A Rotorua woman who stabbed her partner 32 times before chopping off her ears and dumping the body will spend at least 17 years in prison.
Gwenda Leigh Sloane, 44, received a life sentence in the Rotorua High Court this afternoon for the murder of Michelle Hoffman-Tamm.
Friends and family of Ms Hoffman-Tamm cried and occassionally left the courtroom during submissions.
Sloane admitted in December to stabbing and mutilating her former lover, before dumping the body 120km away. She had evaded police for more than two weeks and became a suspect when her stories didn’t match.
Ms Hoffman-Tamm visited Sloane on November 7 last year and after drinking beer together, they had sex. But Sloane became angry because, she later admitted, she caught Ms Hoffman-Tamm stealing $20 from her wallet.
Sloane used two knives to stab her 32 times in the chest and back, before cutting Ms Hoffman-Tamm’s throat and mouth.
She severed both of Ms Hoffman-Tamm’s ears and put one of them in her mouth.
The bloodied and mutilated body lay on the kitchen floor for more than a day while Sloane finished the remaining beer.
She then turned her attention to disposing the body, buying rubbish bags and duct tape to wrap the body with, before driving to a site near Murupara and burying Ms Hoffman-Tamm in rubbish and dirt.
Upon her return, Sloane hired a carpet cleaning machine and cleaned the blood from the house, ditching the cleaning products in a rubbish bag on a neighbouring street.
Police say Ms Hoffman-Tamm’s body might never have been found if Sloane hadn’t shown them where she dumped it.
3 News
source: newshub archive
