A Case Almost Too Gruesome To Mention - Rita Camilleri - No.16

foreign this case takes place in Sydney Australia on the 20th of July 2019. Jessica camilleri was a 25 year old woman who lived in Sydney with her mother growing up her parents had noticed that she was delayed in walking and talking and later teachers noticed her delays in Reading Writing and Mathematics over the years she had been diagnosed by various doctors who all give various answers to her issues she had been diagnosed with autism OCD depression and ADHD although some doctors believed she had schizophrenia Jessica was badly bullied at school she struggled to make friends

and she was frequently mocked and teased by her peers and she would often respond to the bullying with violence in year 9 in school Jessica was suspended for biting a boy and pulling his girlfriend's hair the following year she attacked a school girl and was expelled it's reported that Jessica had a particular dislike towards her female peers in her home life she would often have conflict with her family members following a fight with her parents she was forced to live with her grandmother with hopes that this may help to solve the issues however shortly after

moving in she attacked her auntie so was made to go back and live with her parents again whilst living at home again Jessica was constantly verbally aggressive to her parents the stresses she brought upon her family resulted in her parents breaking up and her father leaving home Jessica's mother Rita did everything she could for Jessica and supported her despite her husband leaving despite the problems Jessica would cause Rita assured her daughter that she would not be institutionalized starting in 2012 Jessica committed a series of assaults on one occasion she saw a woman holding her baby

Jessica walked over and pulled the woman's hair six other such instances were reported to the police where Jessica would approach random people and pull their hair the reasons were usually that the person was looking at her in a way that she didn't like Jessica would also develop a very strange and disturbing hobby she enjoyed calling random numbers to harass and threaten people on the other end the kind of threats you would make was a sign of what was to come one person who was a victim of these calls was a woman named Natalie Naylor in

2015 Natalie received 20 phone calls from Jessica and in these calls she would threaten to kill Natalie's husband Jessica would say I will come over to your door with a knife in my hand and slit your throat myself I will run a knife right through your neck and cut off your whole head she did this to numerous people another person was a man named and Matthew for over 12 months in 2018 Jessica would call Matthew's personal numbers and business numbers at least a hundred times a day in these calls she would threaten to stab him

and cut his head off urita was made aware of these very disturbing phone calls however despite her trying she was unable to stop Jessica from placing the calls despite Rita doing everything she could for her daughter Jessica would be constantly rude and aggressive towards her she would often scream and swear at her even in public in June of 2018 Jessica's aggression baganta escalate further her psychiatrist noted that she had a very low impulse control and would lash out and act without thinking of any consequences she was diagnosed with intermittent explosive disorder and was prescribed antidepressants

and Valium although by December Jessica declared that she no longer wanted to take any Medicare vision and now we arrive to July of 2019 at this point Jessica and Rita lived alone together her older sister had moved out and married and of course her father had left home a number of years prior and Jessica was seeing a therapist for her anger and depression however there was little Improvement on the 19th of July Jessica made a number of phone calls to a random man she met her usual threats of decapitation and told him that she hopes

he gets cancer and dies Rita learned of this and sought help from the police in an attempt to get Jessica to stop this behavior that same day Rita took Jessica to the station and an officer gave Jessica a caution instructing her to never call people and make threats ever again Rita and Jessica then left the station and made their way home together the following day on the 20th of July a young relative of Rita and Jessica's came over to stay with them this relative was only four years of age so they are unnamed because they

were only four years old Rita needed to provide more supervision care and attention to the child but this angered Jessica she was bitterly jealous of the attention the child was receiving in the evening Rita ordered a takeaway for Jessica and the young relative who was staying with them for the night soon after Jessica told her mother that she was experiencing a severe stomachache and needed a doctor the doctor arrived at around 9 30 Rita let her inside so she could inspect Jessica's symptoms however Jessica was on the phone to a fast food restaurant trying to

order a second serving the doctor would later say that Rita tried to get Jessica to hang up on the phone but Jessica refused and instead continued to speak on the phone she began to ask the attendant on the line to tell her her that he loved her the doctor waited for some time but after around half an hour it became clear that Jessica would not get off the phone so the doctor left she was also sure that Jessica had faked these symptoms after the doctor left Rita made a call to her eldest daughter who was

named Christy Rita told Christy that she was worried for Jessica and believed that now was the time to have her institutionalized however this is something that Jessica really didn't want Rita walked over to grab her mobile phone and began to call the emergency services to have Jessica be taken to a psychiatric hospital but before she could Jessica approached her and grabbed the phone the two engaged in a brief struggle before Rita then made her way to another room to grab a different phone but Jessica had followed her into the room Jessica knocked her mother to

the ground grabbed her by their hair and dragged her into the kitchen she then opened a drawer pulled out a knife and sat on top of her mother to restrain her Jessica then proceeded to stab Rita in the face head and neck multiple times the child relative who was staying over heard all of the commotion he went to see what was happening only to witness the horrific sight this young four-year-old boy bravely took action he jumped on Jessica and tried to get her to stop attacking Rita and took the lid of a toy box and

struck her over their head of course this Brave Young Lad was far too young to do anything to stop Jessica from attacking Rita but the fact that he tried to do something at that age is incredible Jessica pushed the child away and slashed his face from his ear to his cheek the child retreated and due to the horrific scenes he had witnessed he began to vomit a number of times it's also likely that Rita was still alive when the young boy had tried to defend her Jessica had used such force in stabbing her mother that

she broke four knives each time one broke she would grab another in total Jessica stabbed her mother in the face and head over 100 times and had used a serrated knife to decapitate her to a fully sever Rita's head Jessica began to twist and pull until it became fully detached by the time she was done Jessica was covered from head to toe in her mother's blood she picked up her mother's head and walked to the next door neighbor's home but she dropped her mother's head on the pavement on the way Jessica knocked on the neighbor's

door and asked them if they could call the emergency services for her she then turned around and returned home and called the Emergency Services herself here is the call hello this is Alison from police emergency we just received a call from this number uh yes I need you to get the ambulance and the police out here immediately so which address I need you this is our immediate our life or death situation which suburb or town is that in thank you thank question what's the nearest Crossroad please um what's the nearest one Lisbon can you can

you talk to the neighbor on Blaster can you just talk to him because on my hands bleeding here thank you can you talk to us uh what happens I don't know it was just a home but she just came in screaming for help and when suddenly I opened the door she said that just help me and call the police or ambulance and she said to me yeah she had a fight with her mom I think okay um so did she just say her mum tried to stab her I don't know because I think what killed

her yes can you tell them to come immediately yeah can you please just come immediately please okay so she believes that she may have killed her her mother yeah she said like this and where is this where you are at the moment so me yeah so where are you at the moment is she with you at the moment yeah she's um in the front yard of my house okay all right uh so how old is her mother how old is your mother how old is she 57 57 so is she not conscious nah you try

to kill me okay then you didn't check if she was breathing yeah kid in there could you come with me please no I can't go sorry about that and is her mother severely bleeding no because we didn't go to the her house because outside of my house because I can't go there okay yeah okay so do you know what the lady's name is her name Jessica connollary is that your name is that the lady's name who called yes yes can I talk to her um lady can you hear me yes I can your name's Jessica

my my fingers are broken okay mum has had enough of me because I admit I've been a challenge and this this ongoing thing has been going for months and months anyway um she she had enough of me she grabbed me by the hair and dragged me from my room all the way to the kitchen and she got a knife and she tried to stab me with it and I grabbed the knife off her because I 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 I took off her head her head is um I ran to my neighbor not this neighbor I'm my other neighbor before this one who's on the other side he was at work uh I told him to call the ambulance and the police immediately he's going to do so but no one's at home because everyone in the family is at work now so he wasn't as much help he said all I can do is I'll call the police and the ambience to my address and I thought

it was going to take a bit of time so I ran for my other neighbor on the other side um and I had my mum's head in my hand I know this sounds insane but I was taking it for evidence to show the neighbor in the struggle in the frustration I didn't know what I was doing I'll cut her head off I chopped her head off with a knife okay what type of knife was it um there was all sorts of knives it was about um seven knives seven knives of stabbing her with a few

of the knives growth when that knife rope I got another one and did the same where's the knives now they're all in the kitchen there's blood everywhere there's blood everywhere and you're outside the house yes yes um the ambulance and the police have rocked up do you want to stay on the phone so that's okay what's your phone number officers arrived on the scene to find Jessica standing outside in a night dress completely covered in blood when the police asked what had happened she told the officers that her mother had tried to kill her with

a knife and claimed that she had defended herself the police apprehended Jessica and inspected the scene inside they found the young four-year-old boy hidden in the living room he was taken to hospital as the cut to his cheek was rather deep he underwent surgery for the cut to his cheek and he also had a small cut to his hand but of course the main damage was psychological the young boy was deeply traumatized by the events that he witnessed that night in the kitchen the police found the lifeless body of Rita her head was also located

outside the home before she was taken away Jessica pointed to where the head was and asked the officers if they would be able to sew her mother's head back onto her shoulders Jessica was taken to the station and was questioned further she said that she had been attacked by her mother and did what she did in self-defense however Jessica had no physical injuries she also only really seemed to care about what would happen to her now and showed little remorse for what she had done crime scene investigators began to examine the scene they were able

to determine from the crime scene that Jessica was lying she had been the aggressor the entire time not Rita Rita had over 90 defensive injuries her hands had been cut to Ribbons in her final moments she desperately tried to defend herself from Jessica but tragically was unable to do so when piecing together what had happened they discovered that Jessica had sliced off the tip of Rita's nose and had also used a knife to pluck out both of her eyes it was clear too that Jessica had held one of the eyes in her hand and squeezed

it Jessica was charged with the murder of Rita while Jessica was awaiting trial she was kept in a facility in this facility she lashed out at a number of women she would usually pull their hair but on one occasion she poured boiling hot water over an inmate the trial began on the 30th of November 2020 the evidence of the brutal crime was read to the jury describing the horrific things Jessica had done to her mother Jessica's Hobbies were also brought up which included the disturbing phone calls but it was also brought up that she was

obsessed with horror movies and two movies in particular The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the Jeepers Creepers she was known to watch these movies on repeat I'm not claiming that movies caused these things to happen I'm just mentioning what was brought up in court and by the media her family friend also came forward and said that Jessica had voiced her concerns about being put into a hospital Jessica told this family friend that she would rather kill someone than return to a psychiatric hospital Jessica's defense team brought up the various mental disorders she had that would have

impaired her ability to control her anger and emotions it was concluded that Jessica had an intellectual disability disorder autism and severe anger issues along with narcissistic features and features of OCD depression anxiety and ADHD however the prosecution brought forward evidence from a psychiatrist that showed that Jessica knew right from wrong when the family of Rita read their Victim Impact statements to the court it was reported that Jessica showed little interest in what they had to say the jury were convinced that Jessica's judgment was impaired by her conditions and as a result of this she was

found guilty of manslaughter and not murder Jessica was sentenced to 21 years and seven months after being convicted Jessica spoke with a forensic psychiatrist and she admitted to him that she attacked her mother and did not act in self-defense she told the psychiatrist that she hacked her mother like a butcher and described how she Twisted her mother's head to fully remove it Jessica also claimed that the murder was as brutal as it was because she had been inspired by the horror movies she had watched since being incarcerated Jessica has expressed remorse for what she had

done although this does seem to be somewhat disingenuous as in September of 2022 Jessica repealed her sentence the result of this appeal is yet to be determined Jessica's older sister Christy has stated that before the attack Jessica had all the support she needed all the support she refused Jessica preferred the attention her behavior attracted instead Christie described her mother as having a heart of gold and always put other people before herself others have said that Rita's unconditional love for Jessica was remarkable but that sadly she was blindsided and couldn't see what Jessica was truly capable

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