A SERIAL rapist, who recently confessed to an unsolved murder on the Central Coast and organising the shooting of his Newcastle-based partner as she headed into a NSW courtroom to testify against him, will not be eligible for parole until 2052.
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Graham Thomas Sales was sentenced to an additional non-parole period of 15 years and eight months in the Sydney Supreme Court this month after he pleaded guilty to two high-profile crimes from 25 years ago.
Sales, who is serving a lengthy jail sentence for a string of violent sexual assaults in the 1980s and 1990s, admitted killing 61-year-old Ronald Penn at The Entrance and soliciting his brother, Ross Sales, to murder a Newcastle woman, known as JF, inside a courtroom at Wyong Local Court.
Mr Penn's disappearance had been a mystery until May when Sales made a jailhouse confession about the murder.
Despite extensive searches in bush land north of North Entrance, where Sales said he buried the body, Mr Penn's remains have never been found.
The court heard that Mr Penn, who was living with Sales, was tricked into bush land on the promise of digging up buried money. He was made to dig his own grave and while he was standing in the hole, Sales attacked him with a baseball bat.
JF, then 24, survived with serious injuries after Sales' brother, Ross, followed her into Wyong Local Court and opened fire on her on November 21, 1995.
Ross Sales, then aged 24, was arrested at the scene but found not guilty on the grounds of mental illness. The brazen shooting was the reason metal detectors were installed in NSW courts.
Graham Sales admitted to soliciting the attack and was sentenced by Justice Elizabeth Fullerton to an additional seven years' and two months' jail.
He also confessed to the murder of Mr Penn, who went missing in October 1995, and was sentenced to a further non-parole period of seven years and two months.
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