wheelchair-bound woman set alight by man she trusted David Harding, who pleaded guilty to the murder of Christine Anthony. Photo: Belinda Soole In the end, Christine Anthony's trust in one man proved, in her sister's words, "a fatal mistake." The wheelchair-bound woman was set alight by a man she had been seeing, David Harding, in her Narromine home in February 2011. Harding then walked out of the house and did not return. Documents tendered in the Supreme Court on Friday reveal that, as she burned, Ms Anthony made a frantic phone call to a friend, Malcolm Hazel, who rushed to her home and extinguished the flames. Ambulance officers arrived soon after, but her injuries - burns to 40 per cent of her body - proved too great. The 50-year-old was at Sydney airport, en route to the burns unit at Concord Hospital, when she went into cardiac arrest. Ambulance officers rushed her to the nearest intensive care unit at St George Hospital, but she died there soon after. "Chris isn't just a case number, a hearing date, or even a sentencing date," Ms Anthony's sister, Dee Dickinson, told the NSW Supreme Court at Harding's sentencing hearing on Friday. She was an aunt, a sister, a friend. I can't understand how something like this could happen. It's such a vicious and disgusting act. Right now our pain is in the hands of the justice system, and we ask for justice. Harding initially tried to excuse his actions. He told police that he had thought he was pouring water on the deceased, and then later said that she had dared him to set her alight. But last year he pleaded guilty to Ms Anthony's murder. The agreed statement of facts reveals that the offender and the deceased had known each other since childhood and had been in a sexual relationship before the incident. It appears the deceased and the offender had an argument about a male person called Gibson coming to live with her. After setting the 50-year-old alight with a bottle of methylated spirits, Harding walked home to his de facto partner, telling her that "the police would be around to see him soon." "It would be difficult to find anyone [in Narromine] who didn't know or wasn't affected by her death," Ms Dickinson said. We all know life goes on ... but in the quiet times it's there and it will never go away. Justice Peter Garling adjourned the sentencing hearing until next month so that Harding could gather more evidence about a brain injury he claims to have suffered in a motorcycle accident in the 1980s.