Teenage girls strangled their best friend for fun

Teenage girls strangled their best friend 'just because we felt like it'

From The Times May 10, 2007
Bernard Lagan in Sydney

Two teenage girls strangled their 15-year-old best friend with electrical wire after a Saturday night sleepover.

Their victim, Eliza Davis, was reading in the next room when the girls woke up and began discussing what it would be like to kill someone. They agreed that they would feel no remorse in murder and to prove their point they crept next door and set upon Eliza.

One of the two 16-year-olds -- who cannot be named under Australian child protection laws -- crept behind Eliza and garroted her with the wire. The other girl held her down and pressed a chemical-soaked cloth to her mouth.

The girl who twisted the wire around Eliza's throat told police how she watched with detachment as her friend's emotions shifted from anger, to terror and eventually the realization that she was going to die.

For the next five to ten minutes both girls watched as the life ebbed out of their friend.

They said that they knew it was wrong, but that it just "felt right" and that they did not feel any remorse.

"Sunday morning me and [the other accused] woke up, and we were just talking, and for some reason we just decided to kill her," one of the girls said in a police record of interview read at the trial.

The other accused girl told police: "We just did it because we felt like it. It's hard to explain. I knew we had wanted to kill someone before. We knew it was wrong, but it didn't feel wrong at all. It just felt right."

After the murder last June, the pair buried Eliza's body in a shallow grave beneath the house in which they had been staying in the town of Collie, in the south of Western Australia.

They reported Eliza missing and pretended to help in the police search for her body before walking into different police stations several days later and confessing. Both realized that Eliza's grave was so shallow that the discovery of her body was inevitable.

Yesterday the pair, who pleaded guilty to willful murder, were given life sentences. Because of their age, they will eligible for parole after serving 15 years.

. . . .

It came to light during the trial that one of the girls had killed two kittens in what the prosecution said was a trial run for a murder.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article1769427.ece?print=yes