Husband Gets 1 Year for Wife's Scuba Death

June 5, 2009 — -- Eleven days after a fairy tale wedding in Birmingham, Ala., 26-year-old Tina Watson and her new husband went on a scuba diving adventure off the coast of Australia.

Tina Watson never returned from that scuba trip, and now, six years later, Davd Gabriel Watson, who pleaded guilty to his wife's manslaughter, has been sentenced to just a year in jail.

Tina Watson's family is outraged by the light sentence. Her father, Tommy Thomas, said, "I'm sure that the entire Australian nation, as well as our country back home, shares in the shock at what we've just seen, because it's a total injustice. ... It's ludicrous."

Thomas told "Good Morning America" last week that he was certain Gabriel Watson had killed his daughter. "He had turned off her oxygen," Thomas said.

Like the millions of viewers who saw media reports of the death, Thomas had seen the image of his daughter floating motionless in the water as captured by a tourist's underwater camera. Watson is not in the picture.

"He had held her until she went unconscious, then turned it back on and let her go to the seabed," Thomas told "GMA."

Prosecutors believe that while scuba diving in October 2003 near the Great Barrier Reef, Watson, 32, drowned his new wife by turning off her oxygen tank.

An underwater video camera captured an eerie final image of Tina Watson's lifeless-looking body on the bottom of the sea while Watson, clearly swimming away, looked over his shoulder.

"You never think your daughter will leave for her honeymoon and her husband will kill her," said Tina Watson's mother, Cindy Thomas.

Watson, an experienced rescue diver, told authorities that his wife, a beginner, appeared to panic underwater and clutched at his mask, pulling it off his face.

"She was looking up, had both her arms out ... reaching up to grab," Watson told authorities in 2003.

He said she was too heavy to bring to the surface and instead he went for help as she sank. Another diver did manage to pull Tina Watson to the surface, but efforts to resuscitate her failed.

Police initially became suspicious of Watson when he changed details of his account. An autopsy found no pre-existing medical condition that could have explained Tina Watson's death, and tests showed there was nothing wrong with her diving gear.

Prosecutors were convinced the motive behind the crime was money.