Within months of becoming a carer for an elderly Sydney man, Kerry Forrest knew all his financial affairs and had wrested control of the sale of his house.
Within a year, she had given him a lethal dose of pain medication.
Forrest, 54, was found guilty on Tuesday of murdering Bill Adamson, 84, at a Campbelltown motel in Sydney's southwest in April 2010.
In handing down his verdict following the judge-alone trial, Justice Peter Hidden said Forrest had killed Mr Adamson by making him ingest a lethal dose of the morphine-based pain killer MS-Contin.
"It is most likely that she crushed tablets and mixed them with his food," he told the Supreme Court.
Forrest, the court heard, had been employed by Mr Adamson as a live-in carer in September 2009 after his wife Beryl died.
From this point, Justice Hidden said, her "behaviour points to a calculated course of dishonest conduct".
Forrest became increasingly involved in his financial affairs and by February 2010 helped him sell his Kareela home in southern Sydney for $690,000.
The plan, the 84-year-old former realtor and property developer thought, was to use the money to build on a plot of land that Forrest owned in Bundanoon, south of Sydney.
At the exchange of the property, $25,000 was placed into a joint account set up in the names of Forrest and Mr Adamson.
Then on April 12, a cheque from the proceeds of Mr Adamson's home totalling almost $319,000 was placed into the account.
A day later, Forrest and Mr Adamson moved into the Campbelltown motel on April 13, 2010.
No arrangements for accommodation were made after the motel.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Mr Adamson, the money from the sale of his home was quickly being transferred into several of Forrest's bank accounts.
It was also disappearing down poker machines across Sydney.
Gaming managers at league clubs in Parramatta and Cronulla regularly watched her play more than one machine at once.
Plainly enough, Justice Hidden said, the primary source of her gambling funds came from the sale of Mr Adamson's house.
By Friday morning of April 16, 2010, Mr Adamson could have been lying dead for up to 24 hours in the twin motel room that the pair was sharing, Justice Hidden said.
But Ms Forrest didn't call Triple '0' until just before 11pm that night.
This was after trying to get her own doctor to sign the death certificate, going to see her daughter and going to a storage unit.
Forrest also failed to tell Mr Adamson's sisters and stepson about his death.
"Ms Forrest misappropriated Mr Adamson's money and killed him to prevent that misappropriation being exposed," Mr Hidden found.
Forrest, who has cancer, sat slumped forward in her wheelchair as the verdict was handed down.
She will be sentenced at a later date.
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