Jason Thomas King, 53, will spend the next 20 years behind bars after a jury took four hours to convict him of murdering of Susan Walker on the Gold Coast.
King was drunk when he turned his rage on the 74-year-old mother of five in March 2022, attacking her in a sudden and violent rampage, inflicting blow after blow on the helpless pensioner.
A postmortem determined she had 54 distinct injuries including a broken hyoid bone, a broken voice box and broken ribs.
The trauma was so severe it battered her brain against her skull and left her home splattered with blood.
Slumped on the floor with blood pooling under her body, King wrapped an extension cord around Ms Walker's neck and choked her to extinguish any sign of life.
"She was bleeding profusely from her injuries and she would be found dead in the lounge room ... surrounded by her own blood," the jury was told.
Covered in blood, King left a trail of footprints from her body to the pool where he tried to wash away evidence of his brutal crime.
Days before the killing, Ms Walker had tired of King after his stoush with another resident, giving him four weeks to pack up and move out.
King had no money and nowhere to go, and had to borrow cash to get drunk the night of the murder.
He had been on a "good wicket at Ms Walker's house", crown prosecutor Elizabeth Kelso told the Brisbane Supreme Court on Monday.
"He liked living there, and he was paying $165 a week, and if he fell behind, she let him make up the rent in other ways, doing odd jobs around the house," she said.
"At the time she died, he had just $1.06 in his bank account. It wouldn't have been easy for him to find another place to live, and certainly not one as accommodating as Ms Walker's home.
"He had nowhere to go. Ms Walker came home ... he confronted her in the lounge room, and his anger overwhelmed him, and he assaulted her."
King was handed a mandatory life sentence of 20 years' imprisonment on Tuesday.
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