DETECTIVES investigating the murder of Stockton grandmother Stacey Klimovitch were speaking to the suspected hitman in the cells at Queanbeyan police station when he said something interesting.
It was November 30, 2021 and Jason Paul Hawkins had just been charged with murder over the execution-style killing and handed a police fact sheet that named him as the hired gunman who shot Mrs Klimovitch dead at her front door in Queen Street some five months earlier.
And while professing his innocence, claiming the facts were "bullshit" and he was being set up, Hawkins asked detectives if he would get a discount on his sentence if he told the truth about what happened that night.
"Everyone who pleads guilty gets a discount," a detective told Hawkins. "The other discount depends on how much you help us. Every situation is different so I can't give you a definite answer."
It was then that Hawkins let his guard down for a moment.
"If you get in writing that I will do no more than 15 years," Hawkins told the detective, who quickly made it clear there was no way he could guarantee that.
Hawkins never did a deal, did not plead guilty or assist police in any way and will not receive a discount on his sentence when it is handed down next year.
But the fact that at that early stage he shifted from being shocked and appalled at being charged with murder, vehemently claiming that police had the wrong man to even briefly entertaining the idea of "telling the truth" and doing a deal if he could guarantee avoiding a possible life sentence may have proved compelling to a jury.
If he was, in fact, innocent and this was all a set-up then why do a deal and serve 15 years in jail, Crown prosecutor Brett Hatfield, SC, may have argued.
But the jury in Hawkins' recent murder trial never heard that conversation.
While the exchange was taken down in detective's notes and statements, it was not recorded electronically by police because they said they had "no idea" Hawkins wanted to speak about the investigation when they went to see him in the cells after his court appearance.
Prosecutors in the murder trial still wanted to the jury to hear it, but defence barrister Benjamin Bickford objected and it was ultimately ruled inadmissible by Justice Peter Hamill, who found there was no reasonable excuse for the failure to record the conversation.
In the end, the jury didn't need to hear the exchange in the cells, they convicted Hawkins of murder based on the other evidence in the case anyway.
The jury found Hawkins was the gunman who had shot Mrs Klimovitch at the behest of her former son-in-law, drug dealer Stuart Campbell.
Campbell, who organised the murder over an ugly dispute with Mrs Klimovitch, was charged with murder but died before facing trial.
A third man, Stephen Garland, was found not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter after driving Hawkins to and from Stockton on the night of the murder.
In his case, the jury were left with some doubt he was part of the plot to murder Mrs Klimovitch, but found he knew something criminal was going to happen the night the pair crossed the Stockton bridge. He will also be sentenced next year.
