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A man who slit the throat of his lover and then slashed his own spinal cord rendering himself a quadriplegic has died of sepsis while serving a prison sentence, a coroner has revealed.
Michael James Quinn, 31, was serving a maximum of 20 years for fatally stabbing Cherie Vize in Wollongong when he died at Prince of Wales Hospital, in Sydney’s east, on April 1, 2020.
His death was kept hidden for more than a year with deputy state coroner Carmel Forbes on Wednesday telling the Coroners Court he died of natural causes – in the first known development in the case in years.
Forbes said Quinn had died from sepsis with the underlying conditions ‘urosepsis and pneumonia as a result of C3 incomplete tetraplegia’, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Michael James Quinn (pictured), 31, was serving a maximum of 20 years for fatally stabbing Cherie Vize in Wollongong when he died at Prince of Wales Hospital, in Sydney’s east, on April 1, 2020
Quinn died from sepsis with the underlying conditions of urosepsis and pneumonia as a result of C3 incomplete tetraplegia at The Prince of Wales Hospital
The coronial findings, published on Wednesday, labelled the incident leading to his imprisonment as ‘both tragic and traumatic’.
Howard Mullen, who was assisting the coroner, said Quinn suffered a ‘catastrophic injury’ while attempting to take his own life after he stabbed Vize in the neck outside his family home in July 2013.
Quinn was found guilty of Vize’s murder in a judge-alone trial in 2016.
In his trial, the court heard he attacked Vize in the front yard of his Wollongong family home before turning the knife on himself, in July 2013, leaving him quadriplegic.
‘Ms Vize was a peaceful person. Her passing has caused much sadness to her family and friends,’ NSW Supreme Court Justice Robert Beech-Jones said following a month-long trial.
Quinn became enraged after finding out Ms Vize was seeing another man she had met on an online dating site.
Quinn killed his lover Cherie Vize in the front yard of the home he shared with his family in Farmborough Heights, Wollongong, in 2013
Quinn became enraged after finding out Ms Vize was seeing another man she had met on an online dating site
He killed her in the front yard of the home he shared with his family in Farmborough Heights, Wollongong, in 2013.
The Crown alleged he deliberately tried to cause Ms Vize at least grievous bodily harm after seeing a message she sent to another man about the morning-after pill.
In a walk-through with police a few days after the killing, Quinn’s mother Joanne said she was folding clothes inside when she heard Ms Vize asking her son what he was doing, the court heard.
She said she saw the pair struggling when she walked outside to investigate.
‘There was something in her voice that I thought, ‘what’s going on?’,’ Mrs Quinn told the court.
‘I knew she looked fearful and she didn’t want him there so I tried to get between them but he was just too strong and by then I saw the blood,’ she added.
Mrs Quinn said she had blood on her hands, arms, stomach and face by the time paramedics arrived, desperately attempting to apply pressure to the woman’s punctured neck.
‘Cherie was bleeding from the neck so I put my hand on her neck,’ Ms Quinn told police in a recorded interview played in court.
‘This isn’t my blood,’ she had earlier told police when they first arrived.
An artist’s sketch shows Quinn (left) in the NSW Supreme Court during the verdict in 2016
Her son had collapsed on the front lawn and was complaining that he couldn’t feel his hands or legs by the time Mrs Quinn went to see him, the court heard.
‘He asked a police officer to shoot him to be done with it,’ she said in the video played to the court. ‘I told him to shut up.’
The court heard a knife was still lodged in Quinn’s neck when he was first put in an ambulance but fell out on the way to hospital.
The defence argued that Quinn, who was on medication for obsessive compulsive disorder, did not mean to kill or cause grievous bodily harm when he inflicted the five wounds to Ms Vize’s neck.
His barrister Janet Manuell SC told Justice Beech-Jones he could find the man guilty of manslaughter if he found his mental capacity was substantially impaired at the time.
‘It’s Mr Quinn’s position that he inflicted the wounds on Ms Vize accidentally in the course of a struggle,’ she said.
In another walk through, Quinn’s brother described screaming at Michael as he stabbed himself in the chest and then began running a knife along his throat.
He said Ms Vize’s eyes were rolling into the back of her head as his mother tried to hold her up.
‘She was gasping,’ he said.