Before Susan Falls killed her husband, she went outside their Sunshine Coast duplex and had a cigarette, followed by a coffee, chased down with bourbon.
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"I was trying to pluck up the courage to do it," she explained as she gave evidence at her trial this week where yesterday, after less than two hours of deliberation, a jury acquitted her of murdering her partner of 20 years, Rodney Falls.
As she sat in the witness box, the blonde, petite mother of four was describing the moment she killed the man she had once loved, the man she claimed made each day of her life a living hell by subjecting her to violence, threats and intimidation.
"I could sit here until Christmas and never find the words to properly explain how I felt and how my life and my children's lives was to live in fear, to constantly try and read a person, to worry what would set him off," she said.
What would set him off, she said, was little things like their three-year-old making noise, or his usual breakfast of Coco Pops being too soggy.
"I had to get his Coco Pops. I would know when I heard the hair dryer [he used to dry his hair] that at that point I would pour the milk so they would be just right, wouldn't be too crunchy, too soft," she said.
And the injuries from the years of "being a punching bag" were too many to list, she said.
Wounds like carpet burn all down her legs from being dragged around the house by her hair, a burn on her arm from an oxy-welder, bruised ribs from being punched or kicked in the chest, countless black eyes and bruises all over her body.
She said, he would beat her and then demand sex. She was too scared of him to refuse, describing their post-violence bedroom trysts as "disgusting".
And when he hit her, she said she wasn't allowed to cover her face because he would cut his hands on her rings.
"Later I would ask him 'why do you keep hurting me?' and he'd say 'I black out and I don't know half the stuff I do'," she said.
Mrs Falls' barrister, Jeff Hunter, asked the jury to consider what had driven "an otherwise ordinary suburban housewife" to kill her husband in the lounge room of their home, while their two teenage daughters stood and watched.
"What has happened to her to make her think the only way out is to drug her husband and shoot him in the head?" he said on the first day of Mrs Falls' trial.
When she took the witness stand Mrs Falls told the jury how she left her husband in 2000 after a police officer involved in a domestic violence order she had made told her Rodney would eventually kill her if she didn't leave.
But after six weeks away, she returned when he threatened to use bikie connections to get to her, Mrs Falls' parents, her sister and anyone who had helped her leave.
He promised he would change, but he didn't.
Mrs Falls came to believe a life of domestic violence and misery was the life she was meant to live.
But then, in May 2006, Rodney created a deadline for her to do something about his "tyranny" and ultimately, to take his life.
Rodney devised a "death lottery" by writing down the names of their four children and forcing her to choose which one of them he would kill on her mother's birthday, May 29, 2006.
His death at her hands, just four days before what she feared would be one of her kids' last, was "a pre-emptive strike", her lawyers told the jury.
His death began with his favourite meal, curried prawns - which Mrs Falls had laced with crushed sleeping tablets.
Then, she got changed into her pyjamas, put on some socks and took off her jewellery.
She put an old, Christmas-themed tablecloth on the lounge room floor.
"I'd never shot anyone before, I didn't know if I was going to get covered in blood," she told the jury.
Then, Mrs Falls got out the gun, the gun which the court heard she must have been "so very desperate" for she sent her 15-year-old daughter out to buy it for $5000.
The weapon, which was fitted with a silencer, had been stashed in a pile of washing, waiting for the moment when she would use it.
Mrs Falls told the jury how she held the bullets in her hand and thought "how can something so small kill someone?"
But minutes later, she remembered: "I had my arms stretched out. I lined it up with his temple. And I fired."
Immediately after the first shot, she says, she saw her two eldest daughters, both teenagers, watching from the kitchen.
The three of them huddled behind cupboards and the girls told their mother they loved her.
There, they waited for the sound of Rodney's breathing to stop and his life and his reign on their lives, to end.
It took three hours. And another shot to the head.
"I knew I had no more bullets left. I thought 'a whole bottle of sleeping tablets and two bullets to the head and he's still breathing'," she said.
But just as she grabbed a doona with a view to smothering him, the breathing stopped and he was gone.
A dried tear stained his face, Mrs Falls said. She remembered it because she "felt bad".
"Like he'd been in pain and crying. He was there for three hours. Then I thought 'why am I feeling sorry for him for? He never felt sorry for me when he hurt me'."
Then, she left his body in front of an air conditioner for three days because, her lawyers said, she hadn't thought of how to get rid of more than 100 kilograms of her dead husband.
Perhaps out of a sense of chivalry, the court was told, Bradley James Coupe and Anthony James Hoare agreed to dump his "smelly" body in the Mapleton State Forest.
Christopher Anthony Cumming-Creed - who had supplied the gun - got rid of the weapon and, with Mr Coupe, helped dispose of the blood-soaked recliner.
Yesterday, the male trio were acquitted of being accessories to murder.
Given their verdict, the jury must have rejected the prosecution's case that Mrs Falls "had other options open to her" rather than killing her husband.
Prosecutors argued she killed him not because of life-threatening cruelty he dished out to the family but because she "hated and despised him" and wanted to be rid of him.
However the jury of six men and six women must have accepted that 20 years' of violence was real and that doing what she did was the only choice she had to stay alive.
They must have been convinced it was a case of kill, or be killed.
Yesterday after the verdicts she hugged her lawyers, her kids, her friends and her new partner, who had been supporting her during the trial.
She hugged her co-accused, and their lawyers.
Perhaps Mrs Falls knows her life from now on will be filled with happiness and affection - leaving the brutality of the past behind.
