A jury has found Andre Rebelo guilty of murdering his mother at her Bicton home for cash after taking out three insurance policies in her name just days earlier.
Jurors cried as the verdict was announced on Thursday afternoon following nearly two days of deliberation and an eight-week trial where evidence revealed the 28-year-old’s financial woes. Prosecutors said while social media showed he enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, it was debt-driven and pushed him to form a murderous plan.
A court sketch of Andre Rebelo during his murder trial in the Supreme Court of Western Australia.Credit: Anne Barnetson
Andre Rebelo killed his healthy and happy 58-year-old mother, Colleen, on May 25, 2020.
She had dropped her youngest son Fabian off at work at 10am and planned to pick him up at 2pm. But he never saw her alive again.
Colleen returned to her Bicton home when Andre, her second-born son, came to visit.
He told the jury he stayed for a chat and a coffee, dropped off some clothes, and caught his mother up on the latest news about his Instagram influencer girlfriend Grace Piscopo and their young son. Then, Andre claimed, he left.
However, prosecutors said Andre murdered his mother during that visit, possibly by smothering her face with a pillow. He stripped her naked and placed her body into the shower to make it look like she had collapsed from natural causes.
There was no animosity between the pair. There had been no disagreements, no tension, no arguments.
So why did he do it?
Money, greed and an image to uphold
Rebelo was a desperate man, the court was told. He had been studying at university when his girlfriend’s modelling career began taking off.
Piscopo was a beautiful young woman who was in a relationship with Rebelo for about eight years.
What started with photos of herself posted on social media turned into a business where clothing and accessories brands would pay her to wear their items.
More than a million people followed Piscopo on Instagram.
Rebelo often featured in her photos too, and soon the couple realised a lot of money could be made if they turned social media into a full-time gig.
Rebelo deferred the last year of a management degree and agreed to become her assistant. He also agreed to be the primary carer of their son, who was born in 2019.
Andre Rebelo with his then girlfriend Grace Piscopo.Credit: Instagram
From the outside it appeared to be the perfect arrangement, but with the job came the pressure of an image to uphold.
Rebelo and Piscopo would often appear in photographs looking glamorous, posing in front of expensive homes or on luxurious holidays.
It became a carefully curated marketing plan – they needed an expensive house, holidays, car, clothing and accessories to show a lifestyle that others would want to buy into, increasing Piscopo’s popularity and, subsequently, her income.
But the plan only worked if they could afford to maintain the lie – and the truth was that Rebelo and Piscopo were not well-off.
Before their ascent to fame and fortune, Piscopo had been a receptionist at a gym, and Rebelo had been driving delivery trucks for Coles.
They took out a big car loan to buy a Range Rover, and it was a stretch to take on an $880 a week rented home in the Perth suburb of Beaconsfield.
Whether Piscopo knew it was a stretch was unclear, but according to financial evidence presented to the jury, the couple could not afford any of it.
While Piscopo was bringing in big contracts and, by 2020, making six figures, the couple’s outgoings were swallowing everything up.
The Rebelo family (from left): Monique, Andre with then-girlfriend Gracie Piscopo, Fabian and Colleen Rebelo.
They were living on credit cards and personal loans and begging for rent reprieves, reduced loan repayments and government handouts meant for those in hardship during the COVID pandemic.
Debt collectors were closing in.
But both Piscopo and Rebelo told the jury they were not concerned about their financial predicament.
Piscopo said Rebelo told her he was about to make a large amount of money – $500,000 – from cryptocurrency trading.
But that was also a lie.
He told her he had become very successful in the three years he had been trading in cryptocurrency, and convinced her this was a lucrative side-business and a secondary provider of income.
None of it was true.
The self-styled crypto-trader and the promises that were never fulfilled
Rebelo made absolutely nothing in the three years he spent crypto trading.
He used credit cards and personal loans to pump money into the business and, at times, made some profit. But overall, his efforts by early 2020 had yielded a deficit of $22.
Rebelo was then almost 24 years old, a stay-at-home father whose involvement in his girlfriend’s burgeoning business was largely posting mail and answering emails.
She was going places, prosecutors told the jury, becoming ever more successful and was in demand. He was not.
Whether their relationship had always been unequal was not clear, but what came out of his trial was that by 2020, Piscopo had little respect for Rebelo.
Andre Rebelo and then-girlfriend Grace Piscopo (left), and Andre’s mother Colleen Rebelo.
As 2020 dragged on, Rebelo was apparently feeling pressure.
He had told Piscopo a big crypto windfall was coming and, by May, had formulated a plan to deliver on that promise.
But to deliver, he had to kill his mother.
State prosecutor Brett Tooker told the jury the cold plan could only have been born out of extreme desperation.
“It was not just financial need or greed,” he said.
“It’s more nuanced than that.”
Over three days, Rebelo took out three life insurance policies in his mother’s name.
He tried to argue that it was done at his mother’s behest, that she had wanted more than $1 million in cover in the event of her death.
But the jury rejected that as a lie and accepted the prosecution’s argument that Rebelo consulted no one else about the policies.
Using his mother’s details, he insured her life for $1.15 million and made himself the sole beneficiary of the majority of it.
He was paying for those policies, but he couldn’t afford it for long. Five days later, he executed his plan to take her life.
Rebelo and Piscopo often appeared in photographs looking glamorous.Credit: Instagram
Mother’s psychologist became Rebelo’s undoing
Fabian Rebelo, Colleen’s youngest son, found her dead in the shower about 2.30pm on May 25, 2020.
He called paramedics, then his sister and older brother Julian. Andre Rebelo was called last.
Three of the four siblings met at the house as the police arrived.
At no point did Rebelo tell his siblings, the police or paramedics that he had seen his mum alive and well earlier that day.
Three days later, he began trying to claim his mum’s life insurance policies.
Two of the companies refused to take the claim any further because it was too soon after Colleen had died, but one left the door open by asking for documents including a coroner’s report, will and medical information.
Rebelo did not have that information. He was not the executor of his mother’s will – his older brother Julian was.
And the coroner’s office had been communicating with younger brother Fabian, who was notified as Colleen’s next of kin.
Rebelo made a fake will, a fake coroner’s report, and fake medical documents in a desperate attempt to get the insurance company to hand over the money.
He even faked a voicemail from Colleen’s long-time psychologist after hassling her for weeks about calling the insurance company herself to tell them his mother was not suicidal.
But the psychologist, Narina Sidhu, smelled a rat. She called police and told them what Rebelo had been up to.
Police secretly record Rebelo and his girlfriend
When police were alerted to the possibility that Rebelo was fraudulently trying to claim a life insurance policy worth $500,000, a coroner was months away from releasing official findings on Colleen’s cause of death, which ultimately came back inconclusive.
But there were questions about why Rebelo took out three life insurance policies in Colleen’s name just days before her sudden and unexpected death.
Police had little evidence to go on, so they placed a listening device in the bedroom he shared with Piscopo at their Beaconsfield rental and a camera with audio in the couple’s living room.
They listened to conversations for weeks in the months after Colleen’s death, hoping for something that would lead to a conviction for murder.
In one conversation, Piscopo told Rebelo she thought he was downstairs and at home on the day Colleen died.
She told him she thought he was being framed for murder, and cried about being interrogated by the police.
It was clear Piscopo knew nothing of her partner’s plan to kill his mother and cash in her life insurance policies.
On the witness stand, she was asked about Rebelo’s promised $500,000 cryptocurrency windfall and said he told her there was a “hold up with the bank”.
That money never came, and Rebelo was arrested for fraud. It took another two years for him to be charged with his mother’s murder, and two more for him to be convicted.
Rebelo will be sentenced on April 4, 2025.
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