ELIJAH Cage was the mastermind.
He came up with the plan to rob a drug dealer, focused the target on 45-year-old mid-level methamphetamine supplier David King and brought a loaded firearm to a drug rip that ended with Mr King being shot in the back of the head at close range as he tried desperately to flee, speeding away down a quiet suburban street in Salt Ash on the afternoon of August 29, 2021.
But who was the shooter?
Prosecutors had said it was Max Vincent Lowcock, the other man convicted of Mr King's murder, who had jumped into the backseat at the very last moment before the car took off and then, shortly after Mr King had been shot and his car had careered into a tree, emerged holding a firearm.
But Justice Dina Yehia said on Friday she was unable to be certain that Lowcock was the shooter and could not definitively determine which of the two men had pulled the trigger.
"There are occasions where it is not possible to make a finding... either because of the absence of evidence or due to the unreliability of evidence," Justice Yehia said. "This is a case where I am unable to make a finding as to the identity of the shooter. "I am certainly unable to find that it was Mr Lowcock who was the shooter."
A third man, Tyson Stamp, acquitted of murder after a directed verdict during a trial earlier this year, made the best decision of his life not getting into Mr King's car before the robbery and shooting.
Otherwise, he might have been found guilty of murder on the basis of extended joint criminal enterprise and found himself alongside Cage and Lowcock again, spending the next decade plus behind bars.
Cage - who plotted the sham drug transaction, picked Mr King, sourced the murder weapon and then directed Stamp to destroy the getaway car - was on Friday jailed for a maximum of 21 years and six months, with a non-parole period of 14 years and six months.
He will be eligible for parole in 2037.
"These arrangements were a feigned drug transaction," Justice Yehia said. "I am satisfied he had no funds to purchase such a large quantity of methamphetamine."
Justice Yehia said a video, filmed the night before the shooting, which became central to the case, showed Cage was the one who had access to the murder weapon.
Lowcock - who only joined the robbery plot shortly before it was executed - was jailed for a maximum of 20 years, with a non-parole period of 13 years and three months, making him eligible for release in 2036.
"I was unable to find that Mr Lowcock was the shooter," Justice Yehia said. "He did not arrange the feigned drug transaction. "He did not bring the firearm. "He played a lesser role than Mr Cage."
Stamp, who pleaded guilty to torching the hire car used to flee the shooting, received a conviction with no further penalty after he spent more than two years and four months behind bars awaiting trial.
Justice Yehia said Stamp was not acting to destroy evidence but out of a "misguided loyalty" to Cage.
Justice Yehia said both men had been failed by those charged with caring for them.
Mr Lowcock, who was placed in more than 36 foster homes in Queensland during his upbringing, had been "let down in the most appalling way", she said.
