand out the cash as needed according to groceries that were required.

DIXON: Were you able to keep up with the spending at that time?

SHERNA: No. Actually, I had no idea how much she was spending but I had to get a second job … I was doing shift work plus overtime, then I got a second job working at Safeway Liquor on a casual basis. Susie kept wanting more things to buy and it was getting out of hand, all the spending.

DIXON: How were you coping with that level of working hours?

SHERNA: No, didn’t last too long. I couldn’t cope. I ended up leaving Safeway and National Mutual … and got my old job back at Roy Morgan—less money.

Less money meant unpaid rent which meant a move to a nearby ‘cold and damp’ two-bedroom townhouse. Susie caught viral pneumonia there. With cap in hand, an ashamed Sherna made contact with his long-lost mother and asked for $2000.

‘It was Susie’s idea,’ he told the court.

The money went towards a bond and four weeks’ rent in advance for a villa unit in Mount Waverley. By that stage Sherna had changed jobs again, and was working at a company called SNP Ausprint five kilometres away.

DIXON: How did you get to work?

SHERNA: The mini broke down at the Box Hill address and Susie told me to sell it and just catch a bus or taxi to work from then on.

A rat problem forced the couple to move to another villa unit, this time in neighbouring Glen Waverley. Dixon asked Sherna: ‘What was her general attitude to you in that period? How did she treat you?’

Sherna replied, ‘I was basically just the bloke who brought the income in.’

Sherna, by then, was sleeping on what he described as a camp bed.

‘I slept on a camp bed for many, many years,’ he said. When asked why he didn’t just buy himself a new bed, Sherna replied: ‘She wouldn’t let me.’

DIXON: If you wanted to go and buy something for yourself were you able to go and just do that?

SHERNA: Oh, no, no, no. Susie held all the money. She held the credit card, ATM card, bank book, cash.

DIXON: Did you try and express affection to her from time to time?

SHERNA: As the years progressed I’d try and be affectionate and all she would say is, ‘You want to get in my pants.’

DIXON: Did she have an attitude about your hygiene, your general hygiene in the house?

SHERNA: Put it this way, apparently my ‘number twos’ were filthy and I stunk and I should be doing those at work and shopping centres. I wasn’t allowed to defecate in the toilet [at home].

During his first trial (which ended with a hung jury), Sherna admitted that, while he trained himself in the art of bowel control and the use of toilets other than his own, long weekends ‘were a problem’. It was a startling statement from a grown man. Prosecutor Andrew Tinney, SC, who took Sherna to task on several aspects of his evidence during the re-trial, grilled him about his toilet claims.

TINNEY: Some of these things that you claim about Ms Wild are treatment by her of you that would be nothing short of demeaning.

SHERNA: Absolutely.

TINNEY: For example, for a wife to insist of a husband that he never use the toilet in their house if he wants to do anything other than urinate … that would be quite demeaning and bizarre, would it not?

SHERNA: I didn’t have personal space to use the toilet how a human being should be able to … I had to go to shopping centres and work.

TINNEY: How many years or months or days was it that you were not permitted to use the toilet at whatever house you were living in?

SHERNA: I’d say maybe five years.

TINNEY: [It’s not in your police interview] because it is a lie, isn’t it?

SHERNA: Hell no. Why would any person stand in the dock and tell the world that?

TINNEY: You were telling the police about your life and you did not tell them anything about this very notable claim that you now make of not being able to use your own toilet?

SHERNA: Yes … to me that was everyday. That wasn’t unusual.

Sherna’s next job, as a highly paid laser printer, led him to suggest to Susie they purchase a home-and-land package they could call their own, rather than living like rental gypsies. After Susie reneged on a first home deal, they bought in Hogans Road, Tarneit. Their future neighbours had no idea what trouble was about to move in. Sherna would often visit the house in development, while trying to break the ice and build a rapport with people living in the street. Despite his best efforts to add his own touches to the place as it was taking shape, he still managed to get into trouble.

‘I bought wooden blinds from the Kmart catalogue to match the windows of the plan, and of course when we got to moving day, the blinds that I’d bought didn’t fit,’ he said in court.

The house plan windows—a lot of them were incorrect. Susie called me an idiot. She was absolutely livid, furious at me. I’d tried to do the right thing. There was a thirty per cent off sale. Lo and behold the windows are different. It wasn’t my fault.

Any time there was any sort of responsible decision that went pear-shaped it was moi’s fault.

Of Susie’s alleged common abusive taunts, Sherna said: ‘“Low life” was her favourite in probably the second half of our relationship. “Weak bastard” was the favourite for the first half. “Grow some balls.” That used to happen a lot.’

He also said: ‘Susie used to comment that I didn’t have a full deck. The put-downs were basically part of everyday life. They were just routine.’

Sherna and Susie moved into Hogans Road in June 2002. It did not take them long to make an impression. Neighbour Claudia Cortez would often see Sherna working in the garden under a figurative whip. ‘[Susie would say], “You missed that weed” and do that and do this and do that. It was a domineering … just a weird kind of relationship.’

Mark and Anthea Rose were the first couple to meet them. The Roses were walking their dogs and introduced themselves while Sherna was out gardening. The Roses got around to telling their new neighbours they were expecting a baby. After the birth, Sherna and Susie took over a bottle of champagne. The cork was popped and the couples began to talk. Everything seemed to be going fine until Susie began a lecture about the Roses’ dog and the danger it posed to the infant. An argument broke out between the two women; Sherna appeared to try to placate his wife as he continued sipping on champagne. The Roses asked them to leave.

‘Susie said something that got the pair of us offside with the Roses,’ Sherna would tell the court:

[and] goodness me did I cop it when I got home. I was called disloyal and it was just terrible because I was truly trying to support her. [She said] that I was a weak little bastard and I should grow some balls.

In November, not long after Susie managed to get ‘offside with the Roses’, Sherna was retrenched from his high-paying laser printing job.

I was absolutely shattered because it was a brand new house, I had a mortgage. It was out of the blue. Susie was livid and said to me, ‘That’s why I didn’t want a house in the first place’, and she made me look and feel rather foolish about it.

Being the provider, Sherna scoured the local newspaper for work. He picked up a job as a casual bottle-shop attendant at a hotel. A couple of months later, in March 2003, he gained employment as a laser printer at a company called Security Mail in nearby Laverton. On top of the two jobs, he took on a third—as a casual bottle-shop attendant at another hotel. His work hours were long—days, nights and weekends. About eighteen months later, around November 2004, he started working normal business hours with the company after an upgrade to customer service. He worked with a team of fourteen people, twelve of whom were women. Those numbers didn’t go down too well with Susie.

‘I had a business unit leader of Rachel Kasupee and my team mate that worked on the same account was Elisha Blake,’ Sherna explained. ‘Susie was insanely jealous of those two.’

Phone calls to Sherna’s desk became incessant. Sherna explained: ‘Susie rang many times every day. She would say, ‘Who are you screwing?’ and things of that nature. These ladies were just my team mates and Susie actually made me feel bad.’

Despite the phone calls, life at work was a luxury for Sherna compared to his regimented existence at home where he slept on the camp bed in the back study.

‘[Susie’s bedroom] was a no-go zone for me,’ he told the jury. ‘That was Susie’s private area.’ Sherna claimed during the 2009 retrial that he had last had sex with Susie on Valentine’s Day 2004 after buying her a partner desk as a gift for her front study.

‘That was a reward for purchasing the desk,’ he said of the sex. ‘Every time I tried to be affectionate she’d say, “You just want to get in my pants,” and she would make me feel dirty, like a sleaze.’

Sherna told the jury that he was only ever allowed into the kitchen to grab a beer.

‘He did mention that he was very rarely allowed in the kitchen,’ workmate Elisha Blake said in court. ‘That it had been years since he’d made a cup of coffee in the kitchen. He wasn’t allowed in the kitchen.’

Sherna described the situation in this way:

[The kitchen] was [Susie’s] office, I suppose, and as luck would have it that was the exact middle of the house. If Susie had a topic that was on her mind I had to stand on the other side of the bench and listen. If I had the audacity to walk away I would just cop the biggest tirade and she would say, ‘You come back here and you listen.’ It was like she was the head master telling you off.

It was strict routine in Susie Wild’s home, according to Sherna. He told the Supreme Court that on workday mornings, Susie would grant him one of his twelve daily cigarettes. During his re-trial, Dixon asked, ‘So what if you wanted to smoke more than the daily quota?’ Sherna’s response: ‘Too bad.’

Sherna would smoke his morning cigarette in the back courtyard and then return inside to be sprayed with some sort of medical aerosol. While he showered, Susie would make his breakfast—toast and coffee only. Lunch was always three sandwiches a day, Sherna said.

SHERNA: One was to be eaten for morning tea. Two for lunch.

DIXON: What about if you wanted to buy lunch at work?

SHERNA: No, no. I was never given any money, especially any lunch money.

While Sherna brushed his teeth after breakfast, Susie would lay out his clothes for the day.

DIXON: Did you ever disagree and say, ‘No, I don’t want to wear that. I wore that yesterday or last week?’

SHERNA: I made that mistake a few times but she’d explode at me [and say] that she is older than me and she knows the corporate world.

By ten past eight Sherna would be out the door with his briefcase, and a grocery list with an estimated amount of money to cover it.

SHERNA: As far as the ATM card, credit cards— Susie held on to those. They were her property. That money she gave me was purely for that grocery list. I was not to spend any of it, absolutely not one cent of it.

DIXON: What would happen though in terms of using them to withdraw money?

SHERNA: I had to withdraw $600 or $800 a week at Susie’s request. I would then have to hand her the money and ATM receipt, and look out if I didn’t have the ATM receipt.

Of an evening after work, Sherna arrived home and— after taking his shoes and socks off and putting on his ‘indoor thongs’—he placed any groceries and the receipt on the kitchen bench.

‘Then I would have to empty my pockets of any change, mobile phone, keys, cigarette case, lighter … Susie would grab the change, receipts, make sure that it was all there.’

DIXON: When you got home did you go and turn on the telly? What did you do to relax at home after work?

SHERNA: Well I loved sport. I love current affairs, and like any person, you want to watch the news when you get home. But every time I tried to watch the news, because Susie used to control the remote, she would flip the channel. ‘I’ve already watched the news.’ Bang.

DIXON: So in terms of relaxing at home, what did you do to relax at home of an evening?

SHERNA: I didn’t. I sat on the couch. I tried to watch TV but they were all Susie’s shows.

Pre-prepared meals would be heated in the microwave and eaten for dinner. Susie would drink up to a bottle of red wine and Sherna about eight cans of beer. After tea it was lights out on Susie’s say-so, according to Sherna. ‘In our relationship, if Susie was tired, the household was tired,’ he said in evidence.

‘Off with the telly. We are going to bed.’ That was it. Didn’t matter if it was the last quarter of the Grand Final. Too bad. Bed … It was best to let her be when she was on her bandwagon. There is no way I was going to cause trouble at that time of night.

On weekends, Sherna said, it was his primary role to play chauffeur. ‘If Susie wanted to add a piece of home decorating that she wanted to buy, regardless of where it was in Melbourne, I had to drive her there.’

He said he would then have to wait in the car and listen to the radio as Susie shopped her little heart out. ‘Didn’t matter if it was four hours. I wasn’t allowed to drop her off and come home. I had to wait outside the store.’

On Friday evenings to welcome in the weekend, Sherna’s workmates would regularly head to the pub for a few beers.

DIXON: Did you ever go?

SHERNA: No. Wasn’t allowed and I didn’t have money.

According to a former workmate, Sherna referred to his wife as ‘the thumb’ or ‘the boss’. When asked in court if he ever confided with workmates about his tempestuous relationship, Sherna said:

I confided in nobody … because with Susie loyalty was her number one motto. I was never to discuss any of our relationship with anyone else. It had to remain within those four walls … I had to be loyal out of fear of what may happen if I broke that loyalty. I was terrified of what she was capable of doing.

Sherna made a mistake one year of attending a work Christmas party, held in a restaurant at the Victorian Arts Centre. Roadworks and traffic jams on the West Gate Bridge caused him to miss his home curfew by twenty minutes.

‘Susie was in a massive, massive rage,’ Sherna told the jury.

She was throwing full cans of beer at me, right at my head. She was calling me a womanising toe rag. It was just an incredible tirade of abuse and it was so uncalled for. You can’t help traffic delays … Lucky she was drunk and not a good aim.

Hard times: A dejected Anthony Sherna tells detectives about life with his wife.

Sherna’s working role required him to travel interstate occasionally. On the first occasion, Susie allowed him to go to Sydney for one day, instead of the required two. Sherna was not to stay overnight interstate.

Despite his only travelling the one day, Susie called three times to check up on him.

DIXON: What was the nature of the calls?

SHERNA: Well obviously I had to pull my pants up. She was checking who I was screwing.

Susie Wild appeared to be disgusted at the thought of fun, as neighbours learned after putting a gazebo, veranda and spa in their backyard. Susie abused them constantly.

‘It was always a hassle to be in the backyard,’ Claudia Cortez said in court. ‘She would always say, “Get out of the spa you lazy bastards,” and so on. “Go and get a job.”’

Sherna told the jury: ‘They were nasty, abusive remarks. She would call them things like trailer trash. She just thought they were having sex orgies.’

Susie falsely reported other neighbours, like Mauricio Perez, for wasteful water usage. Perez also found human faeces in his letterbox several times. Susie was abusive to Perez and his young daughter whenever they were out walking or playing.

‘She used to just come out and start abusing the hell out of us,’ Perez said in evidence.

She used to come out swearing, insulting me and that kind of thing. It got out of hand when my daughter was around. I told him [Sherna] to put her on a leash … because she looked like she was out of control.

Susie would even yell at children who dared pat horses in an adjacent paddock.

‘I’d been trying to build a rapport with neighbours and it didn’t matter what I said to Susie,’ Sherna told the court.

If I told her ‘stop it’, she would scream things out at me like, ‘You disloyal little bastard.’ She loved saying that.

When Susie had a bee in her bonnet she was the boss. You just didn’t mess with her.

To try to improve his ‘marriage’, Sherna accepted a free pup from a work colleague. It was a Jack Russell–Maltese cross. Sherna called him Hubble. He brought the dog home on 24 December 2006.

‘I brought Hubble home to compensate for not having children and also to make Susie happy,’ he recalled. ‘We treated him like a kid, like a child.’

In August 2007, Sherna was required to travel to Sydney for work again. The court was told that Susie packed his suitcase and gave him his orders.

DIXON: Did Susie tell you anything about what you were to do in Sydney?

SHERNA: Well, I had to behave. Susie rang me heaps and heaps and heaps of times.

DIXON: What was the nature of the calls?

SHERNA: She was in a massive panic. She was one hundred per cent certain that I was screwing [my work colleague] Elisha, saying, ‘Put that bitch on the phone.’

DIXON: What about when you came back?

SHERNA: When I came back from Sydney it was awful. The taxi pulled up. I got my suitcase out and Susie was screaming at me that I was a womaniser and words to that effect. When I got inside, to my horror, she grabbed my wallet and started searching for women’s phone numbers. I mean, come on.

DIXON: What happened with your suitcase?

SHERNA: What she did, and this is even more disgusting, is she picked up every piece of clothing and smelt them for women’s scent … She was adamant that I was having an affair.

Sherna said life was like a pressure cooker for him. Desperate for a normal married relationship, he decided to throw his career away and seek a sea change with Susie. Maybe that was the tonic: a change of scene away from Melbourne. He quit his job at Security Mail in November 2007, but Susie pulled out of the plan to move to the seaside.

‘I was at home. I’d given up,’ Sherna said in evidence. ‘Just lost all motivation. Just sat around mucking around with Hubble. Susie called me a lazy bastard. “Get yourself a job and stop playing with that bloody dog.”’

Sherna did as he was told, and found employment with QM Technologies in Port Melbourne as an account manager. At Christmas 2007—two months before he was to strangle Susie to death—he took Hubble and visited his cancer-riddled mother.

Fatina later told police: ‘I asked him if they did anything together or had any friends. He said they never went out or did anything outside the house. I told him he was like a slave to Susie and he agreed.’

There was a 20/20 cricket match at the MCG between Australia and India on the night Susie Wild was to die. One of Sherna’s workmates had invited him to the game, but he had politely refused. He knew it wasn’t worth the trouble it would have caused. That day Susie had told Sherna that a bill for his mobile phone had arrived two weeks earlier. His phone had since been disconnected. To add to his frustration, Susie had demanded to know exactly who he had called. According to Sherna, Susie was ‘very, very frosty’ when he arrived home that night.

‘Susie had already been drinking and she said to me, “Skol, catch up,” so I had to skol beer,’ Sherna told the jury. ‘She seemed to be in a real mood for stirring up trouble. I don’t know what got on her pip that day, maybe it was the mobile phone bill.’

Sherna continued to drink. Some time around 10 pm he went out the back for one of his twelve daily cigarettes. He let Hubble out for his ‘toilet business’. Susie, meanwhile, made a ‘distressed and afraid’ phone call to her mother in Tasmania.

‘She was crying a lot and I asked her what was upsetting her and she said she couldn’t tell me,’ Susie’s elderly mother Lorna Brazendale told the Supreme Court. ‘I said to her, “Have you had a fight with Tony?” She said, “I can’t tell you that.” When I said, “Why?” she said, “You call it discretion.”’

Lorna changed the subject and asked about Hubble the dog. That seemed to cheer Susie up. ‘Towards the end of the conversation she said, “I feel like God’s sent Hubble to me for somebody to love me,”’ Lorna said. ‘I said to her, “Well, I love you and pray for you every day.”’

‘Nothing will ever bring Sue back’: Lorna Brazendale told daughter Susanne Wild that she was praying for her.

The phone call ended at about 11.45 pm. Susie Wild had no more than twenty minutes to live.

Sherna was in the laundry rocking Hubble to sleep to radio tunes—as was his usual practice of a night-time— when Susie stormed in. ‘Turn that bloody thing off and come and sit down,’ she yelled. ‘I’ve got to talk to you.’

Susie’s yelling scared Hubble in Sherna’s arms. Sherna told police: ‘Susie came in ranting and raving. It was loud and Hubble was shaking like a leaf. I was really angry.’

On the way from the laundry to the kitchen, Sherna grabbed the cord from his dressing-gown and followed Susie. ‘I was just so angry … because I was drunk … I grabbed the cord to kill her,’ he later told Homicide Squad detectives Nigel L’Estrange and Vic Anastasiadis.

‘She was in the kitchen heating up her red wine in the microwave. I stood there and just listened to what she was saying … I was angry but I was calming down.’

Susie then went on to taunt him about the mobile phone bill.

‘Susie said I would never find it,’ Sherna told the jury. ‘And at that inexplicable moment I had a surge of emotion. It’s impossible to explain. And I lost all rationality … It was the final taunt.’

Sherna ‘stormed’ into the kitchen, raised the cord and wrapped it around Susie’s neck. She uttered: ‘Tony, no. Don’t do it.’ He ignored her plea.

L’ESTRANGE: Was she making any sounds?

SHERNA: At the end it was horrible.

L’ESTRANGE: What do you mean by that?

SHERNA: Because she was dying. The blood, oxygenated blood come up through her mouth.

L’ESTRANGE: How was that making you feel?

SHERNA: At the time nothing was going into my head.

L’ESTRANGE: At any time did you think that you should stop?

SHERNA: No, because I thought if I stopped … I just didn’t want to stop.

When asked what went through his mind as he stood over his wife after what was a two- to three-minute death throttle, Sherna said: ‘I was in shock. I couldn’t believe what I had done.’ In court, Dixon asked him: ‘Did you intend to kill Susie?’ Sherna replied: ‘No way in hell, no way. No way.’

Tinney aggressively cross-examined Sherna on that point.

TINNEY: You had ample time to think about what you were doing. Ample time to stop short of killing her, but that killing her was exactly what you had in mind and was exactly what you were intending to do.

SHERNA: No way. I had absolutely no intention of killing Susie.

TINNEY: If you had no intention of killing Susie … first of all could I ask you why did you wrap a dressing-gown cord tightly and twist it tightly around her neck?

SHERNA: That is something that I have been asking myself ever since. I cannot provide an answer to that. All I can tell you is I wasn’t acting rationally. I had a surge of emotion.

After the killing, Sherna stood and took a drink. He knows exactly what time he killed his wife because he spied the oven clock as he rocked his head back to take a slug of Toohey’s Red. He threw on some clothes and got ‘the hell out of there’. In what Tinney described as ‘entirely frightening’ behaviour after the killing, Sherna went and played with poker machines and a prostitute:

He grabbed some clothing, got himself dressed and he left his de facto wife dead on the kitchen floor, sort of crumpled there, and his dog asleep in the laundry and he went out drinking and gambling at a pokies venue at the Werribee Plaza. After a few hours and many drinks there he went off to a brothel called Whisper’s Studio, where he spent some time with a prostitute.

Tinney grilled Sherna about his actions, post-death.

TINNEY: Why did you not [go to the police] straight away after you had killed your wife?

SHERNA: Because I was in shock. I had no one to confide in. I didn’t know what to do.

TINNEY: So you confided in the good folk down at the Werribee Plaza Tabaret pokies venue. Is that right?

SHERNA: I wouldn’t have said it like that, but yes, I did attend there.

TINNEY: You went down there and kicked up your heels a bit did you? To celebrate what you’d done?

SHERNA: Definitely not.

TINNEY: And your thought process was, ‘I’ve killed my wife. I’m going to go and have a drink?’

SHERNA: I was getting the hell out of there, and that’s the first thing that came into my head … I was drinking and obviously gambling as well.

TINNEY: And then you went off to see the prostitute for an hour?

SHERNA: That’s correct … It was totally out of character. I never do that and my dear old mother would be so upset with me.

According to the police summary, Sherna arrived at the brothel at 3.25 am on Saturday, 2 February, ‘utilising the services of one of the girls initially for half an hour then extending this to one hour’. After the brothel, Sherna drove home and passed out on his bed close to 5 am. He woke up about noon.

‘I let Hubble out again and then it hit me,’ he told Homicide detectives during his record of interview.

I went, ‘Shit. What the hell have you done?’ Because I didn’t have family or friends I didn’t know what to do. So what I did is I grabbed her under the arms and I dragged her body from the kitchen and somehow I managed to put her on [her] bed. Not out of any spite, or anything, but she ended up face down on the pillow and that’s where she remained.

During the afternoon, Sherna made several phone calls. And none of them was to the police. The first number he dialled at 4.48 pm—about seventeen hours after killing Susie—was a sex chat-line. It gave him this recorded message: ‘Hi babe, I was waiting for your call. Welcome to Australia’s hottest chat-line.’ He called that same number again.

TINNEY: Your wife was still lying dead on her bed not more than a few metres from that desk [from where you were calling]. Is that right?

SHERNA: I’d never rung them before and it was a stupid thing to bloody do.

Sherna’s next call was to a different sex chat-line. That call lasted 23 minutes and 42 seconds and cost him $41. Tinney asked him, ‘Were you not happy with the service you got during the first two calls?’

Sherna also called Whisper’s Studio brothel.

TINNEY: What were you doing calling a brothel at 5.20 in the afternoon?

SHERNA: I don’t know. I don’t know. I was acting so irrationally. I’m just so ashamed.

TINNEY: You keep on saying you’re acting irrationally but you killed a woman with whom you hadn’t had sex for three years. Within hours of that you went off to a brothel and had sex, and later that day phoned sex chat lines and then phoned the brothel again. I mean were you particularly interested in sex during this day, the day that you had killed your wife?

SHERNA: No.

TINNEY: And after you had killed her?

SHERNA: No way. That’s what I’m saying to you, I wasn’t acting rationally.

Interspersed between the calls to sex chat-lines and brothels, Sherna steadily punted on the horses through his TAB telephone account.

‘I think I had the radio on the horse channel,’ he admitted.

Susie Wild lay on her bed all Sunday. It was February and the summer heat was unkind to her.

‘On Monday the rigor mortis and smell was really hitting,’ Sherna told detectives L’Estrange and Anastasiadis.

In that time I had the evaporative cooler going to keep the temperature down because it was very hot weather. I went and got Glen 20 disinfectant spray, or whatever it is, and I also got a rose scented candle for two reasons. Number one reason was for the smell. Number two is because Susie is Catholic and I knew candles and deaths are associated with each other.

On the Monday morning, Sherna rang his supervisor Lucy Mariani and asked for a week off because his wife had ‘left’ him.

‘He was very apologetic,’ Mariani said in court.

Despite Sherna’s efforts to mask the smell of death, the stench emanating from his home had the closest neighbours complaining. He had no option but to bury the body. To save Hubble from the trauma of seeing one of his owners burying the other one, Sherna took the puppy to a pet resort kennel.

‘I didn’t want Hubble to smell or see anything,’ he told the detectives. ‘I didn’t want him to be traumatised.’

Sherna stopped in at a Safeway store and bought 20 metres of orange nylon rope. He wrapped his wife in bed sheets and plastic from his garage. It was amateur hour.

‘It [the smell] was terrible,’ he told the detectives.

I slid the plastic somehow over her from the feet up. I tried to make her dignified. I pushed her legs together, her arms together and I wrapped her in the plastic bag and tied it up to keep the smell away.

While drinking beer, he tried to dig a grave in the hard backyard clay with nothing more than a spade and a pitchfork. Amateur hour continued.

You could clearly see that I was digging a grave-like hole. I was out in the open and I was digging for hours and hours because it was clay. [The weather was] boiling hot and [the ground] rock hard … I could only dig the hole approximately two to three feet deep because I hit an easement pipe.

At about 1 am on the morning of Tuesday, 5 February, he dragged his wife’s wrapped, decomposing body and dumped it in the shallow grave.

Backyard grave: Susanne lies wrapped in plastic next to the hole Sherna dug for her.

‘I knew I had to take the body outside somewhere because it was just stinking,’ he told police. ‘It was decomposing … I had been drinking very heavily and I lost a right thong. That’s in the hole as well.’

He covered the body with dirt. Tinney described it as if Sherna had disposed of Susie ‘as though she was some sort of animal’. After sunrise, Sherna planted rose bushes along the edge of the garden. Even in death, Susanne Wild was still on the wrong side of the roses.

After cleaning the floors with disinfectant and throwing out the clothes he had been wearing, Sherna went and picked up Hubble. He later rang his mother and told her what he’d done. Sherna went and picked her up and drove her to Tarneit.

‘I walked in the house and just stood by the kitchen bench near him and dropped my head and just cried,’ Fatina said in her police statement. ‘Tony was holding his puppy dog and crying. He was telling me not to cry and he said he would calm down a bit, call the police and it would be all over.’

Sherna never called the police. That duty was left to brother Vladimir, after Fatina told him what had happened. On Saturday, 9 February, his last day of freedom, Sherna drank, played with Hubble and placed a dozen bets on the horses via his phone account.

Tinney questioned Sherna about his so-called state of shock and grief at that point.

TINNEY: You were at home listening to the races were you?

SHERNA: Yes, no doubt.

TINNEY: Putting on bets at your leisure?

SHERNA: I wouldn’t have put it like that, but yeah. I was putting on bets.

TINNEY: I would suggest that you didn’t really have any particular regret about what you had done other than in respect of how it was going to affect you.

SHERNA: I had absolutely heaps of regret.

Senior Constable Graeme Rayner and his constable partner arrived at the Tarneit home for a welfare check on Susanne Wild about 9.30 pm on Saturday, 9 February. They found Sherna asleep on the couch in front of a flickering TV in a dark lounge room. They roused him with torchlight and he came outside. The cops then questioned him.

RAYNER: Mate, we’re here to do a welfare check on Susie.

SHERNA: I know. I’ve been expecting you.

RAYNER: Where is she? I need to speak to her.

Sherna dropped his shoulders, sighed and replied: ‘She’s dead. I killed her.’ He was arrested and read his rights. Rayner then continued. ‘Where is she?’

Sherna told him. ‘In the backyard. I buried her. I just had enough. I strangled her to death then buried her.’

Sherna led the two cops to the shallow grave. ‘She’s just over there,’ he pointed. ‘About two feet off the corner of the house; three feet down. I hit a stormwater pipe and couldn’t go any further.’

Forensic examiners later dug up the body.

‘The body was wrapped in three bed sheets and the head of the deceased had a pillow over her face,’ the police summary states. ‘Inside the grave underneath the body, crime scene examiners located a blue-and-white thong.’

Sherna’s first Supreme Court murder trial ended with a hung jury. During the re-trial in October 2009, forensic psychologist Jeffrey Cummins said he believed Sherna fitted the profile of a victim of battered woman syndrome.

Cummins told the jury:

The battered woman syndrome was first described in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and it was characterised then, as it is now, by a set of psychological phenomena where a person who is subjected to physical and or emotional abuse over an extended time period acquiesces to that and becomes depressed.

[They have] concentration difficulties, their self-esteem deteriorates, they often report feeling isolated, feeling a sense of loss of control. In my opinion this man, Mr Sherna, ended up effectively having a symptom set identical to that described in the battered woman syndrome.

Tinney was obviously sceptical, and cross-examined in that fashion.

TINNEY: Well at the heart of the condition, if there is such a thing, I’d suggest to you is a history of pretty much constant and severe violence?

CUMMINS: When the condition was first described in the late 1970s it was described in the context of women who had been subjected to repeated physical violence … And progressively the definition has been broadened to include people who perceive they have been emotionally abused and or physically abused.

Later in his cross-examination, Tinney asked Cummins: ‘How many women you have assessed over the years who could be said to be suffering from such, or experiencing such a syndrome?’

CUMMINS: Fewer than one hundred.

TINNEY: Fewer than one hundred women. Over how many years are we talking about?

CUMMINS: Thirty years of practising.

TINNEY: How many men?

CUMMINS: I would say two.

Sherna spent several days in the witness box. His evidence ranged from poignant to darkly comical. He was asked why he simply hadn’t walked out on the soul-destroying relationship.

‘The only thing I knew is that I couldn’t leave her … because I couldn’t break that loyalty aspect that she had on the relationship; the hold that she had on it because I didn’t know how she would react,’ he said. ‘She was five foot tall, sure, but goodness me she knew how to use the phone and she had connections. If she had a bee in her bonnet she used to make things happen and I used to be bloody terrified.’

Tinney accused Sherna of exaggerating the extent of his tormented life, but Sherna was adamant. ‘No way. No way in hell. That was my life. That happened. It was a horrible damn life and I had to live it. I had to endure it every day.’

Tinney told the jury that Sherna’s crime was the result of the ‘voluntary, conscious and deliberate’ actions of a drunken man who lost his temper.

‘Now we all know, I suppose, that there are good ways and bad ways of ending a relationship,’ Tinney said in his closing address.

A good way might have been for the accused to go up to Susanne, sit her down and tell her, ‘Susanne, for eighteen years we’ve been together. I’ve worked at this relationship. I’ve loved you, I’ve done my best to make a go of it. But honestly I’ve reached the point where I can go no further. The relationship doesn’t give me what I need. I’m sorry. I’m leaving you. You can stay in the house. I’ll continue to make the mortgage payments until we can arrange our financial affairs. Goodbye.’ That would be a good way of ending a relationship.

If I was to put forward a bad way of ending a long-term relationship then perhaps what the accused did to his wife on 2 February 2008 would be a reasonable sort of blueprint. A bit on the extreme side. Even if every single negative thing he said about this woman or any of the other witnesses in this court said about this woman were the truth, it would not have given him any justification whatsoever for killing her; for doing what he did. She could be the worst and most unpleasant and controlling person in the world, but she deserved a bit better, members of the jury, than to be strangled to death in her own house, wrapped up and buried in her own backyard.

He could have been the most sad, the most ineffectual, the most under-the-thumb figure imaginable—but it did not give him the right to do what he did.

Dixon told the jury that it was a spontaneous killing that happened due to a sudden eruption after ‘many, many years of abuse’.

The accused man was so totally overborne by the deceased that she essentially had him completely in her thrall to the point where he had lost the capacity for sensible independent judgment about his situation. It had really become more like a parent and child relationship.

Manslaughter is the true verdict in this case, in my submission to you. The defence says there was certainly no premeditation about this killing. This is a man who never in his wildest dreams imagined being here in the Supreme Court on trial for murder.

After just over a day’s deliberation, the jury acquitted Sherna of murder but found him guilty of manslaughter. Justice David Beach sentenced him to a maximum fourteen years’ jail with a minimum of ten. It was a substantial sentence for manslaughter.

‘I accept that the deceased was both controlling and domineering of you and that, from time to time, this involved significant episodes of unpleasantness on her behalf,’ the judge said.

Nonetheless, even if everything you said in evidence concerning the deceased and your relationship with her was true, it would not justify or excuse killing her.

This is not a case where someone in a fit of anger lashes out and kills with one blow. This, on your own evidence, was a case where you took two to three minutes to strangle the life out of the deceased. It was, on any view, a brutal attack perpetrated by you on a person who was smaller and weaker than you were.

In her victim impact statement, Lorna Brazendale said she would never be able to come to terms with her daughter’s death.

‘The emotional trauma and ongoing anxiety is probably the worst aspect,’ she said. After the sentencing, Lorna told this author:

I think the sentence is justice, in a way. I don’t think we could have hoped for much more … but nothing will ever bring Sue back. My counsellor said only a cold-hearted person and callous man could do what he did. This is the most horrible thing that can happen to your child.

Sherna sought leave to appeal against the severity of his sentence. After consideration, three Court of Appeal judges refused the application.

‘The sentence imposed here was at the very top of the range but in my view it was not outside the range,’ Justice Simon Whelan stated.