When divorced mother-of-two Lindy Yvonne Williams met her "knight in shining armour" George Gerbic, she pictured them spending their twilight years together.
A few years later, she hacked off his head, hands and legs with a saw.
Williams has been handed a 20-year jail term for murdering her de facto partner, chopping up his body, and dumping and torching his headless torso on the side of a road in September 2013.
It's not known how she killed Mr Gerbic, but a jury found her guilty on Friday of murder, rejecting her defence that she'd accidentally killed him while trying to defend herself from his abuse.
It took jurors a day to find she had committed the gruesome crime, and then spent the following 10 months lying to cover it up.
Williams told her slain lover's friends and family that he was de-stressing on an overseas trip, and then used his email and phone accounts to send them messages so they'd think he was still alive.
In truth, she'd gone to Bunnings, bought an electric saw, and chopped up his body.
She then wrapped his torso in plastic and a towel, used rope to secure it, and dumped it 80km from his Sunshine Coast home, on Cedar Pocket Road, near Gympie.
There, she set his remains alight before driving off and living her life as normal until July 2014 when police came looking for Mr Gerbic.
"What I found most distressing was the lies you told to George Gerbic's parents," Justice Peter Flanagan said in sentencing Williams to a mandatory minimum life sentence for murder.
"The act of cutting up George Gerbic with a saw ... is, on any view, a horrific act. It has denied the family the closure that would come from being able to bury their father.
"There was a heartlessness in what you did in lying to George Gerbic's parents, his ex-partners and indeed lying to his friends."
George Gerbic Sr died after his son's killing and the pair have been buried side-by-side. The murdered man's head, hands and arms have not been found.
Williams claimed Mr Gerbic hit his head on a kitchen benchtop after slipping on blood from a cut to her arm he'd inflicted with a steak knife while she tried to defend herself with a bar stool.
She denied cutting up his body, saying she returned home days after the fight to find his torso wrapped in plastic and she had no clue who'd done it.
"I thought he was my knight in shining armour and I was just going to live an honest life with an honest man," Williams told police.
"I miss him to pieces but another part of me, I really hate him because I'm going through this now. I'm sitting here at 56 years of age, never done a thing wrong in my life, facing a murder charge because he wanted to be aggressive."
During the trial, her own defence lawyer Simon Lewis said some of her claims were "rubbish".
But he failed to convince jurors that Mr Gerbic's death was an accident, likely caused by Williams defending herself, and that she got caught up in a web of lies she told after she panicked.
Williams has already spent three years in custody, making her eligible for release in 2034 when she will be 76.
Australian Associated Press
