R v Victorsen [1999] NSWSC 913

New South Wales Supreme Court CITATION : R v Victorsen [1999] NSWSC 913 CURRENT JURISDICTION : Criminal FILE NUMBER(S) : 70020 of 1998 HEARING DATE(S) : 14/05/1999;23/06/1999; 02/07/1999; 30/07/1999;13/08/1999 JUDGMENT DATE : 13 August 1999

PARTIES : Regina William Peter Victorsen JUDGMENT OF : Hidden J at 1

COUNSEL : P. Boulten (Victorsen) P Barrett (Crown) SOLICITORS : Peter Ash & Associates (Victorsen) Solicitor for Public Prosecutions (Crown) CATCHWORDS : Sentencing - murder - patricide - plea of guilty after initial concealment of involvement - drug problem - family breakdown following death of mother - special circumstances DECISION : Eighteen years: Minimum term: 13 years; Additional term: 5 years

THE SUPREME COURT OF NEW SOUTH WALES COMMON LAW DIVISION HIDDEN J Friday, 13 August 1999

No 70020 of 1998 Regina v William Peter Victorsen

Remarks on Sentence

1 HIS HONOUR: The prisoner, William Peter Victorsen, appears for sentence after having pleaded guilty to the murder of his father. In the early hours of Sunday, 2 November 1997 he beat his father to death with a heavy metal pipe at their home at Eastwood. To understand the circumstances of the killing, it is necessary to sketch the prisoner's background and, in particular, his relationship with his father.

The background 2 Evidence of his background emanated mainly from his own testimony in this Court and the history he provided to Dr William Lucas, psychiatrist, who provided a report. His account was corroborated in significant respects by his married sister, Mrs Simone Ibrahim, whom I found to be an impressive witness. 3 The prisoner is a single man, who is now twenty-six years old and was twenty-four at the time of the offence. He was born and raised in Sydney, for the most part in the family home at Eastwood. His only sibling is his sister, who is younger than he. He was very close to his mother but not to his father, whom he found distant and demanding. Mrs Ibrahim herself said that, while she loved her father, he was "very unemotional" and "a very hard man to talk to…". It does appear that the prisoner's relationship with his father was submissive and lacking in affection, and that this lowered his self-esteem. 4 Dr Lucas described him as "somewhat of a loner". He progressed satisfactorily at school, completing his Higher School Certificate, but had very few friends among his peers. He enrolled in Arts at Macquarie University and studied for two years. However, he left university at the end of 1992 and did not finish the course. This does not appear to have been the result of any lack of ability on his part. He presented in the witness box as an intelligent and articulate young man. 5 His father had been successful in small business, among other things, as the proprietor of a milk run. He purchased a milk run for the prisoner, who worked it through his years at university and for a little over a year thereafter. During the same period after leaving university, he also worked as a clerical assistant for a telecommunications company. 6 In 1994 he began trading in futures, moving into rented premises in the city which he shared with other young men engaged in the same activity. Futures trading was stressful and involved long hours. He already smoked marijuana daily, and he began to use cocaine with the same frequency and, to a lesser extent, ecstasy. This was the beginning of a pattern of drug abuse which was to escalate such that, as Dr Lucas put it, "his drug abuse almost completely took over his life." 7 In about April 1995 his mother told him that she was terminally ill with cancer. He was devastated by this news and gave up work as a futures trader. During the course of that trade he had made and lost a considerable amount of money, and not long before he abandoned it his father was called upon to meet his commitments to the tune of about $100,000. He began abusing prescription drugs of the benzodiazepine type: primarily Rohypnol and, later, Valium. He continued to smoke marijuana. He also drank alcohol, not through dependence upon that drug but because it enhanced the effect of the benzodiazepines. 8 To Dr Lucas he described himself as "a complete mess" after his mother died in November 1995. Certainly, this was his sister's observation. He had moved back to the family home during his mother's illness, and he remained living there with his father for most of the time thereafter. His drug abuse worsened. As his tolerance for benzodiazepines increased, he was taking very large quantities of prescription drugs daily. In relation to his drug use by 1997, he said in evidence, "It fluctuated depending on how much I could procure. I could never get enough." 9 His use of benzodiazepines and marijuana led to paranoid thoughts. He would believe that people were following him or that someone was in the house, apparently bent upon doing him harm. His sister observed him to exhibit irrational fears and sometimes to speak in what she described as "gibberish language", and this behaviour scared her. From his perceived need for protection he kept three pieces of metal pipe, two in the house and one in the laundry. It was the pipe in the laundry that was to become the murder weapon. Dr Lucas saw this behaviour as consistent with his drug abuse and did not consider it to be evidence of a psychosis. 10 As is so often the case, he resorted to deception to feed his addiction. He paid friends to obtain drugs on his behalf, and became skilled at "doctor shopping" and stealing prescriptions. Earlier, before he was earning money as a futures trader, he had sometimes stolen cash from his father. From time to time, he extracted money from his father, as he had earlier from his mother, by falsely representing that he was indebted to drug dealers. Indeed, only a matter of days before the killing he smashed several windows at the home and sprayed the words "warning/death" on the exterior to suggest that his debts were such that dealers were prepared to kill him. His father gave him money on that occasion, although considerably less than he had asked for. 11 In July 1997 he stole some cheques from his father and negotiated them, obtaining more than $13,000. His father reported the matter to police, possibly in the hope that his being charged might break the cycle of drug abuse. Certainly, it appeared to the prisoner that his father wanted to help him during the period before the charges were dealt with. 12 He attempted drug rehabilitation, but his success was short lived. At the time the charges against him were finalised at Ryde Local Court in October 1997, he had hoped to enter a residential drug rehabilitation centre near Wollongong. However, he was unable to do so as the magistrate imposed a term of periodic detention. Thereafter, as he put it in evidence, "I fell back into my old pattern and began to use drugs as heavily as I could." 13 His father had assisted him financially since he gave up work as a futures trader. However, in the period leading up to the killing his father restricted the supply of money to him, confining him to amounts required for specified legitimate purposes. Trust between them deteriorated to such an extent that his father would keep a number of rooms in the house locked, allowing him access only to his own bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen. Nevertheless, his evidence was that in the period between July 1997 and the killing his relationship with his father was better than it had been for years.