Jamie Lee Dolheguy wasn’t born a killer, but her tragic and abusive life moulded her to be one
An evil lives within killer Jamie Lee Dolheguy, but was it always there or did it manifest from the years of abuse and neglect that marred her childhood.
National
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Jamie Lee Dolheguy wasn’t born a killer.
And she never wanted to be one.
But in the 18 years it took her to become one, her fate became a seemingly tragic and unavoidable inevitability.
Her childlike personality and broad smile, on show daily during her recent Supreme Court trial, mask the evil that hides within.
It is an evil neither she or medical experts have been able to suppress.
And it is an evil that terrifies her.
“I feel like there’s two of me,” she told police after killing Maulin Rathod in July last year.
“I argue with myself every day. One side of me wants to go bomb the planet, the other side of me wants to go and swim with my support workers, and they fight 24-7.
“But it’s me, it’s me fighting with me, it’s like a war zone with myself. And so many times I try and explain that to people, that’s as – as best as I can explain it is I have proper two personalities.
“One’s mean, one’s nice, they’re both me, and only one of them I like and that’s the nice me.
“The other me I’m terrified of.”
From the age of 14 Dolheguy was subjected to round the clock care, because she was deemed too dangerous to be left alone.
On more than 100 occasions she was hospitalised for self harm.
On other occasions she lashed out at support workers.
“She’s not like you and me,” her defence barrister Sharon Lacy told the jurors who ultimately acquitted her of Mr Rathod’s murder, but found her guilty of manslaughter.
During the almost month long trial Ms Lacy and her team didn’t just represent Dolheguy in court – they walked her through every step of the process.
Each day they sat with her and explained what to expect, how to cope with difficult testimony, and regularly told her “you’ve got this”.
Defence teams don’t always form such strong bonds with their clients, in deed expert barristers advise against it.
But in an otherwise friendless world, Dolheguy’s legal team seemed all she had.
As she sat in court colouring in, or making origami, or drawing, her team worked on her behalf to convince the jury that while Dolheguy killed Mr Rathod, she didn’t mean to.
“She’s severely mentally impaired. She has a profound psychopathology. She experiences her inner world as a kind of chaotic torrent of poorly organised thoughts and feelings, much of the time, and she’s survived a neglect and abuse that is simply unfathomable,” Ms Lacy says.
“She was raised by a system of intense assistance from many many services. A system that no doubt has saved her life.
“She has no loving guide in her life to help her navigate her way through the world. She has no functional family or peers. She has no one but professionals in her life.”
It was that way for Dolheguy ever since she was a little girl.
Such was the level of abuse she suffered, that when it was outlined during her trial jurors were moved to tears.
Dolheguy wasn’t even at school when she witnessed the shocking assault of her mother by her father, who was ultimately jailed.
She herself suffered repeated heinous abuse at the hands of family members.
Such was her desperation to escape the real world, she began to completely dissociate from reality and for a while believed she was a werewolf.
On one occasion, after running away from home, she was found acting like a cat, hiding out at a swamp.
On another occasion she had stripped down naked and climbed up a tree in her backyard.
“She has terrible thoughts in her head. Thoughts that repulse her. She feels that no one believes her and she tries to get help,” Ms Lacy says.
In the weeks before she killed Mr Rathod, Dolheguy outlined those thoughts in terrifying detail.
She had turned 18 and her round the clock care had been wound back, despite her insistence she couldn’t be alone.
“Sometimes when no one is looking my demon comes out to play,” she wrote on social media.
“I try and fight her but she just gets stronger and she says to me ‘life hurts, life is pain, there’s no point fighting it you know it’s true so why try and make things right when you can just end it all now’.
“No one will care no one likes (you) that’s why you have no friends, they say they care, they say they love you but it’s all lies.
“My demon is sneaky and she won’t ever let anyone stop her because if they do she will hurt them even if I tell her to stop she doesn’t care.”
Dolheguy also detailed her life of abuse, describing how it crushed her innocence.
“Mother always got angry she hit us (with) sticks poles belts whatever she could find she never even showed a glimpse of sorry she had no heart,” she wrote.
She said people failed to intervene, and instead simply turned a blind eye.
It left her with a severe personality disorder, leading psychiatric and psychological experts to class her as among the most troubled people they’d ever worked with.
“I was assaulted by teachers and all the kids in the school I told mother she didn’t care she said it was all my fault everything was my fault.
“I thought child abuse was normal. I live in fear afraid of what’s behind the corner, my heart is black I no longer feel the emotions of happiness unless I see someone else suffer.”
“I tell my psych every day that I think I’m sick they said I’m fine they said I was self diagnosing.”
Until she killed Mr Rathod, Dolheguy had become used to a system that would intervene to contain her when she couldn’t contain herself.
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Carers, police, paramedics and hospital workers were always on hand to intervene.
On the night she arranged to meet with Mr Rathod, who she’d met online dating, she had an irrepressible urge to kill.
She’d forgotten her medication and warned her on-call carers she was having bad temptations.
“I knew I was going to kill him if he came over,” she later told police.
When he arrived, she warned him “I’m psychopathic” and hoped he run away.
But he didn’t, and shortly later he was dead.
Summing up her case before the jury Ms Lacy said simply: “Ms Dolheguy is not a murderer.”
“She’s a deeply troubled girl. A girl whose mind was a torrent of terrifying thoughts and emotions. Those emotions and thoughts and her fractured sense of self were the product of a childhood of neglect and abuse. You should find her not guilty of murder.”
Dolheguy remains in custody, and will return to court in April for a presentence hearing.
Originally published as Jamie Lee Dolheguy wasn’t born a killer, but her tragic and abusive life moulded her to be one