Samurai sword killer Jonathan Dick can’t be moved to a secure mental health facility because of a lack of beds, a court has been told.
The 42-year-old stabbed and killed his brother David Dick with the sword at a Doncaster shopping centre in Melbourne in February 2017 after waiting for him in the carpark.
Dick was “consumed” by delusional beliefs at the time of the attacks, Supreme Court Justice Lex Lasry found in September.
The justice found him not guilty of by reason of mental impairment for the murder of his brother and the attempted murder of his friend David Cammarata a year later.
“It’s obviously unsatisfactory, but there is nothing we can do about it,” Justice Lasry said on Monday morning.
The judge said it illustrated the pressure of the system at the moment, and there was no available accommodation for Dick.
The matter was adjourned for six months in the hope a bed would be available then and the killer would stay in a specialist prison unit.
Dick started to have delusional memories about events that never happened and thought it was his destiny to kill his younger brother.
Two psychiatrists found Dick was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia during the assaults, and his mental health was deteriorating in the years before the attack. At one point in 2011 he told a friend he wanted to slit his brother’s throat.
He had a delusional memory about an assault in high school involving aliens, “wailing banshees”, the Hells Angels and his friend Mr Cammarata, forensic psychiatrist Dr Rajan Darjee previously told the court.
Dick will next appear for court at the end of May next year.
