ONCE Terry Donai had finished suffocating his friend David Weightman's mother with a pillow, he turned to his mate and asked for "a hand" doing the same to her husband.
More than 12 years after Bill and Pamela Weightman were killed in their home, their son's friend and co-accused was on Friday jailed for a minimum of 33 years.
Terry Mark Donai was 32 and David Weightman was 21 when they murdered the Weightmans at their Glen Alpine home, in Sydney's southwest, in January 2000.
Sentencing Donai in Sydney on Friday, the Supreme Court was told how about a week before the murders, David Weightman had told him about the estate he stood to inherit on his adoptive parents' death.
According to Weightman, Donai told him he would kill his parents in exchange for $17,000 to buy a motorbike.
What followed on the night of January 8, Justice Peter Hidden said, was "grave indeed".
Weightman, the court heard, has alleged that he made tea for his parents and drugged them in the hope that they would not suffer during the murder.
While this remains in dispute, Justice Hidden said what followed does not.
As Weightman stood outside Donai entered the house and suffocated Mrs Weightman in her upstairs bedroom with a pillow.
Weightman could her his mother scream, before a perspiring Donai told him: "That took a lot out of me; I'll need a hand with your Dad."
As Weightman restrained his father, Donai asphyxiated him.
"Mr Weightman put up a considerable struggle, shouting, 'You bastards'," Justice Hidden said.
The bodies were later found in the father's car on an embankment.
"In the sanctity of their home, Mr and Mrs Weightman were killed in a brutal manner," Justice Hidden said.
Donai, the judge said, came from a supportive family but that his "unremarkable upbringing" had been marred by two cases of sexual abuse - first when he was a nine-year-old at school and secondly as an 11-year-old at the hands of a Catholic priest.
According to his mum Anne Donai, while he seemingly lost his "loving, easy nature" when he was 10, she never saw him show "any violence, aggression or nastiness to anyone".
However, it was noted that he had a history of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder following childhood abuse.
Despite this, Justice Hidden said he was "at a loss to understand how the offender could have committed such dreadful crimes" and that his only motivation could have been financial.
For his role in the murder, David Weightman was sentenced in 2005 to a maximum of 28 years, with a non-parole period of 22 years.
Donai was convicted of the murders in 2008, but granted a re-trial which found him guilty in April this year.
He was given a combined maximum sentence of 43 years, with his earliest release date being June 15, 2039.
Speaking outside court, Mrs Weightman's brother-in-law Alan Urwin said the sentence marked the end of a long battle.
He told reporters that Mr and Mrs Weightman were "dumped on the side of the road like garbage" but NSW police either couldn't or wouldn't investigate.
"I am asking the premier for a full and independent investigation into this ... to determine why NSW police refused to investigate an obvious double murder which they left to the family to get evidence.
"For four years we had to do the job for NSW police. For four years they were telling us that this was a motor vehicle accident, that were being paranoid, and get on with our life."
His wife Anne, who yelled out "murderer" and "bastard" as Donai was sentenced, said: "It's going to be very difficult, you know, that nothing is going to bring Pam and Bill back, so you don't move on but you learn to live with it."
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