The story of Donna McAvoy, guilty of the murder of police officer Damian Leeding Donna Lee McAvoy convicted of killing police officer Damian Leeding. DONNA McAvoy's bulk fills the backseat of the police car. She is sore and tired and can't stop crying. She can't believe everything went so wrong so quickly. The three bottles of wine, the Benzos and the morphine tablets had worn off with the shock of the gunshots. The sight of that policeman lying on the ground. His shoes. His hand on his stomach clutching his gun. ``I've f... me life,"" she wailed at the detectives. They didn't tell her she'd done worse to one of their own. ``Oh Jesus, I'm f... stupid."" It's 1.55am on May 30, 2011. Detective Sergeant David Moore is in a car outside the Pacific Pines Tavern. Murdered police officer Damian Leeding. He wants McAvoy to tell him about the robbery. About the gun and the plan and who else had been involved. Not too far away, Detective Senior Constable Damian Leeding lies in a hospital bed with a shotgun blast to the face. He is clinging to life but it won't be for long. Soon they will turn off the machines keeping him alive. McAvoy is telling Det Sgt Moore a patchwork of truth and lies. She doesn't know the men she was with. She doesn't know Phillip Graeme Abell - the man with the gun. She tells them she only knows him as G. It's a lie. McAvoy first met Abell 10 years earlier. She doesn't know how she got to the pub. Doesn't know who was in the car. That's a lie too. The getaway driver was Benjamin Graeme Power, McAvoy's de facto partner of three years. ``I didn't even know what I was doing,"" she sobs. Forensic officers at the scene of the shooting of Damian Leeding. ``I've never done anything like this before."" She tells them she thought it was all a joke. It's not to them. ``Donna this is very important. Very important,"" the detective says sternly, a pause emphasising every word. ``We have a police officer in hospital with a gunshot wound to his head. ``This is a life and death matter."" They try her again late that morning. McAvoy is at the Southport watch house when she gets chatting to another inmate. ``Pac Pines armed robbery,"" she tells the woman - an undercover police officer. ``You f... serious? Holy s...,"" the officer says. The weapon used in the murder of police officer Damian Leeding. ``I heard on the news this morning. McAvoy's voice is slurred, sluggish, barely legible. ``You don't know what you're going to do in a situation like that,"" she tells the cellmate. ``He got cornered. He shot his way out."" On June 1, 2011, they grill her a third time. McAvoy has agreed to take part in a police ``walk through"." Accompanied by her lawyer, she will retrace her footsteps with detectives as she provides detail on how the robbery unfolded. ``Meself and the other person jumped out of the car, ran into the building here,"" she says, showing them the side entrance where she and Abell had stormed into the pub. It was the second time McAvoy, Abell and Power had been to the Pacific Pines Tavern that night. In a car borrowed from a friend, McAvoy drove them to the bar where the trio was picked up on CCTV walking through the building, pointing and talking as they wandered around. They weren't scoping it out, she insists. They were just there for a drink or two and a round of the pokies. A couple of hours later, they stood in the garage of her two-storey home, dressing in hoodies, trackpants and, bizarrely, life jackets. They were sick of being poor, she explains. Power helped her dress in layers designed to disguise her shape. She used a bandage, tape and a strapless top to bind her breasts. The life jacket rounded her out, made her look like a barrel. ``Can you tell me why you put those clothes on,"" Det Sgt Moore asks. ``To bulk me up,"" she replies. ``To make me look like a man,"" she says. ``Just so that I didn't look like a woman. Just to make me look different."" If she is to be believed, McAvoy is the most clueless armed robber to ever don a balaclava. She didn't even know her partner-in-crime had a gun, she insists. They didn't really discuss a plan. She was told to take the bag, tie up anyone inside and get the money. Abell would be the fear monger. He would make sure everyone did as they were told. Det Sgt Moore is incredulous. ``Honestly?"" he asks her. ``Honestly,"" she says. ``OK, so at what stage, I mean, you're going into a place to do a robbery, was there any discussion of being armed?"" the detective asks. `No. It just was a piece of wood, I thought ... now I know it wasn't a piece of wood,"" she says. ``We're talking about a planning of a robbery here,"" Det Sgt Moore insists. For more than an hour, McAvoy leads detectives, forensic officers and her lawyer around the Tavern. She opens the door she went through when they carried out the robbery. She tells them a black bag had been slung over her shoulder. McAvoy continues her story. She and Abell run through the restaurant, behind the bar and around the corner where they find the manager and a security guard, she says. It's near closing time and the tavern is almost empty. Two women have heard them come in. They crouch behind their poker machines hoping they won't be noticed. McAvoy finds them and tells them to get down on the floor with the others Abell has rounded up. She grabs zip-ties ready made into handcuffs from her black bag and binds their hands behind their backs. The manager is ordered into the office and told to open the safe. ``I grabbed bags of dollar coins and two dollar coins ... five dollar notes ... stuffed them all into the bag,"" McAvoy explains as a policeman with a video camera follows her into the office. ``From there I went over to her and asked her to turn around and she was quite stressed,"" McAvoy recounts. ``And I said `it's OK, just do as you're asked and nobody is going to get hurt.""" She uses duct tape to tie the manager's hands and drags the bag - now weighing 70kg - through the doorway. The hostages are ordered out to a rear storage room and the pair, dragging the heavy bag, make their dash for freedom. McAvoy shows the detectives how she and Abell retraced their footsteps back through the bar and out the side entrance to the car park. Abell ran out in front. McAvoy was following when the gunshots rang out. CCTV shows a terrified McAvoy fall back against the wall, her shoulders heaving in panic as her accomplice yells at her to follow him. She cries and sobs as she steps up to the spot where Det Sen Const Leeding fell. ``I seen there was someone on the ground there ... cause I looked and I seen there was feet ... umm ... it was just all too much."" Her most hysterical reaction comes when she spots television cameras filming her from across the road. She is unrecognisable - a blue plastic suit covering her from head to toe, a mask covering her face. Donna McAvoy is as covered as she was three days earlier when a hoodie, gloves, boots and makeshift balaclava cloaked everything but her eyes. She sobs, takes a step back and throws her hands to her head. ``No,"" she cries. There's media over there."" She hides behind the detectives, who close ranks around her. Police ask the cameras to fall back as they hurry her back inside the tavern. They calm her down and, with the media out of the way, McAvoy continues on. She tells them she was terrified by the sight of the injured officer lying on the ground. She claims it was only then she realised Abell must have had a gun. She and Abell take off at a run, follow the building around to a grassed area that leads past the drive-through bottle shop. The heavy bag of coins is left behind. Her chest is heaving. She can't breathe with the bandage, tape and life jacket holding her chest in. Abell yells at her to hurry. He is nearly 100m in front as he crosses to an area of shrubs and trees that brings them out at a loading dock. She runs on, chest constricted, gasping for her. ``Come on! Come on!"" he yells at her. He is in front but they arrive together at a guard rail leading to a main road. They crouch as a car comes. He takes off but she is slower to follow. Abell makes it across the road. McAvoy does not. ``I went to run across and that's when officers yelled out to me to get down on the ground,"" she says. She starts to lead them across the road to where she was arrested when a blue-covered detective approaches. He stops them. ``I've just got to tell you something, alright, in fairness to you, alright?"" he says gently to McAvoy. ``We've got to tell you that that policeman has now passed away. We've just found that out, alright?"" She looks at the people who have just lost their friend and colleague. She puts her hands on her head and moans. She steps back and stares at the ground. ``I know it's a bit of a shock,"" Det Sgt Moore says to her. ``We'll let you compose yourself a little bit first."" They let her sit in the gutter, her back to the guardrail where she crouched on the night she ruined her life, hiding from the police who were hunting her down. Eventually she continues on. Keeps telling them how it had gone down. They'd been going for an hour and 21 minutes when she accidentally tells them what she's tried to keep secret. ``Whose idea (was the robbery)?"" they ask. ``The person I was with,"" she says. They ask who she means. She was with two people, they say - which one came up with the plan? ``Not the driver. Not Ben,"" she answers. ``Not Ben Power."" She's given them a name, maybe by accident. They ask for more. ``So who was Ben Power?"" Det Sgt Moore asks. ``He's the driver,"" she says. Who was the other person?"" ``Phillip Abell,"" she answers. The police know exactly who Ben Power and Phillip Abell are. Both men have already been arrested. But now there is no chance of Abell sticking to his ``you've got the wrong guy"" claim he'd tried when the police dog latched its teeth into his shoulder. She spills then, telling them what they need to know. She never admits to knowing Abell had carried a gun. Eventually they run out of questions. They ask if she has anything to add. She looks up at the detective, looks him in the eye. ``That I'm sorry for the officer,"" she says. ``I didn't mean for anyone to be hurt."" Donna McAvoy and Phillip Graeme Abell will be sentenced next week.