Women the targets of all ACT murder, attempted murder investigations last year

So as ACT police repeatedly claim that the national capital is one of the safest places to live and work, the most heinous of crimes they investigated were most unusually gender-skewed. The ACT, like Tasmania, has the lowest murder rates in the country but for all victims to be female is very unusual.

Across the rest of the country, male victims outnumber female by more than two to one.

For example the National Homicide Monitoring Program reported that in 2020-21 there were 152 male murder victims and 69 female.

The alleged murder in July last year of 92-year-old Jean Morley by her husband Donald at the couple's family home in Fisher revealed that age, too, is no discriminator. The accused is believed to be the oldest person charged with murder in ACT criminal history.

The couple had been married for 69 years. In a sad revelation to the court, it appears that Mrs Morley had experienced dementia for at least the last year of her life and a note left by the accused read "we were both afraid of the future".

Family violence was the court classification placed on the file of 70-year-old Van Thanh Vu, who is accused of stabbing to death 65-year-old Thi Thuy Huong Nguyen, at the family home on Kinloch Circuit, Bruce, on October 23.

The couple's daughter found her mother dead in the kitchen. Vu, yet to face court, had his charges read at a hospital bedside hearing where was treated for injuries to his wrists.

Such is the protracted nature of evidence-gathering, investigation and court hearings into serious crime that it wasn't until December this year that a sentence was handed down in arguably one of the territory's most brutal attempted murder family violence cases of recent years.

In late September 2022, 53-year-old Daryl Robertson viciously attacked and injured a woman in a Charnwood home.

Passers-by heard screams for help as the victim ran into the backyard. On a Priority One response, police rushed to the home where they found the woman had been stabbed 11 times in the body, face and neck with a carving knife.

The perpetrator had also used several aerosol cans and pages of newspaper as makeshift torches to inflict burns to 21 per cent of her body.

Attending police first thought a blowtorch had been used in the attack until Robertson admitted otherwise. The victim required hospital treatment for a year, together with seven surgeries.

In December last year, almost 15 months after the attack described by the case prosecutor as "sustained and torturous", Robertson was sentenced to 27 years in prison.

It was one of the longest prison terms imposed in the ACT since Marcus Rappel was locked away for 32 years and four months for the brutal axe murder of his partner Tara Costigan in Calwell in February 2015.

Two young female students at the ANU suffered traumatic stab injuries in a politically charged debate around the day release of alleged offender, 24-year-old Alex Ophel from a secure mental facility in September.

Ophel had been signed out from the Gawanggal Mental Health Unit in Bruce on September 22. He was reported missing about 15 minutes after the first emergency call was received about the alleged attack near Fellows Oval.

Ophel has been charged with two counts of attempted murder, two counts of assault and one count of possessing an object to be used to kill.

In an effort to quell the concerns of the victims' parents and ANU staff, ACT chief psychiatrist Dinesh Arya is reviewing the circumstances leading up to the incident. Canberra Health Services is not committing to the report's full release, citing "strict privacy of protected information".

Then, in the week before Christmas, 29-year-old Tshewang Choden was stabbed to death, with her body found in the commercial kitchen of the National Zoo and Aquarium.

Co-worker and sous chef in the kitchen Jude Wijesinghe, from Oaks Estate, has been charged with her murder. He had pleaded not guilty and will appear in court in April.