Wednesday, April 30, 2008

One More Beer, Then You Can Kill Me

It's impossible to know if this is exactly what happened, or if the killer has watched too many episodes of The Sopranos. It reads like a deleted scene from Underbelly :

After he begged unsuccessfully for his life on a remote hill in Gippsland's Strzelecki Ranges, Stephen John Witham made two final requests.

Once he stopped crying and screaming and realised he was going to be murdered, Witham first asked his executioner, Michael Patrick Flaherty, for a beer.

Flaherty obliged and the pair sat and drank a stubby atop a steep incline in a dense pine plantation on August 12, 2006.

"I had a chat with him for a while," Flaherty told Victorian homicide detectives.

Resigned to his fate, Witham, 42, already injured from being beaten with a baseball bat, then asked that he not be shot in the face.

...Flaherty said Witham rolled over submissively.

"He realised that, you know, this is it, sort of thing," Flaherty told police.

He held the barrel of the shotgun to the back of Witham's head and pulled the trigger.