Nine days before Jacob Munro was murdered, his killers took a trip to a forest and dug his grave.  To check it was the right size, one of them hopped in to try it out.  Then on July 22, 2014, Stanley Robert Forward and Donald John Cameron stabbed and tasered the 24-year-old to death.  He was reported missing and five months later was found in the grave at Bulahdelah State Forest, north of Newcastle.  Mr Munro's mother, Deborah Hall, did not know her son was dead until detectives came to her door to tell her his body was not only in a hospital morgue, but had been there for six weeks.  Forward, 23, and Cameron, 64, have pleaded guilty in the NSW Supreme Court to murdering Mr Munro and to knowingly taking part in the cultivation of 664 cannabis plants.  A third man who cannot be named is also wanted in connection with the murder, and a fourth, David Ian Wilkinson, 70, has admitted to cannabis cultivation as well as receiving, harbouring, maintaining and assisting Forward, knowing he had murdered Mr Munro.  During a sentencing hearing on Friday, Forward's mother gave evidence that her son had been pressured into the crime.  "'They made me. They said they'd kill me'," she said, quoting her son who was sobbing heavily in the dock.  However, the police had no such statement on record, the court heard.  "There's no evidence from (Forward's) record of interview that he was directly threatened," crown prosecutor Richard Herps said.  In fact, Forward supplied the knife and volunteered to be the one to stab Mr Munro, Mr Herps said.  Justice Desmond Fagan said it was clear that Forward, Cameron and the unnamed man all had some part in planning Mr Munro's murder.  "Actions speak louder than words, especially words after the event," the judge said.  The dead man's mother told the court her "world stopped" the day she found out her son was gone.  "I didn't know that such a dark place existed in my soul," she said in a hand-written victim impact statement.  "The day I received word that the last arrest had been made I had to drive on a quiet road.  "I was going to drive straight into a tree as I thought: 'It is over now'. The courts can deal with it because I can't any longer."  The hearing continues on Wednesday before Justice Fagan.
The mother of Jacob Munro who was murdered in July 2014 in the NSW Hunter region has told a court how her world stopped when detectives visited her home.