A deranged pair of women who killed an autistic teen for the thrill of it in their quest to become serial killers will spend the rest of their lives in prison, a judge said Wednesday.
“You killed for your own pleasure,” Supreme Court of Western Australia Justice Stephen Hall said as he sentenced Jemma Lilley, 26, and Trudi Lenon, 44, to life in prison for their 2016 thrill kill of autistic 18-year-old Aaron Pajich, the BBC reported.
Lilley, a British immigrant working as a shelf-stacker at a supermarket in suburban Australia had a fascination with serial killers since childhood and regarded Freddy Krueger, of the horror franchise “Nightmare on Elm Street,” as a personal hero.
She told friends she wanted to kill someone before she turned 25 and wrote a 200-page online thriller called “Playzone” with a murder theme, in which the main character is named SOS, after Son of Sam.
“It was all about torture and very violent and no empathy for the victims,” said the convicted killer’s former stepmom, Nina Lilley. “She always had an obsession with serial killers as a teenager but said it was a way of venting her frustration.”
Lilley shared her homicidal fantasies with Lenon, a mom of three boys who worked as a “submissive” by the name of Corvina in Perth’s BDSM community.
The pair moved in together in May 2016, when Lilley saw how squalid the home Lenon and her sons lived in.
Police said the women built a dominant-submissive friendship, with Lenon doting obediently on Lilley. They even had matching “SOS” tattoos after the character in Lilley’s book.
After three weeks of living together, the twisted pals hatched a plan to commit the first of what was to be a string of murders.
“I feel as though I cannot rest until the blood or flesh of a screaming victim is gushing out and pooling on the floor…,” Lilley wrote to her friend in an online exchange, prosecutors said.
Lennon allegedly replied: “It definitely is time — I am ready, you are ready.”
The pair agreed their victim would be 18-year-old Aaron Pajich, a trusting computer game fan with Asperger’s syndrome who’d met Lenon while they studied at a vocational college together and he became friends with her 14-year-old son.
On June 13, 2016, Lenon invited the teen to come over to the home — which had a sign reading “Elm Street” on the gate — to swap video games with her son.
One inside, Lilley jumped Pajich and tried to strangle him with a wire, which snapped, prosecutors said.
Then, Lenon pinned the 112-pound teen to the floor as her friend stabbed him three times — twice in the neck and once in the chest.
“[Lilley] murdered Aaron Pajich for the euphoria and exhilaration of it,” said prosecutor James Mactaggart.
The women tried to remove blood stains by cutting out a large square of their carpet and buried him in a shallow grave in their backyard, police said.
“I am seeing things I haven’t seen before. I’m feeling things I haven’t felt before,” Lilley wrote in a text message to her alleged accomplice describing her post-murder euphoria. “It’s incredibly empowering. Thank you.”
Investigators who saw that Pajich had exchanged texts with the women searched their home in June 2016 and discovered the body, along with dozens of knives, a bone saw, scalpels, a machete and an alphabetical handwritten list of torture techniques.
Footage from security camera Lilley had installed to protect her collection of motorcycles showed the teen entering the house the day he died.
It also showed Lenon leaving the house and coming back in carrying a big knife inside a sheath.
After their arrests, the murderous pals accused each other of the murder. Lilley said she was asleep when Lenon murdered the young man, while Lenon admitted to witnessing her roommate commit the crime and helping to conceal it.
But a co-worker of Lilley’s at the supermarket said she confessed to the murder five days after it happened, sounding excited and saying the “police were so dumb” and wouldn’t catch her.
It took the jury two and a half hours to find the women guilty.
After sentencing Wednesday, the victim’s stepmom, Veronica Desmond, said she hoped the women would “rot.”
“I hope you regret what you’ve done,” she said.