Nicholas John Crilley sentencing: Torture victim reveals new hell after banker’s brutality

The brave woman left close to death after 23 days of sickening abuse at the hands of a “sadistic” Brisbane banker says she fears the physical and emotional scars will mean she never has a friend, a lover or a job again, telling how people look as her like she’s "a monster”.

THE brave woman who endured sickening and inhumane abuse for weeks at the hands of Nicholas Crilley says she fears the physical and emotional scars will mean she never has a friend, a lover or a job again.

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told the sentencing hearing of the man who cruelly disfigured her that three years after her attack, that she remains frightened that her face will never look the same again - even with reconstructive surgery.

BRINK OF DEATH: Sadistic banker inflicts 23-day torture terror

As Crilley listened and watch via video link from jail, the woman described how her facial scars make her “feel unworthy of human interactions”, she said.

Strangers “look at me like I’m a monster” every time she leaves her home, she said.

Simple dreams like fulfilling her wish of marriage to a man she loves, having children, feeling the warmth of a kiss, or even drinking out of a straw, may be out of reach, she fears, due to her injuries.

“Part of my dream as a little girl was finding someone to love and marry,” she told the court, saying Crilley has “taken away” her future as she suffers daily nerve pain down her legs.

“I can only explain as hundreds of small ants biting me,” she said of the pain.

Nicholas John Crilley is facing the prospect of life in prison for torturing a woman for three weeks by setting her alight, then stabbing her in the head with a screwdriver - leaving her at the “brink of death” with her face infested with maggots.

She spoke of how it took her seven weeks in Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital in 2017 to gain the strength to be able to look at her face in the mirror or even look at her own body - for fear of what she might see.

“When I finally did, I was so distraught. I didn't look like myself at all. I was unrecognisable,” the woman told the court.

“My whole body throughout hasn’t felt like my own. My own being doesn’t feel like it belongs to me,” she told the court.

She had to learn to walk again because her muscles had wasted, and her legs were so badly burned. The end of her little finger was amputated and she endured weeks of excruciatingly painful treatment for burns across 46 per cent of her body, mostly from chemical burns inflicted during her torture over three weeks.

Surgery to repair her wounds has sadly felt like “being burnt all over again”.

She had been starved for months by Crilley, even before her torture began, and was malnourished when she was hospitalised.

Her teeth are broken, possibly swallowed when Crilley beat her, her once long hair is missing due to her burned scalp and she now wears a wig, and the bridge of her nose has been removed because it was shattered into pieces, along with broken facial bones which hold her eyes in place.

Her skin is marked from repeated skin grafts, she has “large divots” in her skull where skin tissue turned black and died, and became infested by maggots.

And she fears she may need surgery to place a metal plate in her head to stop her eyes “sinking further back”.

Her eyeballs are scarred by burning liquids, which has reduced her vision, and she has burns to 46 per cent of her body after Crilley poured boiling water over her, later burning her with the highly flammable liquid acetone.

Kissing is made difficult because Crilley split her upper lip in half, leaving it disfigured, and Brisbane’s hot and humid climate has been hard to endure while wearing compression garments for her burns, and even now her body struggles to regulate temperature, so exercise and even showering is difficult.

Just as bad as her physical wounds are her psychological scars, she says. She was once a “very smiley and bubbly personality” but Crilley’s actions left her weak, vulnerable and horribly disfigured.