Weeks after marrying her soul mate, Grace Wilson received a phone call that changed her life forever.
“The man I married nine weeks ago was stabbed, that’s a phone call no wife wants to receive,” she said, in a statement read by her mother Barbara, to the Supreme Court on Monday.
“We were on such a high from getting married and that all came crashing down.”
Ms Wilson, 25, was left a single mother when her husband Dylan Bond, 26, was murdered and his brother Heath seriously injured in Geelong in April 2021.
The morning after his death, their 17-month-old son picked up Dylan’s work boots and searched their Geelong home for him.
“He kept searching for his dad to play with him,” she said.
The Bond brothers’ mother wept as she described being taken into a family room at hospital to be informed one of her sons was in surgery and the other was dead.
“I started to feel I too had left my body and I was looking down at myself screaming, shaking and crying uncontrollably,” Fiona Hollowood told the court.
“My head could not cope, I had just been told I had lost one son and now I may lose another.”
She showed the court a photo of Heath’s injuries, and turned around to face her son’s killer, Ashley Feetham.
“That’s what you did,” she said, pointing at the image.
After a 12-day trial in October, a jury found Feetham guilty of murder and intentionally causing serious injury.
He faced a pre-sentence hearing on Monday, where more than a dozen emotional statements from Dylan’s family and friends were read out.
Feetham repeatedly stabbed Dylan and Heath during a brawl at his girlfriend’s Geelong home, amid a romantic dispute.
Heath’s fiancee, Abbey Sexton, had an affair with Feetham and the pair began a relationship after she had broken up with him.
About two weeks after the break-up, Feetham and Ms Sexton were out when Heath caught wind his ex was nearby and met up with her.
Feetham interrupted their conversation and the men started fighting.
After the brawl, messages were exchanged on Facebook between Feetham and Heath’s older brother Dylan, who said “let’s sort it” and arranged to go to Ms Sexton’s house.
On April 26, 2021, Heath walked around the side of the house and yelled out “Ash”, opening the sliding door.
Feetham ran towards Heath and stabbed him with a large kitchen knife, before Dylan jumped in and tried to restrain Feetham.
But Feetham then turned on Dylan, stabbing him multiple times including a large fatal wound to his chest.
Feetham fled with his sister, after she hit the wounded Bond brothers with a metal rake, and Feetham’s mother drove him to hospital.
Dylan died at the scene and Heath, who lost 1.5 litres of blood, survived after undergoing emergency surgery and spending days in intensive care.
Feetham claims he picked up a knife and stabbed the brothers out of “excessive self-defence”.
The hearing before Justice Stephen Kaye continues.
