KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia-born former nurse and the man she paid $3,000 to have her ex-boyfriend's private parts and tongue severed were sentenced to five years in prison.
Karen Kaur Warburton, 50, was sentenced in North Queensland's Cairns District Court, Australia on Tuesday after pleading guilty to one count of attempting to procure grievous bodily harm and one count of attempting to procure a malicious act with intent.
She was given a five-year prison sentence, which was suspended for 16 months, in relation to her attempt to ensure that her ex-partner, Queensland Police Inspector Don McKay, would "never walk or talk again."
Judge Joshua Treviño KC said Warburton's actions could "only be described as cold and calculated", as reported by the Courier Mail.
"The seriousness in your offending is to be found not in the fact that no harm ultimately came to the complainant but rather that you made such plans in the first place.
"You had multiple opportunities to reassess, to stop, to go no further with your plans. But you didn't do that," the judge said.
Warburton studied nursing in the United Kingdom before immigrating to Australia with her former husband in 2007.
The court heard Warburton suffered a string of distressing life events, including the murder of her sister in Germany quickly followed by the deaths of her pets, which saw her turn to alcohol abuse.
Judge Treviño acknowledged the tragedies and alcohol consumption fuelled her "descent into serious criminality".
He found there was a low-risk of Warburton reoffending.
Warburton and McKay were partners from March 2020 but had a breakup in early 2021.
Between April 1 and Oct 6 in 2021, Warburton had hired a local man – Andrew Bown – to harm her former partner to whom she had provided him his photographs and address.
The court heard that Bown had carried out several attempts to harm McKay.
In one incident, another man Bown had recruited had sprayed McKay's home with lighter fluid and set it on fire, resulting in $20,000 worth of damage.
Their plot was unraveled in 2021 when an undercover police officer started messaging Warburton about her plan to attack McKay on an encrypted service.
"The (officer) suggested the severing of (Mckay's) spinal cord as well as the breaking of multiple bones in his body.
"No doubt drawing on her medical expertise to some degree, the defendant provided specific areas of the spine to best give effect to that intention," prosecutor Christian Peters said.
Bown was sentenced to three and a half years imprisonment, suspended after six months, in Nov 2022.
He was charged with arson, attempting to procure a person to do grievous bodily harm on another person, and having a dangerous thing for another person to commit a crime with.