LIFE without parole was the only appropriate sentence for a man who gunned down his girlfriend as she cowered on a neighbour's doorstep, after killing another young woman in similar circumstances decades earlier, a Supreme Court judge has ruled.
Relatives of Tracey Greenbury applauded in the Supreme Court yesterday as Justice Simon Whelan announced her killer would never be released.
As she left court, her mother Pam Greenbury raised her hands in the air, declaring the sentence ''justice for Tracey'', but was quickly overcome.
Her husband Max embraced her as she cried, saying it was ''all over now'' and that Robinson could never hurt anyone again.
Justice Whelan said mother-of-two Ms Greenbury, 33, was ''literally running for her life'' in an effort to escape Leigh Robinson, 62, after an argument outside her Frankston home about 9am on April 28, 2008.
''Your terrified victim posed no threat of any kind to you,'' Justice Whelan said. ''Motivated by annoyance at some aspect of your relationship with her, you chased her down a suburban street in broad daylight, with members of the public in close proximity, carrying a loaded and cocked shotgun.
''When you caught her, you callously shot her in the back of the head as she was attempting to crawl away from you, before the eyes of her petrified neighbour''.
A jury convicted Robinson of murder last September, rejecting his claim that his shotgun accidentally discharged when he went to rescue Ms Greenbury as she fell.
It was his second murder conviction. In 1969, Robinson was sentenced to hang for the murder of Valerie Ethel Dunn, 17, but his sentence was commuted to 30 years' jail by then governor Sir Rohan Delacombe.
Robinson stabbed Ms Dunn, a sales assistant, to death in her Chadstone home in June 1968 when she refused to go out with him.
Clemency for Robinson came in the wake of the campaign to save Ronald Ryan, who in 1967 became the last man to be legally executed in Australia. Max Greenbury was one of those campaigners, and remains opposed to the death penalty.
''He's gone now. He's never going to be released. That's what we wanted,'' Mr Greenbury said yesterday.
Justice Whelan told Robinson: ''After murdering a woman with whom you had been in a relationship when you were young, and after serving a long period of imprisonment for that murder, you have now done essentially the same thing again''.
''Two women who have been in a relationship with you have paid for annoying you in the context of that relationship with their lives''.
Justice Whelan said there was ''a pressing need to permanently protect the community'' from such a man.
Robinson laughed with supporters while waiting to be sentenced, as two young women cried behind him.
Still smiling as he was led away, Robinson was wished ''a long, miserable life'' by Pam Greenbury.
The Age