THEY only stopped bashing him when his skull cracked.

It would have sounded like a gun going off.

It’s a horrible description but one Kim Winter used to illustrate the severity of the beating suffered by her husband Billy.

She also wanted to make clear the intention of his attackers — Ronald Dale Croxford and Ricky Doubleday.

“Those two blokes, they knew what they did. They would have heard that and so that’s why they stopped,” Mrs Winter said.

“But they didn’t stop until that point.”

Mrs Winter said this was highlighted by Justice Paul Coghlan during the men’s Supreme Court trial four years ago.

“The CCTV shows Billy putting his hands up — we all saw that — putting his hands up in defeat,” she said.

Mrs Winter said her husband was heard to say: “I’m not doing that, I’m going, I know when I’m beat”, before he then left.

But Croxford and Doubleday picked up some garden stakes and followed him.

Mrs Winter took issue with the judge’s comments in sentencing, that the defendants had a good chance of rehabilitation.

“I thought, how dare you say that — just because they’ve been good in jail that they would be good outside?” she said.

“To me, that doesn’t say ‘you did what you did’, it doesn’t reflect the intent they had at that particular moment.”

The trial — which resulted in the jury finding Croxford guilty of manslaughter and Doubleday of defensive homicide — heard Mr Winter produced a knife in a non-threatening manner in response to a cheeky comment made by Doubleday about his age.

While Mr Winter had a pocket knife in his pocket, it wasn’t a normal pointed, open blade but rather an enclosed knife — one he used in his work on oil rigs.

He had just returned from Texas in the US where he’d done a six-month fishing tool operator course.

That gave him the credentials to go to any oil-rig in the world that was experiencing problems with drilling procedures.

Specifically, it gave him the skills to work on stuck pipes where oil could not be extracted.

He had one of these tools in his pocket on the night he went to the Birallee Tavern.

Mrs Winter said her husband had gone out to socialise because he knew no one in the city.

That was the knife he pulled out of his jacket and showed, on his open palm, to Croxford and Doubleday.

“Part of their rig is they always carry one of these bullnose knives — it’s not a pointed blade like most knives,” Mrs Winter said.

“It’s got a little hook under it to grab on to wire, so if they get into trouble on the rigs and they have to cut themselves free, they just pull those knives out and flick them open.

“He pulled the knife out and said: ‘well, if I’m still a grandad (as one of them said) then why am I still working on the rigs?’.”

Mrs Winter said she had spoken out this week after five years of silence because she still did not believe her husband’s killers’ sentences were strong enough.

“If we all become aware of what’s going on, then perhaps we can stand together and say we’re just not going to accept it,” she said.

“I remember thinking at the time, ‘this just doesn’t happen’.

“This doesn’t happen in our world, it happens in drug dealers’ world, in the low-lifes of society.”

Mrs Winter said in reality it did not feel like five years had gone by.

“Obviously, for everybody else out there, time has just passed as normal but, for us, it hasn’t — it feels like it’s just a couple of weeks ago that it happened,” she said.

“You’re always reminded of it in some way, it never goes away.”