Man who killed wife to save daughter jailed

A man who admitted choking his wife to death because she planned to sell their youngest daughter into prostitution has been sentenced to a minimum of three-and-a-half years in jail.

Peter Frost, 58, formerly of Kungala on the NSW mid-north coast of Australia, had earlier pleaded guilty in the Supreme Court in Lismore to a charge of feloniously slaying 36-year-old Virginia Frost in 2004.

The Philippines-born woman had told her husband, from whom she was then separated, she wanted to take their nine-year-old daughter back to her homeland. She said the girl could be sold for a good price because she was a virgin.


Virginia Frost

Frost admitted "half-choking" and pushing her into a chair before leaving the room. When he returned some minutes later she lay dead on the floor.

Justice Graham Barr today said he accepted that the defendant had acted impulsively.

"I accepted that the offence was committed in a sudden and unexpected burst of anger, precipitated by the deceased's abhorrent proposal to take the youngest child into a dangerous and degrading milieu of drugs and prostitution," he said.