‘Victory, at long last victory,’ says NSW woman whose conviction for soliciting the murder of her former husband was quashed in 2005

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Twenty-six years to the day after Roseanne Beckett was arrested for trying to kill her husband, she has been awarded $2.3m plus costs for malicious prosecution.

Roseanne Beckett, formerly Roseanne Catt, was released from jail in 2001 after serving most of her 12-year sentence for soliciting the murder of her former husband, Barry Catt.

Her conviction was quashed in 2005 by the court of criminal appeal following a judicial inquiry into allegations she was framed.

After years of legal arguments she has successfully sued the state of NSW, with Justice Ian Harrison on Monday awarding her more than $2.3m plus legal costs.

“Victory, at long last victory,” said Beckett, who was in tears after the judgment was handed down.

“I have been going to bed with it for 26 years. I have woken up with it for 26 years. I have had nightmares.”

During a hearing on the matter last year, Beckett told the court that she first met Detective Sergeant Peter Thomas, the man who would later prosecute her, in 1983. He was investigating a fire at her delicatessen business in Taree, on the state’s mid-north coast, in late 1983.

Thomas, she said, began making a series of unwanted “suggestive” comments.

In one instance, Beckett said, Thomas had insisted she listen to the song Islands in the Stream, which includes the lyrics, “All this love we feel needs no conversation”.

“He told me it could be his and my song,” Beckett recalled in 2014.

When she lodged a series of complaints with the police force about Thomas’s alleged misconduct, Beckett says she was harassed and eventually charged with arson – a case that never proceeded.

In 1987, she married local panelbeater Barry Catt, whom she said was a friend of Thomas.

In 1989, when Catt was facing charges of his own, she said, Thomas began investigating her.

Harrison found on Monday that the evidence established that Thomas harboured an intense dislike for Beckett and that the fallout from the delicatessen fire was the cause of it.

“Detective Thomas utilised the legal system in a way that did not secure justice but perverted it,” he found.