THE wife of an Upper Hunter farmer who died from a mysterious poisoning in 2018 was "devastated and blindsided" by his death and has been unable to properly grieve because she had been treated as a person of interest.
Jane Thrift has had her phone intercepted, her finances scrutinised and audited and her movements triangulated.
And she has been the subject of "vicious rumours and innuendo" around the small township of Denman.
"Just before this inquest started she was asked by someone if she would be going to jail when it was concluded," Mrs Thrift's barrister, Kirsten Edwards, SC, told a coronial inquest into Mr Thrift's death on Wednesday. "For some people this might be fun. It might seem like it's a mystery. But for Jane Thrift it isn't fun. It is devastating because she can't move on because it never ends."
The three-day inquest in Newcastle Coroner's Court this week examined the circumstances of the death of Mr Thrift, who was found in a bedroom of his Denman home about 8pm on December 1, 2018, only a few hours after he finished his regular Saturday round of golf.
An initial autopsy determined his cause of death was heart disease and it wasn't until family members raised concerns with a coroner that toxicology and pathology testing was ordered.
Those tests, undertaken after Mr Thrift had been cremated, revealed surprising results; the 71-year-old had a blood alcohol reading of 0.207mg/L and a fatal dose of 3.8mg/L of strychnine, making Mr Thrift one of only eight people in more than 30,000 to have the restricted substance detected in his blood at post-mortem.
It wasn't until four years after Mr Thrift's death that police searching a shed on his property stumbled upon a small glass bottle that may have been the source of the poison that claimed his life.
During her closing submissions, Ms Edwards said there was no reasonable possibility that the dusty and cobwebbed bottle had been planted in the shed and Mrs Thrift had no connection to strychnine.
She said there was no financial motive for Mrs Thrift to have been involved in murdering her husband and any "supposed suspicious evidence" relating to Mrs Thrift had "been dismantled and fallen away" during the inquest.
Mrs Thrift had objected to an invasive autopsy before testing revealed the strychnine in her husband's blood, but Mrs Edwards said she had no problem with toxicology testing being conducted.
She said, sadly, the possibility that Mr Thrift ingested the poison with the intent of claiming his life remained a possibility and there had been no plausible theory presented as to how or why Mrs Thrift would kill her husband.
"Her behaviour has been consistent with a woman who loved her husband, was looking forward to their dream life and is devastated by his death," Mrs Edwards said.
Meanwhile, Jasmine Taleb, who represented the interests of two of Mr Thrift's sons, said homicide could not be ruled out and there were "ulterior motives" that had not yet come to light.
In his closing submissions, counsel assisting Rob Ranken told Deputy State Coroner Magistrate Carmel Forbes the evidence in the inquest did not allow a definitive finding about how Mr Thrift ingested the strychnine.
He said the source of the strychnine was most likely the brown bottle found in the shed in 2023 and the poison must have been ingested about 30 minutes before Mr Thrift's death, around the same time he must have secretly consumed a large quantity of alcohol.
Mr Ranken said it was unlikely Mr Thrift accidentally consumed the strychnine and while it remained a possibility that he might have acted impulsively and intentionally drank the poison there were factors opposing that, including his good mood, clean bill of health and plans for the future.
"So as long as it is not possible to make a finding that he did it intentionally or accidentally, homicide remains a possibility that cannot be excluded," Mr Ranken said.
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