https://www.news.com.au/national/courts ... c089ebab69
Serial sex sadist to die in jail for murder
6-8 minutes
Serial sex sadist Graham Sales who raped, tortured and degraded women over decades may die in jail after being sentenced for murdering a man and soliciting the shotgun murder of his partner.
Sales, 56, was sentenced to serve consecutive prison sentences, meaning he will not be eligible to apply for parole until November 2052.
Sales’ victim, a woman known as JF, was shot twice by Sales’ own brother with a sawn-off shotgun in a courtroom as she prepared to testify against him at an AVO hearing, but miraculously survived.
The man, Ronald Penn, Sales lured to a lonely spot on a false pretext, tricked him into digging his own grave, striking him with a baseball bat and choking him to death.
Mr Penn’s body was never found.
Sales pleaded guilty in May this year to the two cold case crimes, which happened within weeks of one another in 1995.
He appeared on Wednesday for sentencing via video link from Lithgow prison where is already serving a 36-year sentence for a series of depraved and sadistic sex crimes against different women he raped and degraded.
Graham Thomas Sales was jailed in 2018 for 21 offences against seven women which included raping them with household objects, forcing them to eat their dinner off the floor, hogtying them and putting them face down in the bath.
Six of the victims were in a relationship with Sales and one was the child of one of those women, and he was also convicted of crimes against underage girls and an underage boy.
Sales appeared in the NSW Supreme Court on Wednesday from Lithgow maximum security prison.
His head shaved, sporting a white beard and wearing prison greens he sat in the prison video booth shrugging and making nonchalant remarks as the court endured audio link problems.
Justice Peter Garling read out the grisly details of Sales’ crimes which are linked and occurred within weeks of one another in 1995.
Justice Garling noted that because of Sales’ age and the accumulated length of his sentences he could die in jail.
The first crime was the murder between October 23 and 28, 1995 of Ronald Penn, a 61-year-old rail worker who Sales paid to drive him around because the offender had no licence.
Some time beforehand, Sales had convinced Mr Penn he had found an amount of money buried in bushland and that if Mr Penn helped him dig it up he could have some.
Prior to this, Mr Penn, Sales and Sales’ brother Ross had driven in a vehicle which had followed JF after she had left him.
JF had run away from Sales and reported his serious abuse of her over a lengthy period, and had to move to three different women’s refuges.
Justice Garling said Mr Penn’s murder involved “gratuitous cruelty” partly because of the length of time it took to choke Mr Penn to death with a broken piece of baseball bat.
Mr Penn drove Graham and Ross Sales in his vehicle to an area of scrub, north of North Entrance on the NSW Central Coast.
Sales told Penn to “keep digging deeper and deeper” which he did for several hours.
At one point, Mr Penn was standing in the deep hole with his back to Sales who had collected a baseball bat with which he struck the victim “twice with all his might”, breaking the bat.
After Mr Penn fell screaming in the hole, Sales took a piece of the broken bat and held it to Mr Penn’s neck, slowly choking him until he “eventually stopped moving”.
Sales stripped Mr Penn’s clothing off, filled the hole and then dumped Mr Penn’s car and set it alight.
Before a November 21, 1995 AVO hearing by JF, Sales told his brother Ross that if he didn’t kill her, he would kill him.
JF had been in a relationship with Sales for four years.
Sales made his brother buy a shortened firearm and report to a health centre he had been having homicidal thoughts about a female.
On the day in question, he took the weapon into an alcove of Wyong Court and placed a round and pellets in the chamber.
When JF entered the courtroom he called her name and as she turned to face him, he fired at her, hitting her left hand, wrist, right shoulder and face.
JF was taken into intensive care for operations to remove pellets from her body.
Police arrested Ross Sales, who told them he was hearing voices and having delusions
In 1996, he was found not guilty of attempted murder by reason of mental illness and detained as a forensic patient.
In 2013 and 2014, Ross Sales gave police accounts of Mr Penn’s murder and JF’s attempted murder.
By 2014, Sales was in custody charged with the crimes against women.
He admitted to Penn’s murder and participated in a walk through of bushland where police made extensive excavations, to no avail.
The shooting at Wyong Local Court in 1995 led to the introduction of metal detectors in courts across NSW.
For his earlier sex crimes, Sales pleaded guilty to six counts of sexual and aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping, common assault and two counts of threatening an officer in charge during a fiery outburst in a court witness box.
In that hearing, in which he was described as violent and manipulative, Judge Penelope Wass said “sexual sadistic intercourse” was part of Sales’ “sexual repertoire”.
She also said his actions motivated by “cruelty”.
“The hurt to the victims and thereby the community is insidious, widespread and longstanding,” she said.
On Wednesday, Justice Peter Garling sentenced Sales to a maximum 15 years for Ronald’s Penn’s murder and a maximum 12 years for soliciting the murder of JF.
His Honour said that previously Sales would have been eligible for parole on his sex crimes offences in 2045, while the maximum sentence would not expire until 2051.
However Justice Garling ordered Sales’ new sentences for the crimes of solicit to murder and murder not to commence, respectively, until 2041 and 2044.
With respective non-parole periods of just over seven years and eight-and-a-half years, Sales will not be able to apply for parole until he is 88 years old.
Justice Garling said both crimes involved significant planning but despite their “very high objective seriousness”, Sales had taken full responsibility for his crimes.
He said he had as a child he had been subject to abuse and violence.
candace.sutton@news.com.au
Serial sex sadist to die in jail for murder
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