Michelle Foster’s killer believed he was ‘living in a simulation’
Michelle Foster was beaten to death by a total stranger – now a court has heard her killer believed he was living in a simulation, and that she was an artificial intelligence.
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The man who killed Michelle Stephanie Foster had the “bizarre, grandiose and persecutory” belief that he lived in a simulation and she was an “artificial intelligence”, a court has heard.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled Jayden Tayne Lowah was not guilty of murdering Ms Foster – because he was mentally incompetent due to “entrenched” schizophrenia.
It heard expert evidence that Lowah, 22, believed killing the mother of two would free him from “mind control” and reunite him with his “original parents” on another planet.
It also heard Lowah’s illness had been repeatedly misdiagnosed and wrongly blamed on drugs since he was 15, resulting in “lost opportunities” to help him and prevent Ms Foster’s death.
Those opportunities came after Lowah tried to kill his father as a teenager and when he attacked two strangers “to prevent the world descending into chaos” just six weeks before killing Ms Foster.
After that incident, the court heard, Lowah warned doctors he was feeling homicidal – and yet he was trusted to keep voluntarily taking his antipsychotic medication.
Outside court, Ms Foster’s mother, Andrea, said Lowah had “fallen through the cracks” of the state’s mental health system.
“He told mental health workers he was going to kill – if that was not a red flag, what is?” she asked.
“When does the system stop and see he’s been like this since he was 15, that he wanted to kill his father, that he was going to kill somebody?
“Since this man was a child he’s needed help, but nobody gave it and so he killed … someone didn’t do their job, and my child suffered because of that.”
In October 2018, Lowah attacked Ms Foster outside the Colonnades Shopping Centre at Noarlunga, inflicting severe head injuries by striking her head onto a concrete path.
She was found lying facedown in a pool of blood by a cyclist who tried to save her life, while Lowah looked on saying “I did that”.
On Tuesday, prosecutor Carmen Matteo extensively quoted two expert reports outlining Lowah’s long history of mental illness and violent offending.
She said experts agreed he was paranoid, “predisposed to extreme anger” and believed he was the “chosen one” being persecuted by the purported simulation’s architects.
While he had planned to kill either himself or another to “end the simulation”, she said, his interactions with Ms Foster were amicable at first – making the killing spontaneous.
Justice Sam Doyle remanded Lowah in secure mental health detention custody until August, when he will impose a limiting term.
That term is a period under mental health supervision equal to the sentence an unaffected person would receive – Lowah’s term, under state law, will be for life.