Yesterday when Justice Derek Price sentenced Walter Marsh 51, to a life in prison without parole for murdering nurse Michelle Beets, there was jubilation in his courtroom - cheering and loud applause broke out and he had to call for order. He said "The manner in which he killed her was cruel, merciless and abhorrent, the last moments of her life must have been horrifying."
Marsh was a US citizen who wanted permanent residency in Australia and he once worked with Michelle Beets at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital. He was a nursing manager in the emergency department and Ms Beets was his boss. Not only did Ms Beets not renew his contract, but she gave him bad employment references which enraged Marsh who decided on a plan of revenge.
He believed Ms Beets was responsible for him being unable to find another job and she was an obstacle to him receiving his 457 residency visa. He began stalking her, phoning her house several times a day to work out her routine and was waiting for her to come home from work on the verandah of her Chatswood home.
An American ex Marine, Marsh used a military technique to slit her throat and stabbed her several times. The court heard he practised his murder technique on his wife and brother-in-law and his wife Samantha testified to the court that her husband confessed to her on the night of the murder saying “I did it, it’s done, the bitch is gone.”
The jury of eight men and four women took three days to reach their guilty verdict. Justice Price said there were no mitigating circumstances that would convince him to give Marsh anything less than a life sentence. "He has neither expressed remorse nor shown contrition for the offence," he said.
Before he murdered Michelle Beets, there was a suggestion that Marsh intended to murder his ex wife Tammy who had remarried and lived in America but when he found out her new husband carried a firearm, he abandoned the plan. Justice Price determined before the trial began last September that the jury would not be told that Marsh had gone to the US several weeks before Ms Beets' murder to kill Tammy as a means of "alleviating a combination of problems", which included an unpaid child support debt of $50,000.
Marsh read throughout most of the one-hour sentencing in the Sydney Supreme Court and calmly accepted the news that there was no parole period and that he would die in prison. As he was led away to the prison truck that would take him to Goulburn’s Supermax prison, he grinned at the cameras.
No murder weapon has ever been found, and there was no DNA evidence linking Marsh to the crime.
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