'Unremarkable' woman strangles friend, dumps body in car park - 26th October 2011

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A Melbourne woman who strangled a friend and dumped her body in a car park has been jailed for 19 years.

Cam Linh Tu, 48, killed Thi Xuan Dung Tran after an argument over money, took her friend’s jewellery and made up a story that two women were responsible for the murder.

Victorian Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Curtain said Tu cut her hair, sold the jewellery, travelled to Sydney and bought a return ticket to Vietnam without telling her son she was going.

Tu was arrested when she returned about a week later and repeated to police the lie she told her sister, that two women killed Ms Tran.

‘‘In fact, you contrived an elaborate and skilful web of lies accompanied by detailed descriptions of what each person did and said to Dung Tran in the course of the struggle between them and Dung Tran, where each of them were standing and grappling with the deceased,’’ Justice Curtain said today.

Tu, of Springvale, later admitted she killed Ms Tran, but maintained her friend started the assault and she acted in self-defence.

On April 24 last year, the pair planned to go to Crown Casino, where they had met six months earlier, but argued and Tu strangled Ms Tran.

She dumped the body at a Springvale car park, where it was found the next morning.

Tu maintained that Ms Tran owed her money, but Justice Curtain said it was Tu who owed the 53-year-old mother of four.

She said the killing was neither planned nor premeditated, but arose from ‘‘a spontaneous escalation of a verbal argument into a deadly physical one’’.

The defence had described the case as ‘‘a very sad commission of the crime of murder by a woman who was otherwise a law-abiding citizen who had led an unremarkable life caring for her son’’.

Tu had spent about six years in a Malaysian refugee camp after leaving Vietnam before she and her son came to Australia as refugees in 1995.

A jury found Tu guilty of murder.

Justice Curtain jailed Tu, who pleaded guilty to two counts of obtaining property by deception, for 19 years with a 15-year minimum.

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