As she sits in her safe cell inside a private rehabilitation center in Australia, psychopathic murderer and wannabe serial killer Jemma Lilley might be feeling happy.
Getting caught for the merciless and meticulously planned murder of teenager Aaron Pajich may have halted her plan to continue killing and enter the halls of infamy.
As she awaits sentencing in the relatively comfortable confines of the Melaleuca Remand and Reintegration Facility, protected from a similarly brutal attack her murderous cohort has endured, the 26-year-old can reflect on a life which seems to have led to this moment.
Just 6 miles away from Lilley, in a secure maximum-security wing at Perth’s Fiona Stanley Hospital, Trudi Lenon is recovering from a boiling-water attack by a fellow inmate.
It was Lilley who organized and carried out the strangling and stabbing “thrill kill” murder of Pajich on June 13, 2016, and his burial under a freshly tiled patio in the yard of the house she shared with Lenon, dubbed “Elm Street.”
But it is Lenon, 44, a mother of three and a bondage submissive, who was incarcerated in the maximum-security Bandyup Women’s Prison, a far more dangerous facility, where she was attacked.
On Monday, as Lenon waited in line to receive medication, a female inmate poured freshly boiled water over her back, shoulders, breasts, neck, arms and fingers, causing severe burns.
The attack brought to light Lilley’s comparatively protected incarceration — with personal support officer — in the Melaleuca unit, which focuses on “reducing reoffending, education and early release.”
But as The Australian reported, she now faces the prospect of being moved if she is sentenced to serve time in prison. After being found guilty of murder last November, Lilley and Lenon are to be sentenced next month and face the prospect of life in prison.
Their pasts show it was Lilley, more than Lenon, whose life was a dress rehearsal for the terrible murder.
In Lilley’s sick mind, 18-year-old Pajich’s cruel murder was a glamorous fantasy with her as a serial-killer star.
The young, tattoo-covered, motorbike-riding British immigrant may have worked a humble job in a Perth supermarket, but she held secret obsessions — for suffocation, castration, force-feeding, whipping and scalping. Her ghastly stash of weapons, tools and images reveal she believed she was starring in her own murder movie.
Lilley grew up in England, and as her former stepmother, Nina Lilley, revealed, she was sinister and odd as a child, obsessed with serial killers and murder.
Nina, from Stamford in Lincolnshire, lived with her then-husband, Richard, and stepdaughter, Jemma, until the relationship broke down. Nina left the family home because she was so disturbed by Lilley’s behavior, which seemed to worsen before she left the UK, the Sun reported. Jemma was dyslexic but determined and eventually finished writing a violent and disturbing book.
“The book she wrote was a big problem, it was called ‘Playzone,’ about this character SOS and I found it very disturbing,” Nina said. “At the beginning, I said, ‘Fair enough, you want to write a horror story,’ but I didn’t like the contents of it.”
“It was all about torture and very violent and no empathy for the victims.”
“She always had an obsession with serial killers as a teenager but she said it was a way of venting her frustration.”
Jemma, who lacked personal warmth or emotion, was passionate or at least determined to get “Playzone” published. In reality, it was 200 pages of badly written prose littered with spelling mistakes and repetitive scenes of pain and torture.
Nina said Jemma, who was fixated on knives, would talk about “Playzone’s” main character, a serial killer called SOS, and quote from the book — talk that always put Nina “on edge.”
SOS is named after Son of Sam, serial killer David Berkowitz, who murdered six people in a 1970s killing spree which terrified New York.
One passage from “Playzone” reveals bloodlust and a desire for power and notoriety.
“I feel as though I cannot rest until the blood or the flesh of a screaming, pleading victim is gushing out and pooling on the floor,” the passage reads.
“Until all the roads and streets are streamed red and abandoned and the fear in the back of everyone’s minds and on the tongue of each human that’s left standing is SOS.”
SOS was the charismatic leader of a “murder cult” of devotees called maggots who tortured and murdered to please him.
Jemma hoped “Playzone,” written under the pseudonym Syn Demon, would make her rich and inspire a cultish computer game. In the book, SOS wore a scary mask, a version of which Nina said Lilley’s father helped his daughter make.
Between the age of 11 and 16, Jemma attended Casterton Business and Enterprise College 12 miles from Stamford in Rutland, where she studied gaming design.
It would later emerge that the highly intelligent but socially awkward Jemma would unnerve many with her presence, and she was advised to “see somebody.”
In 2010, at 18 years of age, Lilley packed up and flew to Australia on a two-year visitor visa.
In Perth’s outer suburbs, Jemma met a gay Australian man, Gordon Galbraith, who agreed to marry her to help secure permanent residence.
The two were friends, with Lilley nicknaming Galbraith “Gacy,” because she claimed he resembled American serial killer John Wayne Gacy.
Her arrival in Australia inspired Lilley to write on her favorite topic for the US magazine Serial Killer, contributing stories on historic Perth killer Eric Edgar Cooke and the perpetrator of the Port Arthur massacre, Martin Bryant.
She continued to talk about “Playzone,” which had its own Facebook page.
Lilley posted online in 2011: “Let me introduce you to your friendly neighborhood serial killer … SOS, what better reasons for pure white snow in England.”
Galbraith died in August 2014 and it was later alleged in court that the death certificate had listed his marital status as “separated,” affecting Lilley’s migration application.
Asked at her murder trial if this had made her angry, Lilley said she and Galbraith had only been separated for a few weeks before his death.
By early 2016, Lilley was working as a night shift supervisor at a supermarket in Palmyra in Perth’s southern suburbs. Through a friend of Galbraith’s she met Trudi Lenon, who had operated as a sexual submissive in Perth’s fantasy bondage scene.
Lilley gave Lenon a copy of “Playzone” to read, and the pair bonded over their mutual desire to lose weight.
They moved in together in a suburban house in Broughton Way, Orelia, about 1.5 miles from where she had lived with Galbraith. Lilley dubbed the house “Elm Street” after the 1984 slasher film “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” and decorated it with horror movie paraphernalia.
A Chucky doll and a set of knives sat next to her computer, while one of her motorbikes had the registration number “1SOS1” after the character in her book.
At her trial, Lilley would say she was “asexual,” but the court heard of at least one intimate liaison. A friend of Gordon Galbraith’s, Kim Taylor, gave evidence the two women strangled and cut each other for pleasure, which Lilley denied.
She told the court she had flirted with but “turned down” prosecution witness Matt Stray, a married father who told the jury that she confessed to him that she killed Pajich.
Lilley also worked as a tattoo artist and gave Lenon an “SOS” tattoo, matching the one Lilley had on herself.
Lenon had fallen in love with Lilley, in a relationship which the submissive Lenon was called “Corvina,” and she called Lilley “SOS.” In text messages between the two, the lines between reality and fantasy were becoming blurred.
Lilley began plotting her first SOS murder, with Lenon as her accomplice.
Inside the Orelia house, Lilley prepared a secret room, with the walls covered in blue canvas and black plastic, with a gurney on the tiled floor.
Lilley had a tool belt with various knives and scalpels as well as a bone saw.
CCTV images from Bunnings Warehouse show the pair purchasing hundreds of gallons of hydrochloric acid, to dissolve body parts, and concrete to cover a shallow grave.
On June 13, 2016, after dropping her children at school, Lenon telephoned Pajich, a friend of her 13-year-old son, and arranged to meet him at Rockingham Shopping Center.
The plan was to have him over to the Orelia house to download computer software.
Lenon had studied at college with Pajich, an impressionable teenager who was on the autism spectrum. CCTV installed at “Elm Street” by Lilley showed Pajich following Lenon and Lilley inside, and Lenon locking the gate.
Pajich was served coffee and sat down at the computer.
According to trial evidence, as he installed games on Lilley’s computer, she approached him from behind and garrotted him with a wire until it broke, then stabbed him three times.
The house CCTV then recorded Lenon walking out the back door with a knife.
At some point, Pajich’s body was buried in a shallow ditch dug in the back yard, covered with wet cement and bright red tiles over the top.
Lilley sent text messages to Lenon describing her post-murder euphoria.
“I am seeing things I haven’t seen before. I’m feeling things I haven’t felt before. It’s incredibly empowering. Thank you,” Lilley wrote.
Lenon replied, “You’re welcome SOS.”
Pajich’s family reported him as a missing person, and police investigations uncovered Lenon as the last person to telephone him on the morning of his disappearance.
Eight days later, detectives arrived at “Elm Street.”
In the house, police found Lilley’s knives and a handwritten list of torture methods, such as branding, force-feeding, foot roasting, genital mutilation and Chinese water torture.
A pot in the garage had what looked like meat submerged in acid, in a suspected experiment. A section of carpet had also been cut out of Lilley’s bedroom. In the back yard, they found the freshly laid tiled slab.
Underneath, Pajich’s body was fully clothed and wrapped in a white drop sheet with plastic wrap covering his face. A post-mortem would find defensive knife wounds on his hands, consistent with an attempt to fight off his attacker.
It took three days for police to discover the concealed room, after sledgehammering a lock off the door. Inside, they found a shopping cart cut down to its base, with what appeared to be human hair around one of the wheels, and possible bloodstains.
They believe the room was used to store Pajich’s remains before he was buried.
Police arrested Lilley and Lenon, who were both denied bail. Last November, a jury found the killers guilty of murder.
Pajich’s family, who had sat through the trial, called for both women to receive a life sentence. His mother, Sharon Pajich, branded them “disgusting animals.”
“They have taken an innocent boy from his loved ones,” she said. “He was full of life, he loved life.”
“They can rot for all I care … lifetime, no parole. They don’t deserve the air they breathe in.”