The lover of socialite Maureen Boyce has been jailed for life after a jury found him guilty of stabbing her to death in a jealous rage.
Thomas Lang, a retired doctor, was convicted in less than two hours on Tuesday after an 11-day trial for the grisly murder on October 22, 2015.
The 68-year-old former model was found in her Kangaroo Point home with a cooking knife so deeply embedded in her stomach she was impaled to the bed.
Socialite Maureen Boyce was found in her Kangaroo Point home with a cooking knife so deeply embedded in her stomach she was impaled to the bed
Her lover Thomas Lang was sentenced to life in jail for stabbing her to death in a jealous rage on October 22, 2015
She was stabbed four or five times with such force that part of the 32cm knife’s handle was driven inside her body.
Lang, who was staying in her apartment, claimed he went to sleep about 11pm and found her dead when he woke up in the morning.
He said the socialite who was bipolar with a history of depression, became distressed, threw her phone over the balcony and later committed suicide.
Lang said the cause of her distress was prospective buyers didn’t make an offer for her $3.7 million luxury penthouse, but the jury didn’t believe him.
A post-mortem showed she could not have killed herself and ruled the most probable cause of death was murder.
Lang must serve at least 10 years before he is eligible for parole.
During the 1960s and 1970s Ms Boyce was one of Australia’s ‘top models’, according to one of her contemporaries – going by her maiden name, Maureen Madden.
The pair had an on-and-off affair for 40 years and prosecutor David Meredith argued he killed her because she would leave her husband for him.
They met in the 1980s when Ms Boyce was modelling in the U.S. and Lang was a young doctor in Texas.
When she returned to Australia to be with her husband Graham, she later claimed her first son Zachary was Lang’s offspirng, not his.
They most recently restarted the affair in 2013 when Lang was working in New Zealand and regularly visited her – as he was on the night of her death.