Two of the articles in this archive were written by a woman now serving life for murder. They were filed before she killed anyone, and they are still worth reading, which is the uncomfortable part.
Jemma Victoria Lilley contributed case histories to Serial Killer Magazine. One is on Martin Bryant and the Port Arthur massacre. The other is on Eric Edgar Cooke, the Perth housebreaker known as the Night Caller, the last man hanged in Western Australia. Both are competent, both are about seven or eight thousand words, and both are recognizably the work of someone who had read the files rather than the headlines. They are published here under her name, with a note attached.
On June 13, 2016, at a house in Orelia in the southern suburbs of Perth, Lilley and her housemate Trudi Clare Lenon killed Aaron Lee Pajich-Sweetman. He was eighteen and autistic. He was attacked from behind while he sat playing a video game, garrotted with a wire and stabbed three times. His body was buried in the back garden under concrete and colored tiles. He was found there by police during the night of June 20.
Both women were convicted of murder by the Supreme Court of Western Australia on November 1, 2017, and on February 28, 2018 both were sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 28 years. At trial each said the other had done it; Lilley's account was that she had been asleep. Lilley appealed. In October 2019 the Court of Appeal held that none of her grounds had any merit. Lenon did not appeal.
The prosecution case included a novel. At sixteen, in England, Lilley had written a book called Playzone about a serial killer named SOS, and she had gone on using the name. The Court of Appeal held the book had been properly put before the jury as evidence of what it called an intense interest in the nature of an obsession in serial killers and murder generally. The prosecutor told the court she had said she wanted to kill someone before she turned twenty-five, and that once it was done she was so pleased with herself that she told a colleague at work.
That is the whole of the public record and it is where most accounts of her stop, because a woman who wrote a book about a killer and then became one is a tidy story. The two articles she wrote for this magazine make it less tidy.
Read them and what comes through is not appetite. It is explanation. The Cooke piece opens on his father, an alcoholic who beat him, and on the cleft palate and hare lip his father could not stand the sight of. The Bryant piece finds the note attached to his pension reassessment in which the assessor records that his father protects him from anything that might upset him because he continually threatens violence, and that Martin has said he would like to go out shooting people. Both articles are arguments, made at length and in the ordinary language of the genre, that a killer is what cruelty and exclusion produce. Whatever was going on in the writer, that is the case she was putting in print.
The Cooke article goes further than it had to. A large part of it is about Darryl Beamish and John Button, two men convicted of killings Cooke confessed to, one for the murder of Jillian Brewer and one for the manslaughter of Rosemary Anderson. It records the Chief Justice of Western Australia calling Cooke a villainous unscrupulous liar when he tried to take responsibility, and it records that Cooke went on hunger strike because he was not believed about the two men being innocent. Both convictions were eventually quashed, decades later. The author of that passage was interested in wrongful conviction, and had the Button and Beamish court material in her working files.
None of that is a defense of her and none of it is an explanation. It is a warning about the genre. The idea that people who write about murder are rehearsing it is a comfortable one, and this case is the strongest example anybody could ask for. But the writing itself does not support the reading. What she wrote was the standard, decent, slightly earnest true-crime argument that damage makes killers. What the court found was a woman who put murder on a list and crossed it off. Her own articles are the counter-example to her own case, and she is not in a position to be asked about it.
The magazine published her. That is a fact about the magazine, not only about her, and the honest thing is to leave both articles up with her name on them and this note beside them. Removing the byline would only mean that the next reader who worked it out would find the archive had already known and said nothing.
Editor's note: this piece was written for the archive in August 2026 and carries no byline. Aaron Pajich-Sweetman's family have spoken publicly at the sentencing and afterwards and nothing here is intended to add to that. Lilley's two articles are “Martin Bryant the Port Arthur Massacre” and “The Night Caller Eric Edgar Cooke”, both in this archive, both now carrying a note recording her conviction. She has no entry on the roster: the archive files single-victim murder cases only where they are part of a series or a spree, and hers is neither.