Man who butchered his wife, three children, mother-in-law and spent 6 days with their bodies sentenced to life in prison
A Western Australian man was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole on Friday, 19 July, after he pleaded guilty to killing his wife, three young children and mother-in-law last year. The man also lived with the corpses for six days before surrendering himself to the police.
Anthony Robert Harvey, 25, was convicted of killing his two-year-old twins Alice and Beatrix, three-year-old Charlotte and their mother Mara, 41, using a knife and a blunt object at their Bedford home in Perth, on September 3, 2018.
He proceeded to murder his wife's mother, Beverley Ann Quinn, 73, who visited the family the next day.
Some of the details of Harvey's crimes were deemed so gruesome that they were not released by the court.
During his sentencing hearing, the court was told that Harvey struck his wife of three years on the head with a pipe and stabbed her 12 times with a newly-bought big knife because he wanted to quickly "finish" her off. She was killed in the kitchen. The children were killed in the other rooms of the house with a smaller knife, officials said.
Hours after murdering his family, Harvey-- who owned a franchise of lawn-mowing service Jim's Mowing-- was said to have left the house to complete two jobs, as if nothing had happened. Six days after living with the dead bodies, Harvey finally handed himself to police on September 9, 2018.
While handing down his sentence, the judge said that the sentence was justified as no other case that was "truly comparable."
"Your actions were so far beyond the bounds... they would instill horror and revulsion in the most hardened of people," he added. "This is the place they should have been the safest. They should have been able to trust their father to protect them. That's the most fundamental duty any parent has."
According to his friends, Harvey was not happy when his first child was born.
"Anthony didn't handle the responsibility of being the breadwinner well and hated that the baby took up so much time," one of his friends was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail. "He didn't really want to be a dad."
While his wife planned for a larger family, he started maintaining a journal, where he expressed his desire to embrace his "darkness and animal instincts."
"I am no psycho. I feel. I feel too much, I always have … I will regret what I do," he wrote in the journal, which was an account of how he planned the murders.
Things got worse with the birth of the twins. His business began to slow down as he was forced to take time off work to take care of his expanding family.
"They had a big cushion as Mara saved a lot and was very frugal, but the babies were expensive and the business didn't do well because he never wanted to work, and she had the baby to look after," friends said, adding that Harvey was was drinking heavily and spending $300 a week on his marijuana and meth habit.