"None of us thought that this would ever happen."

At 32, Kate Malonyay was killed by her volatile and controlling ex.

Her mother Wendy says nobody saw it coming.

The second installment of Hitting Home delved into the story of Malonyay’s brutal murder at the hands of former boyfriend Elliott Coulson in April 2013.

“I spend a lot of time still pondering whether there’s anything that could have been done to save my daughter’s life,” Wendy Malonyay told the ABC.

“My son and I often discuss the fact that none of us, including Kate, thought that this would ever happen. I often recall Kate saying to me ‘Don’t worry mum, he’ll never hurt me, he’s too much of a coward’.”

Coulson and Kate met online in late 2011.

“When Kate and Elliott met, they met online… I feel like he was almost grooming her and figuring out how far can I push this girl?” Kate’s close friend Melissa Meredith told the program.

He quickly became controlling, and would send Kate abusive text messages.

“He would say some vulgar things and he would send messages of a really horrendous nature and it was escalating,” Meredith said.

“He was drinking a lot he was getting more abusive, so Kate was getting fed up with it.”

He was also lying to Kate about his life, his job and his family.

After Coulson deliberately broke some things in Kate’s Mosman apartment in January 2013, she ended it.

“She’d had enough of the verbal abuse and the control, the jealousy and the compulsive lying,” Wendy Malonyay said.

But Coulson continued to keep tabs on her daughter.

“Coulson continued to harass Kate by sending abusive phone messages and stalking her.”

Kate reached out to his family and discovered that much of what she’d been told was a lie.

She kept text message contact with him, but made no plans to see him.

On April 17 he went over to Kate’s apartment.

She was never seen alive again.

The NSW Coroner’s report into Kate’s death determined she died between April 17 and 19. She wasn’t discovered until April 22, because Coulson kept her mobile phone and used it to communicate with her friends and family.

“It haunts me to know she was in that unit for five days – dead,” Wendy said.

Coulson fled the state on Friday April 19, using Kate’s credit card to book a business class flight to the Gold Coast.

He was found there, in a penthouse suite on April 24. Before police could detain him, Coulson jumped from the penthouse balcony.

“She was just drawn into what he was offering her, the charm,” Wendy says.

“He definitely did control Kate… he was very jealous if he ever saw her with another man in the group. He just wanted Kate all to himself.”

Despite the circumstances surrounding deaths, Coulson, a naval systems analyst, was given a full Navy funeral.

Because Coulson is dead, police and the NSW coroner’s office will never know exactly what transpired in Kate’s apartment.

Her mother just hopes she wasn’t in too much pain for too long.

“My heart just goes out – she would have been so frightened. And let’s just hope it happened quickly, without too much suffering, because honestly her body was brutally attacked.

“I didn’t recognise her when I went to view the body… it was awful.”

Wendy Malonyay now gives time to speak with police about domestic violence, in the hope it might help them help others.

“I think if I’m going to keep living with pain, let’s turn around and do something positive about it,” she told Hitting Home.

You can watch Hitting Home on ABC iView.