By Tracy Neal, Open Justice multimedia journalist
Paul Armon stood over his mother and watched her take her last breath, having twice hit her on the head with a crowbar and then stabbed her in the heart with a kitchen knife.
Today, the 55-year-old cleaner was sentenced in the High Court at Blenheim to life in prison, with a minimum non-parole period of 15 years, for what the Crown described as the cold-blooded, brutal murder of his 78-year-old mother, Jennifer Phyllis Sheehan, in her home last November.
The Blenheim man admitted killing Sheehan at a High Court appearance in April.
Following Sheehan’s death, her family said they were “shocked and utterly lost for words”.
While no one gave victim impact statements at the sentencing, Armon’s lawyer, Rob Harrison, said his client had apologised to the family for “the inexplicable events” of Friday, November 22, last year.
Sheehan lay dead in her home all weekend before her body was found by the police after Armon turned himself in on Monday morning.
The summary of facts showed that on Friday evening, Armon was at his mother’s house where the pair ate the dinner Armon had brought with him.
An argument began and Armon became angry when his mother mentioned his previous relationships and lifestyle.
He went to the laundry and got a large crowbar he had been using earlier in the day.
As his mother walked away from him, with her back to him, he used the tool to strike her in the head.
Sheehan fell, hitting the kitchen cupboards as she went down on the floor, her head bleeding from the large cut on the back of her head.
As she lay on her back, face up and conscious, Sheehan looked at her son, said “s**t” and put her hands up to her face to defend herself as the crowbar came down on her head a second time.
Aware she was still alive, Armon then grabbed a carving knife from a container on the kitchen bench.
Standing over her, he watched his mother take her last breath, having stabbed her four times in the chest, with sufficient force that the blade went into her heart and left lung.
When she was no longer breathing, Armon dragged his mother into the bathroom, so no one could see her lying on the kitchen floor.
He then went outside and smoked a cigarette on the back doorstep before trying to clean up.
Armon wiped down blood in the kitchen, placed the knife in the kitchen sink and threw the crowbar under a bed, before leaving the house and arriving back at his place just after 9pm.
At 8.15am the following Monday, Armon turned up at the Blenheim Police Station and said, “I think I need to speak to someone. I have murdered someone”.
He told an officer he had killed his mother in her home and that she was “on the floor in the bathroom”.
When spoken to further, Armon confessed he had hit his mother on the back of the head twice with the crowbar and then stabbed her in the chest.
He said his mother had “started swearing at him, calling him names and running him down”, which triggered him.
He said he “got real angry real quick and just snapped and totally lost the plot”.
