A NSW prisoner's tall tale that he killed his cellmate in self-defence has been thrown out by a judge.
"I do not believe any of it," Justice Robert Allan Hulme said.
Richard Jason Reay, 46, was found guilty of murder in the NSW Supreme Court on Wednesday for strangling his cellmate Geoffrey Fardell to death in a jail near Kempsey.
He had pleaded not guilty to the June 2019 homicide claiming Fardell initiated a dispute over their television volume.
"He was pointing in a menacing manner (and saying) 'turn the TV down'," Reay testified during his trial.
"I said 'you turn it down' ... he leapt on me whilst I was lying on my back and he started throwing punches."
Then out of impulse, he ripped down a clothesline that he'd strung above his bed and tied it around his alleged aggressor's neck.
"In a panic ... scared and just worried and confused about what to do next," Reay paced around his cell, had a shower, turned the television on and off and eventually fell asleep.
The next morning he told a floor sweeper "my celly is dead".
But Justice Hulme said this was an entirely implausible account of events pointing out that Fardell would have had to trouble himself to climb down the bunk bed to stand within arm's reach of the television.
"This story on its own makes no sense," he said.
He also disputed Fardell's ability to have delivered "a flurry of punches" within the dimensions of the bunk beds, and that a clothesline later "flushed" down a toilet for no good reason, was conveniently within arm's reach for Reay to use as a weapon in defending himself.
The Crown argued Reay's credibility was undermined by clear lies told after the murder, and that he had a tendency towards violent acts without provocation.
Reay was jailed in 2003 after striking a man with a baseball bat in the head for no apparent reason, one of many documented incidents of seemingly random, aggressive behaviour.
He is due to be sentenced on April 16.
