By Jordan Baker
Paul Thijssen killed Lilie James to punish her for rejecting him, to protect his carefully curated public image as a desirable, admirable man, and to hide his fear and fragility, experts have told an inquest into their deaths. They believe nothing could have been done to stop him.
Thijssen murdered James, his 21-year-old sports coach colleague with whom he’d had a short relationship, in the toilets of St Andrew’s Cathedral School. In the days after she broke up with him, he rehearsed his plans to kill her, purchased a hammer from a hardware store, and lay in wait.
Paul Thijssen killed Lilie James to punish her for rejecting him, experts say.Credit: LinkedIn
Thijssen left no clues about why he did what he did. There’s little online record, as he appears to have taken both their phones when he jumped off a cliff on the night of the murder, and many of his messages were on Snapchat, so disappeared.
The only insight into his frame of mind came from interviews with friends. On Wednesday, the inquest into their deaths heard from two experts in criminal behaviour to try to determine his motive.
They said he had no history or hint of mental health issues. Thijssen did not meet the criteria for narcissistic or antisocial personality disorder, even though he might have had narcissistic traits. He’d had no previous history – that anyone knew about, at least – of violence or stalking.
He wasn’t aggressive in his daily life. He wasn’t threatening. He didn’t have a record of struggling to manage his emotions. In fact, he was the opposite; Thijssen was smart, socially sophisticated, and able to function well in group dynamics, such as high-level sporting teams. If anything, he avoided conflict and took negative feedback well.
The clues to his behaviour, they said, lay not in the grandiose self-belief of a narcissist, but rather in deep-seated sense of inadequacy and fear. He papered over that by carefully managing the facade he presented to the world. Being rejected romantically – first by his long-term girlfriend, who broke up with him a few years earlier, then by James – threatened the narrative he worked so hard to build.
Lilie James was more socially adroit than Thijssen.Credit: Facebook
Dr Katie Seidler, a clinical and forensic psychologist who has worked with sexual and violent offenders in NSW Corrective Services, described Thijssen as a man with a fragile and vulnerable sense of self, “who probably felt pervasively inadequate, and potentially unworthy”.
He covered up his sense of inadequacy, she said, by “projecting an image of perfection, and having it all together, and being the great guy that was competent in everything … I think he was really driven by the desire to control the public narrative and was afraid what people would think of him if a different narrative came out.” He often lied.
Thijssen’s lies included that he was studying a master’s of teaching (he was doing nothing), that he’d had a fling in Bali while James spent time in Sydney with another man, and that he had a stalker. They were symptoms of his need to maintain a facade.
Seidler attributed Thijssen’s decision to murder, and his calculated preparations for the killing, to his need to maintain the facade, and his fear that James would challenge his narrative of their break-up. He told friends that the relationship was casual, but his behaviour suggested otherwise, and her rejection of him cut deep.
He also liked to maintain control, and James was challenging that. She was, said Associate Professor Danny Sullivan, a consultant forensic psychiatrist from Melbourne University, more socially adroit than him. “She was setting the narrative,” he said, by deciding to break up with Thijssen. “She was stating what she wanted and didn’t want.
A floral tribute outside St Andrew’s Cathedral School in memory of Lilie James shortly after her death.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone
“I think deep inside he was very wounded, potentially humiliated that he was not attractive enough to her.”
Both said Thijssen’s behaviour towards James and towards his former girlfriend fit the definition of coercive control and gendered, intimate partner violence. His former girlfriend was significantly younger than him; they’d met when he coached her early high school hockey team, although did not officially begin dating until she was older.
He’d ingratiated himself with her parents, joined her church, and quickly began pressuring her to marry him. His response to her eventual break-up, amid increasingly suffocating and controlling behaviour, was extreme; he booked a ticket from Holland to Australia that day.
He showed up at her church, then took her to a park, where he punched a tree because he “couldn’t punch the one thing I wanted to”. He spied on her house for two mornings in row, before being threatened with an apprehended violence order by her father.
His reaction to James’ rejection was even more extreme. Rather than dealing with his feelings, he began planning to kill her. He even took two weapons to the scene (he used a hammer, but there was also a knife in his bag). The experts said even the frenzied violence of the attack might have been calculated, rather than a loss of control.
Seidler believes the fact that Thijssen stayed in the bathroom for so long after the murder – an hour and 12 minutes – supports this theory. He didn’t stagger away, or shout or scream. Instead, he calmly texted James’ father with her phone.
The blood spatter analysis shows he did not pace in the bathroom. “That does not suggest to me that he was in any way shape or form highly distressed or dysregulated emotionally,” she said.
Neither Sullivan nor Seidler think there were any points at which an intervention could have stopped Thijssen from killing James. His planning was well hidden.
At the end of their evidence, counsel assisting the coroner, Jennifer Single SC, asked both if they had a theory about why Thijssen killed James. “At its foundational level, this is a man who couldn’t cope with how he was feeling and he neutralised that threat by killing another person,” said Seidler.
Sullivan had a similar view. “It can only be taken that he had formed a hatred of Ms James based upon the fact that she had rejected him, and he punished her by killing her.”
Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.