The jury at the murder trial of a Brisbane financial planner who bludgeoned his top client with a hammer is expected to begin deliberations.

October 19, 2018

Jurors are expected to begin their deliberations in the murder trial of a Brisbane financial planner who smashed his top client’s head in a with a hammer during a heated business meeting.

Trung The Ma, 35, is on trial in the Supreme Court accused of murdering Huegio Bonham, 63, during an argument following the financial planner’s alleged theft of $706,000 from the spiritual guru.

Ma has admitted killing his former client and hiding his body in a storage unit but denies murdering Mr Bonham and is fighting the charge on mental health grounds.

The former Commonwealth Bank employee told the court the room was spinning and he had lost control when he struck Mr Bonham in the head three times with a hammer at his client’s Gold Coast hinterland home.

Footage played to the jury by the Crown purportedly shows Ma buying two large containers from Bunnings about the time of Mr Bonham’s death on February 3, 2014.

Ma admitted to police that after killing Mr Bonham, he put the body into the containers and took it to an Indooroopilly storage facility before dumping Mr Bonham’s belongings.

A psychiatrist told the court that Ma had felt weighed down from an early age by the pressure of providing for his extended family, with whom he had escaped from Vietnam by boat as a young boy.

This anxiety and stress, coupled with a mild mental illness Ma had been hiding for years, contributed to his explosion and fatal bashing of Mr Bonham during the argument on February 3, 2014.

But the psychiatrist told the court that despite Ma’s mental state at the time of the killing, he was also capable of understanding right from wrong.