British woman 'with murder on her bucket list' jailed for killing Australian teenager

Jemma Lilley will serve at least 28 years in prison

Aaron Pajich, 18, was killed in 2016. (Western Australia Police)

A British woman who had murder on her “bucket list” has been jailed for life after killing an autistic teenager.

Jemma Lilley, who garrotted and stabbed 18-year-old Aaron Pajich, has been told she will serve at least 28 years in prison.

The 26-year-old buried her victim’s body in a shallow grave in her garden in Perth, Western Australia, before boasting about the crime to a colleague, a court head.

Lilley, who is originally from Stamford, Lincolnshire, had an “obsession” with serial killers and had said that she wanted to kill someone before she turned 25, a jury heard.

Prosecutor James McTaggart told a court that she was so “full of herself and euphoric” after ticking murder off her list, that she had to brag about it.

She was convicted at the Supreme Court of Western Australia in November, along with her housemate Trudi Lenon, 43. A jury took less than three hours to reach the decision.

They were both sentenced to life and told they will serve at least 28 years.

Both defendants blamed each other for the murder.

Lenon told the court Lilley approached the teenager from behind as he installed games on her computer on 13 June 2016, garrotted him until the wire broke then stabbed him three times.

Lilley had previously told the court that she researched torture methods for a trilogy of books she was writing about serial killers.

She had also said that there were tarpaulins hanging in her house because she was painting part of it.

The prosecution said Lilley left incriminating messages to her “obsequious and sycophantic” follower Lenon hours after the killing, saying she was feeling things she had “not felt before”.

The court heard that Lilley had once written a book about a serial killer which she called SOS – and that she took on the identity of the character in the novel.

Lilley’s stepmother Nina Lilley, 48 told The Times after the conviction: “The book was a big problem with me. At the beginning I was, ‘fair enough you want to write a horror story’, but I didn’t like the contents of it.

“She had always had an obsession with serial killers but she said it was a way of venting her frustration of what happened when she was a child.”

The victim’s mother told reporters after the trial about how heartbroken she was about the loss of her “precious little boy”.

Sharon Pajich told them she thought the murderers should never be released and described them as “disgusting animals”.

“He was my precious little boy, he was my first-born... he was full of life,” she said.

“They (the killers) deserve everything they get for what they’ve done, they’ve taken an innocent boy from his loved ones.”

Additional reporting by Press Association and Australian Associated Press Reporters.