Marlene Locke is forever haunted by the terrifying moment she watched on helplessly as her husband brutally stabbed her daughter Sherelle and the 23-year-old’s life ebbed away in front of her eyes.
Even now, with Raymond John Mead locked up in a Queensland prison for Sherelle’s murder, Ms Locke feels threatened by his vow to harm her.
“He never gives up even by bars,” Ms Locke said.
It was February 2014 that Mead pinned Marlene against the wall as her daughter slowly died.
She and Sherelle had been watching TV and enjoying quiet evening reading catalogues in the living room of Marlene’s Boronia Heights home in southern Brisbane.
At the time, Marlene and her husband Raymond John Mead, who was father to her two youngest children, were having marital problems due to his alcoholism and domestic abuse.
Mead came home at around 11.30pm after a night of drinking, and began rifling through drawers in the kitchen.
Sherelle and Marlene began laughing at something amusing in one of the catalogues and an enraged Mead burst into the room.
Marlene Locke watched on helpless, pinned to the wall by her husband Ray Mead, as she watched her stabbed daughter slowly die in front of her.
A jury would later hear that Mead detested his stepdaughter and openly blamed her for the ongoing problems in his marriage.
Mead had told a neighbour just weeks earlier that if she “stuffed up again”she would “get what’s coming to her”.
“If I could stab Sherelle and get away with it I would,” Mr Mead told the neighbour.
Marlene watched her husband strike Sherelle, and thought he had punched her in the chest.
But as Sherelle looked at her “clutching her body” a horrified Marlene saw the blood and realised it was more serious.
Mead then pinned Marlene against the wall to prevent her from helping Sherelle who collapsed on the floor, screaming that she was bleeding and begging Marlene for help.
Mead, who kept a fierce grip around a sobbing Marlene’s neck for ten minutes until Sherelle fell silent told her that his stepdaughter “deserved it”.
Raymond John Mead exits Logan Police Station after being charged with his stepdaughter Sherelle’s murder. Picture: Tara Croser.
When he finally released her, Marlene dialled triple-0 for her daughter who was very pale, and drenched with her own blood.
When police arrived, Mead tried to tell them Marlene had stabbed her daughter, but they didn’t believe him.
Paramedics worked on Sherelle, but it was too late.
Now Marlene Locke has launched a gofundme.com page, to raise money to change the names of her two young children.
“Due to my 2 small children having the same surname as my murdering ex-husband I am trying to raise funds to get their names changed so they don't have to grow up with a murderer’s surname,” she said on the page.
“I am also changing their names and mine for safety reasons.
“Please help me keep my children and myself safe from being found by changing our names.”
Sherelle, who had three young children of her own, had urged her mother to leave the abusive relationship with Mead, who she had married in 2008.
But Marlene had a young daughter and son with Mead, and the controlling man had taken over the household finances and shut her off from family and friends
At one point she left him, took out a domestic violence order and went to live with daughter Sherelle.
But Mead convinced her to return and she felt powerless.
At his murder trial last year, Mead pleaded guilty to manslaughter and had claimed that he slipped and fell with the knife, accidentally stabbing Sherelle.
During the hearing in the Brisbane Supreme Court, a member of the public made threatening faces to the jury and a woman threw water at a security guard in a corridor of the courthouse.
As the jury delivered its verdict that Mead, 52, was guilty of murder, a woman stormed out of the courtroom shouting“she deserved it”.
Mead was sentenced to life in prison for Sherelle’s murder with the maximum possible non-parole period in the Queensland justice system of 20 years.
He will be 72 years old when he is first eligible for release.
But Marlene Locke is still fearful and believes that if she and her two children are able to change their names, they will be safer from Mead.
“I have been quoted from the lawyers it will cost anywhere between $1000 to $2000 for it to go to court and names changed,” she says on the gofundme.com page.
“Not only will I benefit from this but my 2 children especially so they are not tormented or teased at school as they get older about their last name and that they are children of a murderer.”
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