So, what’s on your bucket list?
Skydiving, hiking Everest, seeing the Eiffel Tower, getting more than 100 likes on an Instagram photo – how am I supposed to know, it’s not like we’re friends.
I do know what was on the bucket list of 26-year-old Brit Jemma Lilley [above], though – murder.
After moving Down Under to Perth, Lilley and her 43-year-old housemate Trudi Lenon teamed up to murder 18-year-old Aaron Pajich on June 13, 2016. They then buried him in a shallow grave in the garden.
Lilley has just been sentenced to life by the Supreme Court of Western Australia, and it turns out she’s not the most covert murderer of all time.
Here’s Sky News:
The court heard Lilley had spoken of wanting to kill someone before she turned 25.
Once she had ticked off murder from her “bucket list” she was so “full of herself and euphoric” that she could not help boasting to a work colleague, prosecutor James McTaggart said.
She had also written a book about a serial killer called SOS and went on to assume the identity of the character, jurors were told.
Speaking to The Times after the conviction, Lilley’s stepmother, Nina Lilley, 48, said: “The book was a big problem with me. At the beginning I was, ‘fair enough you want to write a horror story’, but I didn’t like the contents of it”.
Yeah, I would think that book would be a bit of a red flag for me.
The BBC have more details on the murder of Pajich, and none of them are pretty:
Lilley arrived in Perth from Stamford, Lincolnshire, in 2010. She had a troubled childhood and developed what prosecutors later said was a long-term fascination with the horror genre, murder and serial killers.
They say she regarded Freddy Krueger, the serial killer protagonist in the A Nightmare on Elm Street film franchise, as a hero and allegedly once told a friend that she wanted to take a life before she turned 25…
The women were already sharing homicidal fantasies in conversations and in online messages, police say, building a dominant-submissive friendship, with Lenon doting obediently on Lilley.
They used the codenames SOS and Corvina. Prosecutors say their exchanges intensified rapidly until, within three weeks of living together, their bizarre plan reached fruition.
Thirteen days before the murder, each declared themselves ready to kill.
You only have to look at the set of knives recovered from the home where the two lived to know they weren’t mucking around:
Pajich, who suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, was reported missing on June 14. He thought he was trading computer games with Lenon’s son when he entered the house bearing a sign reading “Elm Street” on the gate.
It was the CCTV footage from the house itself that really did them in:
…police appealed for public help and delved deeper, checking his [Pajich’s] phone records.
They found the last call he received came from Lenon, and that led them to her house on 20 June.
A subsequent search revealed the body, dozens of knives, a bone saw, scalpels, a machete, and an alphabetised handwritten list of torture techniques.
Then, incredibly, police found CCTV evidence recorded by Lilley’s own home security set-up. Wary that her collection of motorcycles might come to harm, Lilley had installed a motion-sensing CCTV system at four points outside the house.
The footage captured Mr Pajich entering the back door of the house with Lilley and Lenon about 10:00 on the day he died.
About 10.30, it filmed Lenon leaving the house and entering again carrying a large knife inside a sheath. The CCTV was later switched off.
Too little too late for the murderous duo, with the jury taking just two and a half hours to find them guilty.
Who fancies a nightmare this evening? Cool – here’s what else they found inside the house:
We’ve skipped over many of the details, so if you want to know more you can head over here.
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