A hitman who shot dead a grandmother as she answered her front door as a favour to his drug dealer boss has been jailed for 32 years.
Newcastle Supreme Court Justice Peter Hamill on Friday described the shooting of Stacey Klimovitch at her home as a “premeditated assassination”.
“In many ways, it was an incomprehensible crime and in every way a callous and brutal one,” Justice Hamill said when sentencing the hitman, Jason Hawkins, to 32 years jail with a minimum of 24 years.
The Canberra man, 48, a father of nine to three women, was found guilty by a jury in December of murdering Mrs Klimovitch, a popular swimming teacher described by her family as a larger-than-life character who was kind, caring, protective, funny and loud, just after 8pm on June 9, 2021.
Getaway driver Stephen Garland, 66, a former Nomads bikie gang member, was found not guilty of murder in a separate trial but guilty of manslaughter after he claimed not to know about the murder plot. He was jailed for eight-and-a-half years with a minimum of four-and-a-half years.
The mastermind behind the murder, drug dealer Stuart Campbell, was arrested and charged but killed himself in prison last March.
Campbell had hated Mrs Klimovitch, the mother of his ex-partner Alex, and threatened to “do her in” before recruiting Hawkins to kill her.
Justice Hamill on Friday said the “truly senseless murder” had devastated her family and the wider community.
The judge said it was worth noting Campbell’s hatred of Mrs Klimovitch which led him to set in train “this crazy and tragic course of events” was caused by her instinct to protect her daughter Alex and her newborn grandson.
Campbell had been in a dysfunctional relationship with Alex and was ultimately excluded from their son’s birth in March 2021 and not named as the father on the child’s birth certificate.
When Alex was in hospital after giving birth, Campbell went to their home in the Newcastle suburb of Argenton and kicked in the front screen door before going to the back of the house and destroying the garden, stomping on plants and kicking things over.
The relationship between Campbell and Alex continued to deteriorate and she decided to move in with her mother at Stockton.
Mrs Klimovitch told a friend she would not let Campbell near her daughter and the baby, and “would protect them at all costs”.
The grandmother told family and friends she hated Campbell because of the influence he had over her daughter.
“This type of wanton violence cannot be tolerated in a civilised society,” Justice Hamill said.
The judge said Campbell had been a secretive, manipulative man who had the capacity to use people to do his bidding.
The reality was only Campbell and Hawkins knew how he had been convinced to murder Mrs Klimovitch.
The judge could not accept Hawkins did what he did out of a sense of misguided loyalty, believing it was either the promise of drugs or for a debt he owed Campbell.
Justice Hamill was not sure he could call the murder a contract killing but it was a cold-blooded execution of a person Hawkins had never met.
“This was no spontaneous offence, this was a premeditated assassination,” the judge said.
He said Mrs Klimovitch had been entitled to feel safe and secure in her own home and an aggravating feature of the murder was how her daughter, Alex, had been nursing her infant son inside the house at the time of the shooting.
