An elderly man who sparked a police manhunt when, acting out of love, he kidnapped his “sweetheart” from a West Australian aged care home has been killed in a car crash just two days after his partner died.
Ralph “Terry” Gibbs, 80, died on Wednesday morning when his vehicle hit a utility on the Bruce Highway south of Bowen in Queensland.
His death came 48 hours after his partner of 15 years, Carol Lisle, 84, died in the aged care facility south of Perth from where Gibbs had removed her in early January.
Gibbs was driving back to his home in Queensland when involved in the crash. He had just found out about Lisle’s death. The driver of the second vehicle, a 60-year-old local man, was airlifted to hospital in a serious condition.
Gibbs’ daughter Rochelle Palmay said it was an accident.
“He had been on the road for long hours, he was told of her death while he was driving,” she said on Thursday. “I think he was emotionally tired and I don’t think he had slept enough.”
Gibbs was returning from Perth, where he had been handed a seven-month suspended prison sentence on Friday in Perth magistrates court after pleading guilty to unlawfully detaining a person with a mental illness.
Lisle, his long-term partner, had been suffering from dementia and Parkinson’s disease.
Gibbs wheeled Lisle out the door of Mercy Place Mandurah in January and tried to drive her across Australia’s notoriously dangerous outback in heatwave conditions.
The couple was stopped an hour from the Northern Territory border and Lisle was flown to hospital. Gibbs was subsequently charged and issued a restraining order.
Palmay, who is one of Gibbs’ five surviving children and lives in New Zealand, said the pair had been inseparable for 15 years.
“They met at a ballroom, they spotted each other across the floor,” Palmay said.
“Dad came up to Carol and asked her to dance and they never stopped dancing since.
“They were such a beautiful couple, always social, always entertaining, a full-of-life couple. The type of couple people love to be around. They’re just lucky they found each other. How many people get to find true love at the end of their life.”
Palmay said her father was always upbeat, sang and played the ukulele. He loved travelling with Carol and camping across the country.
“People are so fortunate when they find that kind of love,” she said. “They had it. It should not have ended like this.”
Lisle had been living in the WA aged care facility since last year after her goddaughter, Belinda Hodgkinson, travelled to Queensland and took her back to the state.
Hodgkinson had known Lisle her whole life, her parents were friends and they lived just suburbs away from each other when she was growing up.
Hodgkinson described Lisle as a vivacious socialite who loved life and people.
“She just brought it all together,” Hodgkinson said.
“She was always making everyone laugh and happy. The nursing home said she had the most visitors of all the residents. She was very loved.”
She said Lisle wanted to leave Queensland and claimed Gibbs didn’t always look after her properly. Hodgkinson and Gibbs had been in a long-running dispute over who should care for Lisle.
“She was very loved by family and friends and we were just trying to give her quality of life at the end, which she didn’t receive from him. That was proof – what he did.”
Palmay refuted this claim – saying he never mistreated his partner.
Lisle had been placed in the Mercy Place Mandurah aged care home in March 2021 by the State Administrative Tribunal under a guardianship ruling which Gibbs was challenging.
Covid restrictions meant he had only been allowed into WA to visit her on four occasions in that time.
Outside court last Friday, Gibbs told reporters he was worried he would never see her again.
“I fear I might never see my little girl again, she is fading quickly,” he said.
Gibbs said that in the nursing home “all day every day she says, ‘Please take me out of here, please take me out of here,’ and when I would leave to go home she would say, ‘Can I come with you?’ She even wanted to walk to the airport.”
Magistrate Raelene Johnston agreed Gibbs acted out of love when he took her but said his actions were “extremely dangerous”.
“I accept that you believe you were acting out of love and that you were acting out of care for your partner and that you wanted to be with her, and you believed that she wanted to be with you,” Johnston said when sentencing Gibbs.
