Marlene Parrott finds it hard when her girlfriends share stories about their daughters’ lives.
She likes to hear them, but she doesn’t have any new photos to show or stories to tell.
Ms Parrott was dealt a lifetime of pain and suffering when her 29-year-old daughter, Maddison Jane, was murdered in Geelong in December 2018.
Four years on, Christmas remains a difficult time.
Maddison should be dressing up as Santa’s helper and putting up the Christmas tree with her dad in the special way they had.
Cheese platters and glasses of bubbles with family friends are different, and she’s no longer there for walks on the beach with friends and their dogs.
Her own dogs still wait at the door for her to come home.
Her killer, Nicholas James Cross, 35, faced a pre-sentence hearing in Geelong after a Victorian Supreme Court justice found him guilty of murder on Friday.
“Mr Cross maintains his innocence,” his lawyer Glenn Casement said.
It’s not an aggravating feature of the crime that Cross still blames another person for the crime, he said, but added that it supports the point Cross is “utterly remorseless”.
Cross fatally shot Maddison in the forehead with a rifle held at point blank range inside a glamping tent at the Geelong Showgrounds on the morning of December 3, 2018.
There’s no motive for the killing, Justice Rita Incerti – who heard Cross’s judge-alone trial – recalled.
Afterwards he turned to Maddison’s partner and apparently apologised, prosecutor David Glynn said.
“The apology was … in the sense of ‘sorry I just killed your girlfriend’, which is a bit different to anything actually approaching remorse,” he said.
“And if Mr Cross did in fact feel any remorse in that moment, he got over it pretty quickly.”
Cross then set fire to the tent in an effort to cover his tracks, burning Maddison’s body inside.
He then tried to pin the crime on her boyfriend, but sent a text to a friend the next day saying “when they get me I’m doing 10yrs min”.
Marlene Parrott said her life fell apart the day Maddison died.
“No day will ever be the same without my beautiful daughter,” she said in a statement read to the court. She signed it “Love mum”.
Every day Dale Parrott kisses a picture of daughter Maddison.
“My counsellor says time will heal. I do not think so,” he said.
In a letter cremated with Maddison, her best friend thanked her for a true and everlasting friendship, for school holidays together, for telling her that sometimes boys weren’t worth her time.
“Thank you for being you,” she wrote of the girl who had been like a sister since they were 12.
Mr Casement said Cross had a childhood marred by substance abuse and domestic violence, but he was unwilling to have details revealed in court.
He said it was in the interest of justice that Cross be rehabilitated, which would in turn protect the community.
“The hope and expectation of our system is he comes out (of prison) a reformed man,” he said.
Cross will be sentenced at a later date.
