All the while, prosecutors said, Sam had been having an affair with Kamalasanan, who she'd known for years. Kamalasanan had left his wife and child back in India and moved to Melbourne in the middle of 2013. “Both Sofia Sam and Arun Kamalasanan had a motive to kill Sam Abraham. They both wanted to be together,” Prosecutor Kerri Judd QC had told the trial. Arun Kamalasanan The court heard a $3 diary became an outlet for the couple to profess their love: “Hug me tight, hold me rude. I am here for you. Miss you, dear,” Sam wrote. “I just need to love you ‘til my last breath, to help you always be yourself,” Kamalasanan wrote back.

“I won’t be enjoying my life until I get a life to love with you.” Their love was more than just words, the trial heard, with Sam and Kamalasanan opening a joint bank account more than a year before Mr Abraham was murdered. At the family home in Epping on October 14, 2015, Sam claimed she awoke from the bed she had been sleeping in with her husband and son to find Mr Abraham, described by Ms Sam’s sisters as a loving family man, dead. She said she thought he'd suffered a heart attack and her wails could be heard in the background in a distressing triple-0 call played to the jury. Sam Abraham, pictured with his wife Sofia Sam.

But at the heart of the prosecution case against Sam was apparent implausibility that she could have been unaware that her husband, in bed beside her, had been poisoned. Loading “It beggars belief that Sofia Sam could have slept through the course of her husband’s death,” Ms Judd said. “This would not have been a quiet death.” Sam and Kamalasanan were not arrested until almost a year later, after homicide squad detectives laid a sophisticated trap which, for the most part, cannot be published by order of the court.

What can be detailed is that the couple were placed under surveillance and police recorded secret meetings between the pair. Just five months after the death, Mr Abraham’s car was transferred into the name of Kamalasanan. In a conversation with an undercover officer, Kamalasanan would also make admissions that he had killed Mr Abraham, claiming he put sleeping pills in an avocado shake and poison in orange juice. The fact Mr Abraham had been poisoned with cyanide, the trial was told, was only known at that time by police and the Coroner’s Court. Arun Kamalasanan is led into court. Credit:Jason South He also told the officer Sam didn't know about his murderous act, though prosecutors said he was trying to protect her. And Kamalasanan’s lawyer Patrick Tehan QC argued his client - an isolated man with money problems - had made-up the admissions, trying to big-note himself to win approval.

“He’s like a lonely kid in a playground that tells others his father’s an astronaut in order to be accepted,” Mr Tehan told the jury. When Kamalasanan and Sam were arrested, they denied their involvement in the murder, with Ms Sam telling investigators she had made her husband an avocado shake and orange juice before he went to bed. And, despite the diary and bank account, they denied their relationship was anything but a close friendship. Kamalasanan told police, which Sam repeated in her interview, that his love for her was unreciprocated. Sofia Sam led into court by a prison guard during the trial. Credit:Joe Armao Sam’s barrister Justin Hannerbery had told the jury there was a “vacuum of evidence” against his client. There was no direct evidence that she wanted to kill her husband, nor was the proposition she wanted to leave him for another man a strong enough motive for traumatising their six-year-old son.