Geoff Hunt once told his sister-in-law Renae he would fix his wife Kim, and then himself.
In the end, he couldn't do either.
Here's what we know about the last hours of his life:
He packed a lunchbox for his three children and fed them their tea.
His wife Kim was cranky about that and let him know it. There were two dinners in the fridge for the kids and he'd picked the wrong one.
Sometimes when Kim swore at Geoff or told him he was lazy he would tell her, "That's enough."
On this night, September 8, 2014, he said nothing.
After tea, Geoff helped get the kids ready for bed. Ten-year old Fletcher was wearing his Sydney Swans pyjamas and six-year-old Phoebe her long-sleeved flannelette set, the dark blue ones with the swirls.
Mia, the sensitive middle child, was on the couch, wrapped in a blanket.
Geoff settled in beside her to watch Home and Away, and called out to Lorraine Bourke, the disability carer who came most days to help Kim around the house.
"Goodbye Lainie, thanks, see you tomorrow," he said.
Allen Hunt called for a chat but they only spoke for three minutes.
He would later tell police something was not quite right, that his brother sounded flustered and frustrated and seemed to be trying to get him off the phone.
Geoff had told him he would be at a meeting at Lockhart's ex-servicemen's club the next day but perhaps he had already made up his mind.
At some point in the night, he went to the kitchen and got the keys to the locked box where he kept his guns in the little adjoining shower room.
He took the shotgun the police had taken off him in 2013 when Kim had been talking about suicide in a way that had people spooked. It had been handed back to him after a few weeks.
He probably shot Kim first. Then he went inside, bedroom to bedroom, and fired a single shot into each child's head.
The maker of school lunches, umpire of under-14s footy matches, methodically eliminated his family and then took his own life.
Ellie the dog was left barking in the darkness.
It was Lorraine, a trained pre-school teacher with a big mop of curly hair and a rosebud pout, who found the first body.
When she arrived for work the next afternoon, she saw Kim lying prone on the path leading up to the house.
At first she thought she'd had a fall.
Kim had been in a bad accident two years earlier and her balance still wasn't real good.
She'd had to learn to walk again and got tired easily. Angry, too.
Lorraine sometimes saw Kim swearing and ranting at the children and when she intervened, Kim would appear not to realise what she'd been saying.
As she stared at Kim on the path, she fumbled with the code on her mobile phone, unable to get it to unlock in her panic.
She tried to dial 000 on the hands-free unit inside the house, but the batteries were flat.
Glancing out the window, she noticed Geoff's white ute down by the dam.
Stepping into the laundry, she found the other set and discovered it worked before running back outside to Kim and lifted two jackets off her head.
"He's shot her," she thought.
Lorraine doesn't volunteer anything about that afternoon at this week's inquest, and no one asks her to.
But we know that when the police arrived at Watch Hill, Lorraine was thinking about the kids.
She had already found Geoff's note. It was placed on the mat that Phoebe had made him for Father's Day. In black texta, Geoff had written: "I'm sorry, it's all my fault. Totally mine."
He did not sign his name.
Lorraine was thinking about the school bus, and how it would arrive soon, "and I needed to be there for them, as their mother was dead".
But when the kids' uncle and aunt Allen and Renae arrived, they told her the children had been off sick that day.
"Deep down inside, I thought the worst," Lorraine would later tell police.
From the outset of the inquest at Wagga Wagga, the question was more why the massacre had happened rather than how.
And that is what the throngs of family members who arrive at court each day have come for.
The Hunts sit below in the jury box, while Kim's side of the family - the Blakes - head upstairs to the public gallery.
It is an old-fashioned courtroom with bone-achingly hard seats that creak in defiance.
By the second day of hearings, the Hunt family's loved ones have taken to carrying camping pads and pillows in with them.
They talk a little to each other - sometimes a Blake will wave down to a Hunt - but are wary of the reporters who pile in each morning.
The coroner will say at the end of the week that he cannot tell them why.
Geoff Hunt, the coroner found, was all these things: a top tennis player, a devoted husband and father and a decent and honest man.
He was a man who named Kim and the children as the most important people in his life - and who systematically killed them in cold blood.
"What Geoffrey Hunt did was inexcusable. The absolute worst of crimes," State Coroner Michael Barnes says.
It was "not premeditated, it was not motivated by malice".
No, the coroner says: "It was the result of an egocentric delusion that his wife and children would be better off dying than living without him."
Senior forensic psychologist with the NSW Police Sarah Yule says some family-annihilators are motivated by "pseudo-altruism".
By his twisted logic, she says, Geoff might have believed he was protecting his children from suffering or "ending his wife's misery".
The coroner does not see it this way. He says Geoffrey Francis Hunt snatched his wife and his children away and left only sadness and hurt in their place.
Kim's mother, Heather Blake, cannot sleep at night and "sees visions of Kim lying lifeless on the cold hard pavers".
Renae and Allen Hunt have a friend who reads their words from the witness box.
"If only things could have been different," the woman says.
"We could only imagine the depth of despair, pain and isolation that Geoff must have felt. We now live with the pain of regret that maybe we could have done more to help him."
The woman turns a page and there are more creaks from the benches.
"Somewhere between right and wrong, there is a garden," she says aloud.
"We will meet you there."
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