Woman who beheaded mother gets 21 years in prison
Jessica Camilleri, who was found guilty of the decapitation killing of her own mother, has been sentenced. WARNING: GRAPHIC
WARNING: EXTREMELY GRAPHIC
Jessica Camilleri has received a sentence of 21 years and seven months for the brutal decapitation killing of her mother Rita in 2019.
The offender sobbed and then people in the court room clapped after the long sentence was delievered, the judge saying the 27-year-old did not deserve a concession for her mental disabilities.
Justice Helen Wilson said that due to the “extreme” nature of Camilleri’s crimes, “a stern sentence is called for”.
Her judgment detailed how Camilleri had squeezed and prodded her mother’s eyeball after removing it and engaged in “acts of decapitation and cannibalism” following the killing.
The NSW Supreme Court heard she had indulged in such “macabre curiosity” handling her mother’s body parts after beheading her that her crime was the one of “gravest examples” of manslaughter, her sentencing hearing heard on Friday.
She was sentenced to serving a non-parole period of at least 16 years and two months.
Justice Helen Wilson found that Camilleri had practised “grave and mutilating depravity” when killing and decapitating her 57-year-old mother Rita in July 2019.
She found that Camilleri - who she said had attacked female prisoners since her incarceration, including throwing hot tea on one inmate - was not remorseful about the killing.
After the brutal assault and dropping her mother’s head twice on the footpath outside their house, Camilleri had shown only concern for herself and for her future welfare, not for her mother, the court heard.
She had killed her mother in a fit of rage to prevent being sent to hospital for psychiatric treatment after a series of acts, including threatening to “shred” the heads of strangers.
In sentencing Camilleri for killing her mother in 2019, Justice Helen Wilson found that she had committed “as serious a form of manslaughter as possible”.
“She understood the nature of her act when stabbing her mother and clearly knew it was wrong,” Her Honour said.
“She ... fully understood the nature and gravity of her actions.”
Rita Camilleri, whose body had more than 90 defensive wounds to her hands, “must have been in extreme pain and both shocked and terrified by what was being done to her by her own beloved child”, Justice Wilson found.
This was made worse by the presence of a four-year-old - known only as Child A - who Jessica referred to as “the little bastard” and had fought off and wounded after the child tried to jump on her and stop her.
Rita Camilleri had succumbed to the attack by her “much bigger daughter” after calling an ambulance following a series of “deeply troubling” incidents.
These included threats of decapitation to strangers Jessica called at random, saying “I will come over to your house with a knife in my hand .. and shred your head to the neck”, the court heard.
Camilleri was originally charged with murder but was found guilty of manslaughter by a jury last December.
Rita Camilleri died in a brutal assault at the St Clair home in western Sydney she shared with Jessica on the night of July 20, 2019 in which Jessica beheaded and mutilated her mother’s body.
Mother and daughter had dined on Red Rooster before Jessica demanded a second delivery from the food outlet then turned on Rita, who had planned to have her daughter taken into mental health care.
Jessica dragged her mother into the kitchen by the hair, attacked her with steak knives, beheading her and removing her tongue, eyeballs and nose.
The week-long trial has heard gruesome and graphic police evidence, crime scene bodycam video and a police interview with Ms Camilleri, her face still coated with her mother’s blood and her hands bagged.
Ms Camilleri has been in custody since she was arrested, covered in blood and standing near her mother’s decapitated head which she had dropped on a footpath outside a neighbour’s house.
Her trial was played a wild police recording in which she is heard to say, “Mum’s head is on the path,” and asks if it can be sewn back on.
Ms Camilleri then appears to tell officers how she “chopped her head off with a knife” and then asks them continually if the head can be sewn back on, or some miracle worked to bring her mother back to life.
On the police recording, Ms Camilleri can be heard saying: “My mum’s head is on the concrete over there.”
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“Can you bring someone back to life if they don’t have a head? Can you bring her back to life?
“It was like from the neck and the back of my neck … are you sure you won’t be able to bring her back to life?”
When one officer tell her no, she continues, “Can I ask you is my mum dead? You just can’t bring her back to life?
“Did you find it? … it’s on the path.
“I won’t get the death penalty or anything?”
She continues: “Can I ask you, did they find the head? Has she gone, you just can’t bring her back?
“There’s nothing you can do, she’s a goner? They can’t restart her heart? ‘Cos I know doctors can do miracles they can’t resew her head?”
Police officer: “That’s a bit of a stretch.”
Ms Camilleri: “The nurses can’t do a miracle and bring her back? I think her eyes and her tongue came out.
“I thought doctors can do miracle surgeries and put the head back on. No?”
The trial was played a police interview with Camilleri the day after her mother’s death.
In the interview, Ms Camilleri said of her mother, “half her nose fell off in the struggle” and when she left the scene, she had two mobile phones in her left hand and her mother’s head in the other.
Forensic pathologist Dr Jennifer Pokorny found in her autopsy of Rita Camilleri, the 57-year-old had suffered monumental injuries.
Dr Pokorny told the court that Rita had sustained “innumerable. at least 100 stab wounds over her head” and “innumerable overlapping stab wounds associated with decapitation to the neck”.
She had died from “multiple stab wounds with decapitation” at the C2 vertebra at the top of her neck.
At Camilleri’s sentencing hearing last month, her harrowing triple-0 call to police was played.
In the call, played during Camilleri’s seven-day trial, she can be heard asking for police and an ambulance to be sent to the home to respond to a “life or death situation”.
She passes the phone to a puzzled neighbour who briefly speaks with the operator before a seemingly coherent Camilleri comes back to explain the situation.
“Mum has had enough of me because I admit I’ve been a challenge and it’s this ongoing thing has been going for months,” she said,
“Anyway she had enough of me, she grabbed me by the hair and dragged me from my room all the way to the kitchen. She got a knife and she tried to stab me with it, and I grabbed the knife and thought she was going to stab me so I stabbed her back.
“And I was so heated up with anger, I just kept stabbing and stabbing and stabbing her and I took off her head.”
The trial had heard Camilleri was suffering from several mental illnesses when she killed her mother and cut out her eyeballs, tongue and nose.
She would tell police she got the idea to decapitate her mother – who was her sole carer – “from the movies” she obsessively watched including the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Jeepers Creepers.
Her older sister Kristy Torrisi delivered a tearful victim impact statement, saying her mother was “butchered like she was nothing”.
“I wouldn’t wish this pain upon anyone,” she said. “My heart feels incredible pain day in, day out.”
Ms Torrisi slammed her sister’s refusal to accept help from family and doctors, saying it was Camilleri’s own decisions that “led her here”.
“My mother was taken from me by the selfish hands of my own sister,” she said.
“She was killed and butchered like she was nothing, all because of a fit of rage.
“The aftermath of the events that occurred that day have left myself, my family, my son and anyone who had the privilege of knowing my mother in absolute loss.
“I will never forgive (Jessica) nor forget a single thing about that evening, because Jessica was well aware of the help our entire family extended to her, and tried to give her from a young age.”