Chamari Liyanage doesn’t look like a woman who’s endured years of abuse.
She doesn’t look like a woman who was beaten by her husband with a wooden rolling pin and a metal chair, forced to perform sex acts for strangers on Skype, who lived in constant fear of the man she thought loved her.
She certainly doesn’t look like a woman who bludgeoned that same man to death with a mallet as he lay in bed in their Geraldton home in June 2014.
And that’s exactly why she’s telling her story.
“I knew all about domestic violence myself as a medical officer, I’ve seen it and I’ve dealt with it,” she told 7.30.
“But in my own life I was trapped and I was isolated and I couldn’t talk about it.
“So people have to understand no matter how intelligent, no matter how independent, it’s difficult for people to come out and ask for help.”
Outward charm, inner evil
The Dinendra Athukorala who Chamari Liyanage met in Sri Lanka in 2009 initially seemed charming, but that outward charm hid an inner evil.
Justice Stephen Hall would later describe him as “a manipulative and merciless offender” who regularly abused his wife and kept 13 terabytes of encrypted child exploitation and bestiality images on his three laptops and a number of hard drives.
Chamari Liyanage’s eyes well up and her face crumples as she talks about what it was like inside her marriage to the man she calls Din.
“During that four and a half years when I was with Din, he made it quite difficult for me,” she said.
“There was quite significant violence — emotional, physical, psychological, sexual, financial.
“I think emotional abuse was the most difficult part to deal with. That constant manipulation, that constant control which I felt — I was so much trapped, and I could not leave. And constant threats to myself and my family and loved ones made me very helpless.”