Killer who stabbed ex-girlfriend 78 times jailed for 22 years

A killer who stabbed his ex-girlfriend 78 times while on parole has been jailed for 22 years and six months.

Newcastle Supreme Court Justice Richard Weinstein said Tyrone Thompson’s brutal murder of mother-of-one Mackenzie Anderson, 21, was a frenzied attack of such ferocity that one of the two knives he used snapped.

Justice Weinstein said the Crown submitted that the seriousness of the crime was aggravated by previous domestic violence in the relationship, Anderson’s fear of Thompson and her attempts to end the relationship, which he refused to accept.

The judge noted Anderson’s family had been shattered by her murder and left with feelings of helplessness, despair and anger.

Anderson’s loss would profoundly impact her family forever and her death at such a young age was “every parent’s nightmare”, he said.

But the judge also said Thompson’s significant mental health issues, the domestic violence he suffered as a child at the hands of his violent, schizophrenic, drug-addled father, his difficult schooling and exposure to drugs had diminished his moral culpability.

While jailing Thompson for 22 years and six months, with a non-parole period of 15 years and six months, for murder on Friday, Justice Weinstein said he found Thompson intended to kill Anderson when he first started stabbing her.

Thompson, 25, watched the sentencing via audiovisual link from prison instead of facing his victim’s grieving family in court.

Thompson, who stabbed Anderson 78 times with two kitchen knives over two minutes in March 2022, had been due to stand trial for murder before pleading guilty earlier in April.

In a letter of remorse to the judge, Thompson – who was diagnosed with a complex post-traumatic stress disorder and severe personality disorder but was not considered psychotic – claimed the pair had struggled with a knife and when his hand was cut “something inside me lost control”.

Anderson’s mother, Tabitha Acret, had told the court how her daughter must have suffered a “fear no human should ever know” on the night she was murdered and had been convinced Thompson would kill her after being paroled.

Thompson and Anderson had been involved in an on-again, off-again relationship, marred by domestic violence, since late 2019.

He was jailed in October 2021 for assaulting Anderson, intimidating her and destroying her property before being released on parole on March 9, 2022.

Thompson, who ignored an apprehended domestic violence order banning him from contacting Anderson, killed her 16 days later after breaking into her apartment in the Newcastle suburb of Mayfield.

Acret ran sobbing from the courtroom after the sentence was handed down and collapsed on the floor outside.

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