A 13-year-old girl has told a court an Irish backpacker who stabbed her abusive fiancé to death with a kitchen knife is ‘pure evil’.
Cathrina ‘Tina’ Cahill, 27, stabbed fiancé and father-of-four David Walsh, 29, to death inside their Sydney home just five weeks after he proposed on New Year’s Eve 2016.
The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said in a moving victim impact statement read to court that the ‘hate’ she has for Tina Cahill ‘turns (her) stomach’.
‘Hearing your name, seeing your face, it’s just horrible,’ the girl wrote, according to news.com.au.
‘If it happened to you … How would you feel? I don’t think you’d feel, because you don’t have a heart you don’t care, but I do, we do. I hope you rot in hell Tina Cahill.’
Cathrina ‘Tina’ Cahill (pictured) has told a judge she did not leave her ‘controlling and fairly unpleasant’ fiance as she loved him dearly
Cahill told her sentence hearing on Tuesday she believed Mr Walsh (pictured together left and right) every time he said he would change
During the same sentencing hearing in the New South Wales Supreme Court on Tuesday, a tearful Cahill said she only stayed with the ‘controlling and fairly unpleasant’ man because she loved him dearly.
‘I was in fear of getting in more trouble from David if I told the truth,’ she said after the court heard she had applied for an AVO to protect her from Mr Walsh in 2015.
‘He would call me a rat and a dog.’
Cahill’s father Daniel,who flew into Sydney from Ireland with wife Rita, told the court his daughter was a ‘brilliant’ person who was ‘never’ violent or aggressive.
During an earlier hearing, the court heard from Mr Walsh’s ex-girlfriend and the mother of three of his four children.
In an impassioned victim impact statement, Caroline O’Brien wrote how Cahill’s diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder was offensive to Mr Walsh’s bereaved family.
‘To say you have PTSD is a joke, you are a joke,’ she wrote in the statement read to the New South Wales Supreme Court.
‘Murder is murder to us and that will always be your title.’
Cahill stabbed fiance David Walsh (the couple are pictured together) once in the neck in the early hours of February 18, 2017
The parents of Cathrina Cahill, Rita Cahill (left) and Daniel Cahill (right), arrive for her sentence hearing at the New South Wales Supreme Court on Tuesday
Cahill has pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of her 29-year-old fiance.
She stabbed Mr Walsh once in the neck in the early hours of February 18, 2017, at the Padstow, Sydney south-west, home they shared with two other Irish nationals during an argument following a night of drinking.
The court heard that Cahill had returned to her Padstow address with two friends and a man they had met at the pub when Walsh confronted the man and the two got into a violent brawl.
Cahill then went to the kitchen drawer where she grabbed a large knife and stabbed Walsh, who began to ‘bleed profusely with blood coming out of (his) mouth.’
He then was given a tea towel to stop the bleeding by one of the witnesses before asking them to call an ambulance and walking outside where he collapsed.
He was pronounced dead at the scene by emergency services.
Cahill was originally charged with murder, but the Crown accepted her plea to the less serious charge on the basis of substantial impairment due to an abnormality of the mind at the time.
She will be sentenced on December 13.
Cahill said she stayed with Mr Walsh (pictured) as ‘I loved him very dearly’ and he did have some good features