Luay Sako used floor plan of Celeste Manno’s home in lead-up to murder
Before killing the 23-year-old Mernda woman, stalker Luay Sako tracked down a floor plan of her house and did multiple drive-bys before returning with a knife and a hammer.
Police & Courts
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Obsessed stalker Luay Sako hunted down a floor plan online of murder victim Celeste Manno’s home to find her bedroom before he smashed through her window in the dead of night.
The murderous creep bought the knife he used to kill his former colleague three months before that horror night in November 2020, and drove past her Mernda home two or three times after locating it through online searches.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday heard the killer purchased the murder weapon just one day after he was arrested and interviewed by police for breaching an intervention order Ms Manno, 23, had taken out against him.
He told a psychiatrist he got the knife from a supermarket in August so he could use it for “cooking”.
But Dr Rajan Darjee said Sako, 39, was “not involved in very much cooking”, and there were already knives at his home.
“I think the only plausible explanation when he buys the knife, he’s thinking about harming the victim,” said the forensic psychiatrist, who assessed Sako.
Dr Darjee labelled the home drive-bys Sako did weeks before the murder as “reconnaissance”, and said he was “trying to validate the research he’d been doing online” that it was in fact where she lived.
He stated the killer was also looking at “the logistics of what he might have to do if he was to enter the house”, but that he may not have decided at that point to take her life.
However, that decision had been made when he got into his car around 3am on November 16, 2020, with the knife and a hammer, just hours after seeing photos online that Ms Manno has posted with her boyfriend, Chris Ridsdale.
The picture of the happy couple – which Sako was never supposed to see because Ms Manno blocked his account – was perceived by the stalker as Mr Ridsdale “laughing maniacally at him” – a claim the experts later rejected.
Sako later tried to blame a pointy-toothed ugly man called Isha – a proposed hallucination he said sat next to him in the car and told him to “end it”.
But this hallucination was dismissed by multiple psychiatrists as “fake”, a delusion Sako created in a bid to get a mental impairment defence.
Prosecutor Patrick Bourke KC called for Sako, who pleaded guilty to murder, to be given a life sentence for the “unprovoked, savage and cowardly attack” on Ms Manno “in flagrant violation of court orders that were put in place to protect her”.
“The fact of the location of the murder speaks for itself – she’s in her home, in her bedroom, asleep at 3.30am where she lives with her mum, and that’s when the accused decides to go … when she could not be more vulnerable,” he said.
Addressing Sako’s risk of reoffending, Mr Bourke noted he’d been deemed a “moderate to high” risk of stalking again and that if he did so, it came with a “high risk of serious violence”.
It followed evidence from Dr Darjee that even female prison guards could be at risk from Sako, and that it was “plausible” he could stalk an officer if he found them attractive, felt they were special, and if they showed him any kindness or sympathy.
Defence barrister Tim Marsh – dumped by Sako but brought back to the bar table on Tuesday – said a “dreadful” life sentence was “not appropriate in this case”, as that sentence was reserved for a “vanishingly small” number of cases.
“He did not choose to be this way,” he said of Sako.
Mr Bourke replied, “to submit he doesn’t choose to have a personality disorder takes the matter nowhere – no-one does”.
“This is the most serious offence before this court, the most serious example of murder.”
Justice Jane Dixon will hand down her sentence at a later date.
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